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I'm on the leadership team (Church Council and a Pro-Warden) of B1 Church http://www.b1church.net http://www.b1breathe.net

I also just started the Re:Source course

http://www.resourcechurchplanting.com

I'm also about to launch a project to reach out to the Goth subculture called the Ulfilas project. Ulfilas was a bishop who translated the Bible from Greek into the language of the Goths... I'm trying to do the same for contemporary goth culture!

Am very interested in the Ulfilas project as we have a number of goths in the local church youth group. Please keep us informed.

Fascinating! I didn't know the Goths had their own language. Would love to know more. Do you have any sample text?

My only Goth experiences (I think) are occasionally listening to The Cure and watching Tim Burton movies.

Well it was really a turn of phrase! Goth's don't so much have a language of their own that's written or spoken. It's more about the way they percieve the world and trying to contextualise the gospel to that worldview.

I sent an email to your website about this. Feel free to contact me if I can help at all.

Thanks Edward. I got your mail forwarded to me from Geoff.. I'll be replying soon!

Just to let you all know too. I have set up the group inside the 3D world secondlife.com and its thriving! We have people from all over the world getting involved.

I'm really interested in this so keep me posted. I linger in a place with lots and lots of goths etc.

I'm interested in what others have done by way of review of a Fresh Expression. As diocesan FE officer for Leicester, I'm engaged in facilitating one such here, and it seems there's not a great body of good practice out there to draw on as yet. Any thoughts?

I can't answer your question, other than to say that Church Army regularly does reviews of its Fresh Expressions projects. Worth getting in touch with Church Army?

From my experience,most of us are making it up as we go along and so are constantly reviewing and evaluating, it does seem to depend rather on what the FX is, how it functions and what boundaries are in place. It is very hard to assess one FX against another because they all operate differently. But some bits of good practice do seem to be coming out bit by bit. Andrew is quite right in saying that Church Army is a good place to start.

I believe that the new Code of Practive accompanying Bishops' Mission Orders contains guidelines for reviewing fresh expressions under a BMO (in section 6.1), which may be more widely applicable.

I'm a passionate believer in Fresh Expressions - for example we're running Messy Church midweek, and in the space of a few months are now connecting with many more people who have no other contact with church than we have managed to connect with over several years of trying to attract people to Sunday morning worship through evangelistic outreach.

But the question that's nagging me is, what then is the future for Sunday morning worship? We have been finding it extremely difficult to grow our Sunday morning congregation in any significant way - and the minimal growth we do see is predominantly transfer growth. This is a key reason why we recognise the need to engage with Fresh Expressions - what we're doing at the moment isn't connecting with the vast majority of our community.

But in our case at least, it's our Sunday congregation who are resourcing (through time and money) our existing Fresh Expression, and in reality will need to start and resource (at least initially) any others God leads us to begin - it seems likely to be years before our Messy Church 'congregation' will be in a place to launch Fresh Expressions of their own.

My concerns are twofold:
1) How will we continue to start and resource further Fresh Expressions to try to reach the many other networks and people groups within our community, when the 'resource pool' (for want of a better term) for starting and resourcing them i.e. our core Sunday congregation, is not growing (numerically at least)?

2) If Fresh Expressions are needed because Sundays are not working - because of the style or worship and/or the day/time at which it happens - are we ultimately looking at the end of Sunday church as we know it? Don't get me wrong, I'm all for the 'Mixed Economy'; I'm just struggling to see how how to continue to grow the 'inherited' bit of the mixture.

Of course it may be that others are still finding ways to encourage significant growth (through conversions and not just transfers) on Sundays - in which case I'd LOVE to know what's working, as this is a real area of difficulty for us. And of course I know context is everything and what works in one place can't necessarily just be transferred to another - but some ideas would still be helpful!

Sorry for the long post, and the questions rather than comments, but I'd be very interested in any views on any of the above. Hope I've made some sense and these aren't stupid questions. Do come back to me for clarification if necessary.

Jeremy Noles