I've had a few days to process the discussion and wonder if when we get talking about whole/broken or clean/dirty, we become opposing sides of the same axis. In the act of baptism or Eucharist, Christ calls us something new, so portrayals of these sacraments as consecration or desecration point to Christ only to the extent to which they embody a reimagination of what is broken/whole or clean/dirty.

A few months ago I was part of a communion event which drew on the recycling mantra: Reuse, Reduce, Recycle. In looking at Reuse, the group questioned what is waste, what do we consider waste which can be reused, and made connections between our judgements of 'who is acceptable' and 'who is waste' against Jesus' acceptance of all. In looking at Reduce, we looked at how our consumption affects others and used this as part of our confession. And then at the breaking of bread looked at how Christ's body was Recycled.

Perhaps engaging with the dirtiness of the sacraments helps us to connect to the deeper gospel message, but if we stop there do we miss the opportunity to reimagine dirt and waste? Recycling has transformed the notion of waste in our society; perhaps this imagery can help to understand Christ's actions.

Beth works at The Sheffield Centre and supports learning networks as part of the Fresh Expressions team. She is also involved in ReSource, running weekends for pioneers creating church in emerging culture. The next ReSource weekend is in Sheffield, 30th October to 1st November, looking at mission and culture. More information about this can be found here.

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

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.

Jesus told Peter to 'feed my sheep'. He fed the multitudes; he was known to the disciples he met on the road to Emmaus in the breaking of the bread. On the night before he died, he had supper with his friends and said 'do this, in remembrance of me'. And when he met with his friends on the beach after his resurrection, he fed them.

When I became a Christian, I didn't take communion because I wasn't confirmed. Week after week, I longed to receive but had to hold back.

During a very rare communion service in a young offenders institution, one of the 'lads' asked what was happening. Then he jumped up, muttered 'I want some of that!' and joined the queue. The next week he asked to be baptised.

I asked a group of three boys under the age of seven why they wanted to take communion. They heard the priest say, week in week out,  'Though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in one bread' – and then weren't given any bread. They deeply desired to be part of the body.

At the recent pioneer minister conference at Ridley Hall, it was stated that a fresh expression should be working towards regular communion services because this was a mark of 'being church'.

Many of us were left with questions.

Should the Eucharist be seen as a target? Where does lay leadership fit in? Does the Eucharist create a Christ-centred community? Or is a Christ-centred community, by definition, Eucharistic? What does a fresh expression of the Eucharist look like? And if we're not church – what are we?

Pam Smith is currently priest in charge of i-church, an online community founded by the Diocese of Oxford. Previously she was a Reader (Licensed Lay Minister) in the Coventry Diocese and worked as a lay prison chaplain. Pam has just completed the one year Mission Shaped Ministry course.

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

It's a vital question, whether you are aiming to grow an existing church or develop a fresh expression. Before you can create or develop something you have to have some idea what it is. Imagine building a car without realising that it needs an engine, trying to put up a house without foundations or baking bread without yeast. All of us in some way are involved in building the church as part of our discipleship. Yet many Christians would be more familiar with the essential elements in a victoria sponge than they are with the really essential elements in a church. 

You will need to make sure everyone has a copy of the list in the box below and a pen. Ask the group to break into pairs and go through the different attributes. If you have plenty of time, invite people to:

1. Circle the elements which you would you say are essential to form a church
2. Underline the elements which are desirable and helpful
3. Delete the elements which are unhelpful
4. Leave unmarked the elements which are neutral or depend on context
5. Feel free to add other essential elements

When you have been through the lists, compare your answers.

If you are short of time then just concentrate on the first task: see if you can reach a short list you can agree on in terms of the essential elements in forming a church.

As I've played this game with different groups over the last six months, I have come to believe that just three elements are part of the essence of what it means to be the church. They come up in every set of responses. My answers are in the box at the bottom of the page. Resist the temptation to read them until you've at least had a go at the game yourself. I may be wrong! I also believe that three other elements are essential to maintain and build a healthy community. Everything else is either desirable, merely convenient or helpful or not according to context.

You may or may not agree with my answers (and please let me know). However, what often emerges from the exercise is surprising agreement about these elements and a realisation that it is often the non-essential elements which take up so much time and energy.

The second part of the game is to begin to explore more deeply how we decide what is right and wrong about the life of the church. A good way to begin is to invite people to suggest their own key verses for thinking about the life of the Christian community. Where do they go in Scripture and in the Christian tradition for thinking about what it means to be the people of God?

There is no right answer here. In fact, the more places we look, the more our understanding grows. The more we look, the more we discover that our understanding of the church can't be contained by just one proof text or just one summary of Christian teaching (such as the marks of the church in the creed). But here, to finish, is one key passage which I continue to find helpful.

In Mark 3.14 we read of Jesus' call of the twelve disciples. This is a passage which speaks hints of new Israel: it is deliberately about the forming of a new community. Mark has distilled the essential elements of what it means to be the community of disciples – the beginnings of the church. What are the essential elements?

'And he appointed twelve, whom he also named apostles, to be with him, and to be sent out...'

The essence of being church according to Mark is people being called by Jesus to live in the rhythm of being with Christ and being sent. If you read on in the verse you discover what we are sent to do: to proclaim the good news and to overcome evil in the world.

This is the kind of community we are called to become and to build.

My own answers to the game:

Three essential elements in being the church: people, the risen Christ and mission to God's world.

Three essential elements to sustain the church: the Scriptures; the sacraments and connection and oversight.

Are fresh expressions proper church?