I still remember with great clarity my times of worship with the Moot and St Jude's communities. It was worship in a way I had never known; so different from the formality, stuffiness and the 'clubishness' that we often call traditional church. Instead I found warm and caring communities trying to reach people in new and different ways – but then I realised that it was exactly what Jesus had done and what he continues to encourage us to do as we journey with him.

When I got back home, my head spinning with enthusiasm, I knew that I would have to make some changes in my life so that my wife Susan and I could take a new direction. We decided to sell the family business to free up our time and thankfully our daughter and son-in-law decided to take it on. 

Soon after the transfer was made, both Sue and I headed to the UK to gain more experience and meet new people including Bob Franklyn, and Steve Collins at Grace, Ealing, to discuss the exciting prospects of Fresh Expressions in Canada. On our return we got together with Nick Brotherwood, Team Leader for Fresh Expressions Canada, to discuss hosting a Vision Day in the Diocese of Niagara. Also during this time we started to build a small library relating to fresh expressions, emerging church and a variety of related topics.

Prior to our Vision Day I approached our bishop about doing a short video to help promote the event. He agreed and that was the beginning of another step in the journey – telling people's stories on screen. To date we have completed four videos outlining stories of fresh expressions of church - stories of places that have invited people to meet Jesus where they are, not where we are.

Church on Tap, Skater Church and Cameron House are now featured on a number of websites. We have also created a Canadian video of a Messy Church in our diocese and made a number of films about initiatives that - although not fresh expressions by definition - portray a variety of innovative worship styles and community partnerships that could well become fresh expressions of church over time.

Everything that we video is more or less impromptu. By that, I mean there is no script and no clear thought as to what the end result will be - only a general sense of the story we want to tell.  Strange as it may seem, I like it that way. Sue and I turn up with our equipment and start to film and interview; always hoping in the end that we get the footage we need to tell the story!  This may sound quite amateurish, and in fact it is, but that is the exciting challenge I look forward to each time we get involved in a new project.

Before all this started I wondered if I would be bored when I finally retired. Now I know that the joys of volunteering to share the Gospel story in new and different ways has become the most rewarding time of my life.

Andy Kalbfleisch is a volunteer film-maker for Fresh Expressions Canada. His YouTube channel is here. Sue Kalbfleisch is Vision Day Co-ordinator and Messy Church Regional Co-ordinator.

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If you have something burning to say and want to contribute to the Share weekly guest blog, please contact Karen Carter. The views expressed in this blog are those of the author and are not necessarily shared by the Church of England, the Methodist Church, the United Reformed Church, Church Army, Fresh Expressions or any of its partners.

For too long the church has been bound to unhelpful binaries: lay and ordained, Catholic and Protestant, activist or personal piety, radical and mainstream, and so on. The truth is, if we stand a chance of ever making an impact with the de- and unchurched who are interested in spirituality as a mission imperative, then we will need to draw on variant elements of the wide traditions of our Christian inheritance.

We need to get away from this ridiculous 'them and us' which finds its foundation in misunderstanding, lack of love and fear. I think practitioners of emerging and fresh expressions of church in a post-modern context understand the post-binary holistic need for this more acutely than their predecessors. So, as practitioners, we can draw on 2,000 years of resources of the church to assist us in this task.

Many people interested in spirituality today trawl the internet seeking spiritual communities that do - and are - what they say they are. They seek communities of integrity where there is love, openness, honesty, inclusion and participation. Unfortunately, too many churches feel like incredibly dysfunctional families where few of these qualities are evident. They are, in effect, spiritually impoverished. The prevailing church culture remains cognitive and propositional rather than experiential.

At the same time, many people are seeking something that goes beyond materialism, consumption and technology. Many have become aware of this need through personal tragedy, addiction, life stages, illness or study. So the challenge is: how to provide opportunities for authentic worship, mission and community for people who are seeking to become more deeply human, unaware that this is a spiritual quest. Such people often do not know who they are, let alone that they have a need for God!

How do you engage with spiritual tourists whilst being authentically Christian? Well, I would encourage people here to really consider models of church. Why? Because if you don't your project will end up with something that is dumbed down, individualistic and consumptive as a default position. This is where the new monastic or new friar model can really help if you are engaging with spiritual tourists.

One of the main mistakes we made with the Epicentre Network is that it was held captive to deconstruction, consumption, individualism and was somewhat anti-theological. Yes, it was very participative, but the lack of a model made it difficult to have a healthy basis. It was a collective of individuals that was never fully able to become a community because of its inability to re-envision or reconstruct. We ended Epicentre after ten good years of exciting and innovative mission activity because it was impossible for it to grow into being fully church. This was a painful lesson.

With Moot in its early days, we focused on the need to balance hospitality and inclusion with the authentic practice of the faith. Yes, experimental and contextual, but authentically Christian all the same. We were struck with the question: 'How do we have a community that allows people to belong who do not believe; that allows them to experience the community; that is authentic and life-giving without dumbing down on the faith?' It was Steve Croft who suggested to me the use of a rhythm of life as a focus to the community, so that it be Christ-centred.

Moot, inspired by the monastic pre-modern rules, crafted a rhythm of life through a communal bottom-up process to form an aspiration for how we wanted to live. Its language was not churchy but spiritual and embodied the gospel. So now we have a mixed community of both committed Christians and those who are spiritually searching, all desiring to live out these aspirations as a form of discipleship, where people are at different stages of the journey.

The pre-modern model of the monastics - and in particular the friars who had a spiritual rhythm of life and were sent to service particular localities - enables us to reframe new monasticism as a helpful model for an open, accessible Christian community with a focus on experience and exploration, that assists people to shift from being spiritual tourists to communitarian co-travelling pilgrims. Moot has developed sacramental (focusing on God's presence with us) and experiential forms of worship, mission and community drawing on this new monastic basis.

So, ancient forms of Christian contemplation reframed into post-modern language and sensibilities become the resources for prayer that work in terms of bringing centredness and peace. Mission then becomes seeking to catch up with what God is already doing in loving service by the whole community through social justice projects, the arts and other imaginative pursuits, and worship becomes an event of encounter of God and other pilgrims as a place of inspiration and hope-sharing.

If you are interested in going deeper with this, check out my two books: The Becoming of G-d and Emerging & Fresh Expressions of Church, both available here.

Bio: Ian Mobsby, author, priest missioner, fresh expressions core team member and associate lecturer in theological education

Blog: www.ianmobsby.net

Moot: www.moot.uk.net