Churches often ask how 'we' can do mission. But who are the 'we'? How was the membership of our church determined? And the answer mostly is: worship style. In these 'worship-shaped churches', the worship style gives people their essential sense of 'belonging'. The problem with worship-shaped churches engaging in mission is that they find it very hard work. It is like introverts going to parties, or extroverts going on silent retreats – it's just not their 'shape' or their inner style. They can do it, but it drains them because their membership is not 'gathered' around this purpose.

The churches in one Devon town provide a housing trust that supports homeless people. Now, if a homeless young man is touched by God's care for him expressed in this project and wants to explore the Christian faith, what does he 'join'? Where is the fellowship of Christian people who are energised by this aspect of the Christian mission that has touched him? He can't join it because it isn't there. The Christians who work together in this project have melted away into their separate worship-shaped churches, where that project is frankly peripheral to their corporate life.

Our challenge today is to create churches where the primary reason people join is the particular focus of its mission. Such churches will find worship hard – as hard as the worship-shaped churches find mission. Worship will not be the emotional powerhouse that it is for worship-shaped churches. But it will also not need to be. 'Gathering for mission' is what will give a mission-shaped church energy, and will keep it on track as a mission-oriented church.

In a sense, worship stands at the most intimate centre of the church's life. It can be totally enthralling, whether it be a charismatic celebration or choral evensong. A good worship life in a church is like a good sex life in a marriage. But what would we say about a marriage where the couple talk constantly about sex, earnestly read books about how to make their sex life even better, spend most of their spare time in bed together, live from one sexual encounter to the next? We would worry for them – because the truth is that marriage is much more than sex. It is about building home, creating stability, providing places of companionship and welcome – and, of course, having and raising children.

Jesus invites us to put the kingdom of God and his justice first, and everything else will be ours as well. For those who love to worship, but who also want to be instruments of God's kingdom purposes and his justice in our day, it is a saying they need to learn to trust. 

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.

Sorry Paul, but that's not missional! It may well be important and necessary work, but it's not missional. But I do think Paul highlights an important discussion concerning what we mean by 'missional'. The danger I find is that with many emerging churches, everything is missional but mention evangelism at your peril.

Yet David Bosch, whose work on the Missio Dei is at the heart of our missional language, writes: 'Evangelism is the core, heart or centre of mission. We do not believe that the central dimension of evangelism, as calling people to faith and new life can ever be relinquished. I have called evangelism the heart of mission. With evangelism cut out, mission dies: it ceases to be mission' (Evangelism: Theological Currents and Cross-Currents Today).

Now, I am not suggesting that evangelism and mission are synonymous, but I do believe that evangelism is at the very heart of mission. We do not help the fresh expression movement if we are not enabling unchurched people to become transformed and transforming disciples of Jesus. As I have written elsewhere, we have too many safety nets and not enough fishing nets.

We also do evangelism a disservice when we divorce it from discipleship. As Graham Cray says in the June edition of the e-xpressions newsletter, we need both quantity and quality. It is about winning people to Christ, but it is also about the qualities of discipleship that we are seeing developed in new converts and their communities.

The danger is we reject evangelism because our present (or past) models are deficient for this age. But that's no reason to excuse ourselves from the work of evangelism. The need is great today and so we must to do the hard work of seeking out and developing good, faithful and relevant models of evangelism. (There is no one model!)

Scott McKnight, the American theologian, in a recent article in Christianity Magazine (April 2009) on the emerging church, put it most bluntly and starkly when he wrote, 'Any movement that is not evangelistic is failing the Lord.'

Dave Male is involved in training pioneers in two Anglican theological colleges in Cambridge and is planting a church to connect with sports people, called Relay. His blog is here.

If you have something burning to say and want to contribute to the Share weekly guest blog, please contact Beth Keith.

Your exposure to 'church' doesn't necessarily have much bearing on your openness to God, or even your ability to live out Christian/spiritual concepts. Even if it does, discipleship for each person will be different and any real engagement with an individual will require a friendship to be formed, not a shove along the Engel Scale (which, of course, is hopelessly out of date). Any one of us is able to commune meaningfully with the living and eternal Creator, from the shallowest atheist to the deepest, most profound thinking holy man. Any of us can have a life changing, long term impact on another, if only we give them the time, energy, love and respect they deserve.

