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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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
A weekly guest blog.
I am exploring a language to describe a mission and ministry that is organic. When I go back to the gospels in order to shape my approach to mission I find simple parables filled with organic metaphors. I do not find a Jesus driven by a strategic vision or a plethora of programmes. I find a humble nomad content to carry out his ministry at the edges, amongst the unwanted, and to give his full attention to individuals of little importance.
We live in a culture that highly values personal experience. It is the shift from trust in an overarching Big Story (meta-narrative) to a focus on our individual personal story. This is a pattern that could be seen in many of the groups that I visited. The significant question would be, 'How does my experience connect with your experience, my story with your story?' And alongside that, 'How do our stories connect with the story of Jesus and the experience of faith?' This is a journey together, a shared experience, and a shared story. In order for that to be possible, many of the groups remained small, tight networks of friendship where people felt safe to share their story. But always the focus is on the individual personal story and its interconnection with others and with faith.
I am really excited by the way things are going with Divine Divas (as featured on Fresh Expressions' latest DVD, expressions: making a difference). BUT, even better, the men in our area have now had their first 'Divine Diva' style event! We'd provided them with lots of suggestions for names - things like Divine Dudes or Heavenly Hunks, etc - but surprise, surprise, they weren't impressed. There are a number of men in their 40s and 50s (and over) in our congregations who we wanted to bring together, but this effort was more about reaching out to the men 'beyond the fringe'.
Two years ago, the St Luke's congregation in Somerstown (in the heart of Portsmouth) moved out of its building and began meeting in Wilmcote House tower block. With the Bishop's permission, we stopped Sunday services and opened the Sunday Sanctuary. Now I'd say, looking at the terms with which we started out, Sunday Sanctuary has failed. The idea was that if we created something on a Sunday morning within a particular setting, people would come to it. We thought it would be sort of like turning up in their front rooms. It wasn't.
If Charles Dickens thought he knew something about strange times, he should have stayed around to describe the years you and I are living through. They're strange almost beyond description, not to mention their constituting, like those of Dickens's tale, seemingly both the best and the worst of the possibilities. These times of ours are referred to as the Great Emergence, if not by popular novelists, then at least by the scholars and credentialed observers who are doing today's writing and talking. Primarily their titling plays to the fact that about every 500 years our latinised culture goes through a major upheaval. Or perhaps we should say 'upheavals' in the plural, because everything changes. Every part of life from economics to politics to culture and social structures to intellectual pursuits and technological advances ... everything must change. And ultimately, of course, so too must religion itself change.
