The Guide contains how-to-do-it advice on starting, developing and sustaining fresh expressions of church based on shared experiences.
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Encounters on the Edge (no. 42: Across a Threshold) looks at the Threshold group of churches, around and in Lincoln (also featured on a Share page here). In it, George Lings makes the following observation about tent making and pioneer ministers:
I was struck by the roles played across the whole Threshold history by doctors. Since Paul White's books in the Jungle Doctor series, we have been used to the pivotal role of the overseas medical missionary.
Up till now, I have also imagined that St Paul made tents because he needed to eat. I now wonder if I have misunderstood all this.
Could it be that Paul made tents because it put him in the market place? He met people in a neutral space but also produced something of value to them.
In today's cross-cultural mission at home, could the tent makers of tomorrow be doctors and nurses, solicitors offering legal aid, hairdressers, coffee-shop staff even plumbers and electricians – anyone who meets people in a neutral environment and offers something of value to them, including a listening ear in an environment of trust?
If they were also church planters and leaders, it would mean the forms of church grown would have to be simple and with the work shared across the people of God because they would not have the time or calling to be full-time pastors.
Is this a possible vision for the new pioneer ministers?
George Lings is the director of The Sheffield Centre, Church Army's Research Unit. He specialises in church planting and fresh expressions, and Anglican ecclesiology. He writes the quarterly publication, Encounters on the Edge, which can be ordered here.
If you have something burning to say and want to contribute to the Share weekly guest blog, please contact Andrew Wooding.
Another issue of ecclesial identity is provoked because the lay-led church is unhelpfully dependent on outside provision of clergy to give them communion. At worst, this is a return to Mass Priests. At best, it is a ceaseless reminder that such a congregation is in permanent dependency on those outside its life and is thereby somehow second class.
If Anglicans deem having a sacramental life essential to ecclesial life through dominical warrant, it is then tiresome, and probably damaging, that such communities are denied the fullness of this dimension. By this, they are made more fragile. Such scenarios have similarities to the nineteenth century overseas problems that bedevilled those works that were 'missions' but denied the status of 'churches'. They had problems of dependence on the professional missionary and on finally becoming designated churches promptly lost most missional desire or impact. Such patterns are not to be repeated.
In practice, members of both network churches in Deal and Sandwich spoke with restrained frustration at how difficult getting suitable 'cover' was and how it made them feel like 'the poor relation'. Understandably, those of a free church persuasion found this doubly irksome. They had no conviction that this priestly requirement was necessary and served only to demonstrate to them the ecclesial imperialism of Anglicanism.
Eucharistic Presidency is an irenic and scholarly read of the Anglican Bishops' last published view of the topic and makes a good case that what is at issue is the catholicity of the church. However, this now exists in tension with the bottom up creation of churches who seek a fullness (or second century Ignatian catholicity) of their life and rightly sense their local oneness is impaired by this arrangement of a near stranger heading up the family meal.
There is also the vexing issue of whether the church is better defined by its overall ministerial arrangements or its localised congregational life. If the number of lay-led fresh expressions grows, the issue will grow sharper.
George Lings is the director of The Sheffield Centre, Church Army's Research Unit. He specialises in church planting and fresh expressions, and Anglican ecclesiology. He writes the quarterly publication, Encounters on the Edge, which can be ordered here.
There is a Share blog on a similar theme here. Share has offered some practical tips on the subject here - go to the brown heading, about halfway down the page, called 'What about the sacraments?'
If you have something burning to say and want to contribute to the Share weekly guest blog, please contact Beth Keith.