This may seem a naïve concept, but I truly believe in it. And I believe that there is strong resistance against it. Treating people with the respect and attention they deserve takes time, mutual sharing and energy. But we like our networks, our conferences, our ideas. And sometimes we like our private/work life divide, and the silence of our own homes. 

So who is wise?  So who is your example?

Loving people is often called for, but to do it requires us all to have fewer, more meaningful relationships. Attend fewer conferences and more local barbecues; have less acquaintances and more authentic friends. Allow ourselves to be changed by those we're supposed to be discipling.

Laurence Keith is the team co-ordinator for Church Army's research unit, The Sheffield Centre. He twits here for the team.

I'm not good at taking advice so I signed up to work for Hope08. I liked the passion of the leadership team and the real efforts they were making to genuinely give their idea away to local churches. I also liked that it was a bit ridiculous and that it could only work if God liked it too.

So we started trudging away – getting churches excited about working together and suggesting ways they could bless their communities. We put together books, gave advice, published yet more websites, went to conferences and made up a framework of 'high points' to help churches access the year of intense mission.

We were a comparatively tiny team attempting to commission the UK to 'do more evangelism, do it together and do it in word and action'. Sometimes it felt like the whole thing was stuck on pause, and sometimes we couldn't handle the number of people signing up. We had no idea what – if anything - was going to happen in 2008. Christmas 2007 was scary.

I've been in shock for the whole of 2008 – we were unprepared for the generosity, beauty, kindness and grit of the church in the UK. We'd had a few ideas of what churches could do, but our feeble bleatings were drowned out by the weight and originality of what happened in that year.

I couldn't ever sum this all up, but I do know that all over the UK people came to church for the first time because the church had come to them. Cheesy, but true! Simple things worked, like car washing and litter picking. Complicated things like citywide youth outreach weekends also worked. In some places family fun days gave churches roots in their communities, and in other places social action projects flooded Jesus into the places that need him most.

We've published an evaluation with lots of numbers in it – you can find at www.hope08.com. We like it because it's full of encouraging stats, and also because it tells the truth – there are things we could have done better and that future projects probably need to know about. Mainly, though, it's exciting stuff and it seems that Hope church groups aren't stopping here but are carrying on into 09 and beyond!

We had no idea it was going to go as well as it did, but we're glad to have been involved.

Note: How do you feel about Hope08? What was good? What would you have done differently? Please leave a comment.

I remain a great supporter of both the analysis and aims of the Mission-Shaped Church report which has led to this kind of language. The problem is that the language has taken on a life of its own that means it is often no longer serving that report's vision; indeed, I think it is often working against it.

The insight of the report that we need fresh expressions of church for a new cross-cultural mission situation remains true, but increasingly the effect of the fresh expressions language is leading to something quite different. People seem to have got into their heads that the need is to 'create a fresh expression of church' and not that they are called to cross-cultural mission which may in time, and sometimes a long time, lead to a fresh expression of church emerging from that mission.

The result of this is that people set up whatever kind of fresh expression they think they ought to run and then go looking for people who might want to join it. Such churches are not in the least bit 'mission-shaped'; they are simply a way of consumer niche marketing existing church to provide a wider range of choices for church shoppers.

The categorising of fresh expressions as certain types of church may add to the problem, suggesting they are styles of worship. The likely result is that those attracted will be existing church members, or those who have left church. Such churches cannot enable new Christians from non-churched backgrounds to worship in their own culture when they have already had the culture of the 'fresh expression' decided for them in advance by a group of well meaning but culturally different Christians.

So, my suggestion? Let's stop starting fresh expressions of church and let's start doing the real task of cross-cultural mission in the belief that in time fresh expressions will emerge.

A fuller version of this blog can be found here.

Steve Hollinghurst is Researcher in Evangelism to Post-Christian Culture, The Sheffield Centre, Church Army.