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

A thread running through many fresh expressions is God's call to take risks – to step out of comfort zones. Maybe the Spirit doesn't want us to become too settled or reliant on our own way of doing mission and being church.

Jesus did this when he called his first disciples - pioneers who helped God to build his church. To Simon the fisherman, who had caught nothing all night long, Jesus says, 'Put out into deep water, and let down the nets for a catch.' (Luke 5.4) Although he is sceptical, Simon does so and then experiences what it means to trust in the power of God. Perhaps he doesn't really understand why his net is full, but now the way he sees Jesus is changed through taking the risk.

The spirituality of fresh expressions is the spirituality of risk. We can sit on a familiar shoreline and gaze at the shallows where we have grown comfortable with the way things are. But Jesus offers a deeper invitation: to try something different; to see that there may be new ways of reaching people and finding some way to answer the question, 'what might the kingdom of God look like for them?'

As fresh expressions leaders have taken a risk, however, sometimes they find that this didn't work out. But that first step was important. God showed them one path, only for them to find that this leads to something else quite different. Yet, to get there, the first step was vital.

Simon Peter took the risk of 'putting out into deep water'. How might God be asking something similar of you, or your church? Ask him to show you, and to be the power needed for his kingdom come.

In January 2006, a church in north London created a Sunday morning schedule which allows people to stay for as long or as short a time as they like. Services start at eight o'clock in the morning and conclude at one o'clock, in half-hour blocks. While some people stay for five minutes, others stay for the whole five hours, experiencing the differing approaches to worship throughout the morning. These half-hour blocks have also been designed with discipleship in mind, as well as building a sense of community.

Sunday begins with a more formal style of worship and moves to a more contemporary style, with time in between for conversation and prayer. Eating together is central to each section, following the practice of the early church where eating together was commonplace.

A sceptic might ask: 'Surely three services on a Sunday morning provides enough challenge and diversity; why change it to ten half-hour sessions?'

Vicar, Rob Harrison, answers: 'The Come & Go programme is designed so that you will get a fairly well-balanced spiritual diet if you stay for about one and a half hours. On one level it gives the previously separate congregations more of a sense of belonging to one another. The overlapping of worshippers among the different sections adds to this sense of continuity.'

Explaining why he chose to focus on Come & Go for the latest Encounters on the Edge, George Lings comments that 'it is a good example of spotting changes in background culture and shaping church around the needs of those who find its patterns don't fit. Deeper than that, what happens when existing churches are serious about discipleship, creating community and enabling lay ministry to the point that clergy cannot provide all that is needed?

'Come & Go is far more than a search for relevance and is turning this church inside out. We wanted to find out how it worked.'

Encounters on the Edge 35, Changing Sunday ('Come and go': beyond attractional church), is now available and is priced £4.00. To order copies, contact the Sheffield Centre on 0114 272 7451, or email ask@sheffieldcentre.org.uk