The Guide contains how-to-do-it advice on starting, developing and sustaining fresh expressions of church based on shared experiences.
More about The Guide
Share
- Guide |
- Blog
| - Networks |
- Perspectives |
- Community |
The Guide contains how-to-do-it advice on starting, developing and sustaining fresh expressions of church based on shared experiences.
More about The Guide
Posted by Andrew Wooding on 23 August 2009
I have been musing about sustainability in fresh expressions. Perhaps there are two levels of sustainability.
The first is when people who have no church background begin to serve the purposes of God in the same way that the 'starter group' first served them. The weakness of some fresh expressions is that the 'serving centre' reflects the culture of mainstream church, well schooled in Christian teaching and practice. So from the start we need to think about how an unchurched person can become a full part of its community life, and begin to serve others as they were once served. It is as if the process has come full circle – like a rope going around something and creating a kind of knot. It secures the day to day life of the fresh expression. If the initial team collapsed, the fresh expression would hold, at least for a time. Before this point the whole rope would simply unravel and all the initial energy would be lost. So from the beginning we need to think about how to get to that first point of sustainability.
Then I wonder if there is a second 'loop' of the rope – when the unchurched person initially served is enabled into leadership. This is like putting a double knot on the rope and securing it properly. So from early on in a fresh expression we need to be looking at people who are being drawn into faith, and asking how these people are going to share in its leadership. If the way we model leadership requires being comfortable with (even keen on) the ways of mainstream church, this fresh expression is never going to become entirely secure. It will always depend on importing leaders with the right credentials.
Both these tests of sustainability help to focus my mind. In offering to serve others in the name of Christ, can I see how new people can start to help others in the same way they have been served, albeit relying on the grace of God as they do so? Is it too 'expert' a form of service for this to happen very soon? Does it require too much theological understanding, or pastoral expertise, or public speaking skills, or group facilitation skills, or whatever? If so, it is going to be absolutely ages before this fresh expression even achieves the basic level of sustainability. During that time it could fail.
And then, how could ordinary people enter into leadership fairly quickly? Is the leadership task massively complex? Does it require awesome organisational skills? Is it a 'burnout' model that no one in their right mind would take on? Is it deeply fulfilling to do, albeit also a lot of hard work? Is it a shared and meaningful experience, rather than a long and lonely road?
In other words, how can my new fresh expression be something that new members get involved in fairly quickly and the more able ones move into leadership fairly easily?
Does any of that make sense?
David Muir is an Ordained Pioneer Minister in the Okehampton Deanery of Exeter Diocese. With a long background in adult Christian education, he is now supporting 24 largely rural parishes to create fresh expressions of church that will resonate with the increasingly diverse population of Devon. He is also course leader of The Pioneer Disciple, an Anglican/Methodist Devon adaptation of the mission shaped ministry course (see www.exeter.anglican.org/pioneer), and he writes a regular column on how to do church in a 'pioneer' way (see www.exeter.anglican.org/pioneerprimer).
If you have something burning to say and want to contribute to the Share weekly guest blog, please contact Beth Keith.
Comments
Sustainability
Posted by Gethin Rhys on 27 August 2009 - 09:42
I think David and Pam have hit on one of the most crucial questions around Fresh Expressions. Most - including the café churches in which I am involved - are totally dependent on leadership nurtured in traditional church structures. David is right that leaves them very vulnerable - I notice how Methodist FEs tend to come and go very quickly due to the ministerial stationing process, for example; but it happens in other denominations too. But Pam is right that nurturing simply takes time - you can't speed it up because the institution requires it. This is our dilemma in Porth in the Rhondda - it is quite possible that the traditional church will have collapsed completely before the café church has nurtured indigenous leadership.
I don't see an obvious way out of this myself. I think we have to trust God and trust that what we believe he has led us to do is worthwhile even if the future is very unclear. It's a scary place to be, but Pam, is right that we mustn't let institutional stability become the focus of our work, or we end up with the endless navel-gazing of the traditional church and, as John Hull says, mission-shaped church becomes "church-shaped mission" again.
