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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)

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.

I am not sure what threeinone read in the introduction that gave the impression that God is somehow a fresh expression (obviously he is the same yesterday, today and forever) but I can appreciate some reservation towards "fresh" expressions of church while "old" expressions are still valid.

God sends us on mission, resulting in new fresh communities of reconciled people. Starting an old expression, if it involves an expensive building [have you tried buying a cathedral recently?] and fittings and staff is not a practical or financial possibility to the majority of us. Most likely, we will have a tiny budget, lean on rented or acquired facilities and lack the visible signs of an old expression.

As for what went wrong for me . ..

Once I killed off a fresh expression by an impulsive and stupid idea. It was a house-based church/event that happened weekly with a Bible study and prayer. Most people who came were not believers. I changed everything one week when, instead of the Bible study, i showed a stupid cheesy Christian movie which was so bad that the host (a new Christian, now embarrassed in front of his friends) asked me to shut down the group. Ahhhhhhhh . . .

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.