The Guide

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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COMMENT - Things to learn from

Close-up of computer keyboardWhat went wrong?

This is a page for you to leave comments and reply to other people's comments.

What went wrong for you? Do you want to share with others so that they can learn from you and avoid making the same mistakes?

 

Comments

Oaks Church plant

Posted by Duncan Petty on 24 October 07 - 11:15

For profile of Oaks please see the 'went well' comment. We have however done loads wrong (!) such as lean on our own ideas rather than God's ideas too much. It is so easy to be enthusiastic in this and to run away with your initiatives instead of looking for what the Spirit is up to and going with that. We have, for example, just because we did it in more conventional settings, tried to run basics courses such as START before people were ready for them, and they duly flopped. In our UPA setting we needed to spend longer gaining trust and making social contact than we did, and although we ran loads of things to do this e.g. cruise evenings, environmental clean-ups, Easter Egg hunts, BBQ's and the like we still tried to move too fast. Our auditing was conscientious before we started but I now think we needed to really continue the audit after we moved for a while before we started to be too pro-active. For future plants, and we do plan to plant from this one, it would be better to look for non-Christians to gather in than taking too many Christians with you. They bring too much baggage! You do need a core but it is easy to attract the church hopper or those people who have vast pastoral problems that take away from the mission element because of their need for time with you; not that this is not needed but there has to be a balance. Another aspect that we did not get right was gift aid. Until we sorted out our legal status we could not claim gift aid on giving and lost about £4000 through this. Anyone thinking of taking a route remotely like ours should sort this asap. Finance does help the initiative to flow! I could go on but don't be put off - it is a great journey to be on.

Duncan and Ann Petty (Oaks Church, Tanhouse, Skelmersdale)

opening dissatation

Posted by john morson on 30 May 08 - 12:42

I read through the introduction about what fresh expressions is etc my thoughts were after reading it have we made god in our own imagage? Is god our puppet? Why must god be a fresh expression why not a very old one?
The idea that we can declare and therefore it is, is a bit of a worry.

Definitions

Posted by Duke Vipperman on 16 July 08 - 20:13

Nothing gone wrong yet - except that I left the UK too soon. Thanks all for all you all taught us.

Before Toronto and Canada move much further down the FX path, are there brief definitions of each of the types of Fresh Expressions? I know they are from Mission-Shaped Church but those tend to be longish paragraphs. Some clarity at the start might save us some trouble down the line, though we realize that creativity is key and many FX are combinations and permutations of various components.

Thanks again.