Posted by David Muir on 27 August 2009 - 20:47
Gethin: I think you are right that it is not about institutional stability. But it is about creating sustainable communities. And I wonder if the way we set up some fresh expressions (and in particular how we set up their leadership) gets in the way of that sustainability. We are writing instability into their DNA.
I have been having an interesting discussion recently with some others about what St Paul did. He founded churches and put local leadership in. A friend of mine argued that he probably appointed Jewish converts or at least Gentile ‘god-fearers’ who had become Christians, because they would have known their Old Testament, had a background in monotheism, and were already convinced of moral uprightness. So they could be people who could lead and teach the new congregation. I have doubts about this, not least because it is hard to understand the problems that arose in Corinth, for example. I wonder if he appointed ‘natural’ leaders, heads of households or whatever, anyone with a good track record of managing their household well, people who would pastor and support small household congregations. But he did not appoint them to teach and foster faith; that is a role he continued to have himself as the evangelist/apostle, and he then appointed a few others to such roles. We are so used to the Christendom model of leadership where we roll together pastoral oversight with teaching, with evangelists as subservient ministries. Perhaps St Paul rolled together evangelism with teaching to make the key leadership role, with pastors as subservient ministries. And maybe some such pattern is what is required in relatively ‘virgin’ mission today as well? If so, pioneers should perhaps expect to have a similar apostolic role in relation to fresh expressions, rather than pastoring and teaching them?
Posted by Pam Smith on 28 August 2009 - 10:30
I think it's really hard, if not impossible, to avoid projecting our own assumptions and experiences onto our view of what should be happening - so I'm still happiest with a 'slow cook' model that is based on listening, learning together and organic growth, because that can give space for new ways of seeing things, perhaps from the people who don't have those assumptions.
I'm reading 'The Starish and the Spidcer' - subtitled 'the unstoppable power of leaderless organisations' at hte moment. On one level it's one of the many books I've had recommended to me that I read thinking 'Yes, but.....' - and in my situation there are definitely times when top down leadership is needed, eg anything impinging on legality isn't really up for negotiation. It's at this level that I've found being part of a Diocese which can resource us as a positive benefit. we don't need to provide all our own legal structures from scratch for example.
But being part of a Diocese can lead to people seeing us as the same kind of thing as a parish churches, and judging our validity by how much like a parish church we look. Parish churches have a 'one size fits all' structure - where even the smallest church is expected to operate through a committee system, which requires certain roles to be filled. It seems to me that Gethin's question is one about how the hierarchy deals with something that is part of its structures but operates in a different way. The tendency might be to shut down something because there is no discernible leader, even though the leadership might in fact be diffuse and work in a completely different way to the parish church and work without that kind of structure.
This perhaps isn't the same issue that was facing St Paul - though I seem to remember he did have to go to Jerusalem and defend his practices at one point!
Being a priest in charge of something that is essentially a FX presents a lot of challenges, at the moment I find there are occasional issues where something has to be done or decided quickly - usually that's something that the Diocese needs to be done - and I can take care of that. But a lot of what we do is much 'slower'.
Also presumably the Holy Spirit must be part of sustainability, so prayer is more important than committee meetings!
It does make sense, but....
Posted by Pam Smith on 24 August 2009 - 14:48
It does make sense, but it also makes me twitchy, and I think it's because it seems to be talking about people serving the structure and keeping the structure going - which is exactly the problem with a lot of inherited model churches I've been involved in. People are no sooner through the door than they are being sized up for this rota and that rota. I think the reason Cathedrals attract people is that it's usually possible to sit at the back - literally and metaphorically - until you are ready to move forward - however long that takes.
I was quite struck by the model of a 'vocational' community, when people seek to discover their joint calling and the individual callings within it - that takes time, and may mean listening to what God is saying through new members about the future direction things need to move in, rather than telling them.
This all boils down to what you could call the 'volunteerism v. vocation' dilemma. In a volunteer culture, the leadership decide what needs doing and find people to fill the gaps. In a vocational culture, the organisation responds to the callings of the people God has put there. I think the second is more likely to be pioneering.
This is probably a massive tangent from where you started us - thanks for a stimulating post!