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The Guide contains how-to-do-it advice on starting, developing and sustaining fresh expressions of church based on shared experiences.
More about The Guide
Fresh expressions challenge Christians to
think of church in new ways. Many church members
have heard regularly that they should be involved with mission, but
often little seems to happen.
Could this partly be because Christians can't imagine how church could be different? Existing forms of church are so deeply ingrained that congregations cannot conceive of anything else.
Yet different and more varied ways of being church are central to fresh expressions. Thinking afresh about church is a mission priority.
To re-imagine church requires a clear picture of what church is. What can change and what has to stay the same? It may be helpful to ask:
What is at the heart of church? The simple answer is Jesus. The question is not what is at the heart of church, but who?
Archbishop Rowan Williams has described church as 'what happens when people encounter the Risen Jesus and commit themselves to sustaining and deepening that encounter in their encounter with each other' (Mission-shaped Church, Church House Publishing, 2004, p. vii).
Church is what goes on when people meet Jesus, meet each other and meet Jesus in each other. Church happens when people gather regularly round Jesus.
The essence of church is discussed further...
What must always happen 'in' church? It is not quite enough to say that church is what happens when people encounter Jesus and one another. Are there things that we should expect always to happen when these encounters take place?
Over the years Christians have said 'yes', though they have not always agreed on what these essential 'happenings' are. The Methodist Church in Britain, for example, describes church as worship, learning and caring, service and evangelism. These are what you can expect to occur when people gather round Jesus.
A more traditional answer is contained in the Nicene Creed, which affirms Christian belief in the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic marks of the church. These are four essential aspects of what it means to be church. If Christians are really meeting Jesus together, these four dimensions of church will always be present.
They are sometimes re-expressed in today's language as follows. Church has:
These dimensions overlap and reinforce each other. Christians may connect with God and have fellowship with each other as they serve people in mission, which may be undertaken with other groups of Christians.
UP, IN, OUT and OF are channels of grace and means for individuals to grow closer to God. All four dimensions need to be present for a Christian community to be truly church.
What can change? UP, IN,
OUT and OF are a skeleton to support the flesh and blood of
church. How each dimension is expressed will vary between
denominations, and from one church to another within a
denomination.
Christians continue to debate what form these dimensions should take. Some churches think communion should be celebrated every week, for example; others once a month - while the Salvation Army doesn't celebrate communion at all.
Inevitably, some of these wider debates will be reflected in fresh expressions, as they seek to become churches that both fit the culture of people who take part and remain true to Scripture and the Christian tradition.
We give some examples of what can change in A different approach to church.
How can we preserve our identity? Remaining true to our particular inheritance is getting tricky as local churches become more diverse, due in part to fresh expressions.
'All these churches are so different, what makes them specifically Methodist?' 'What will make this fresh expression Church of England?'
Five values that tie Church of England churches together have been suggested by Steven Croft.
(Steven Croft, 'Conclusion' in Steven Croft [ed.], The Future of the Parish System, Church House Publishing, 2006, pp. 178-182.)
Thr
ee values that
might be at the heart of contemporary Methodism have been
suggested (in conversations) by former Principal of the Methodist Cliff
College, Howard Mellor:
Might these be helpful guides to whether a fresh expression is truly Church of England or Methodist? What would be the equivalent for other denominations and 'streams'?
We would offer three bits of advice to churches planning a fresh expression:
Will you be working within a catholic, evangelical or liberal tradition? It would be asking a lot of many congregations to support a fresh expression that had a radically different theological stance to them. So being clear at the outset about what is negotiable and what is not could well avoid tensions later on.
God has built experimentation into creation, and so experimentation should be part of the church's life. God believes in creative experimentation.
As one person said, only the whole church can know the whole truth.
Comments
what Rowan says
Posted by Laurence Keith on 17 October 07 - 15:43
the thing i particularly like is that is doesn't say anything about banning homogeneous groups! we're often asked how we can think of ourselves as church and be homogeneous, to which our reply is always that we are a very young fresh expression, you have to start somewhere!!
i think Rowan's definition is releasing and helpful as it doesn't start to put unhelful social boundaries in too early on. nice one, Arch Bish.
laul
Eucharist
Posted by Gordon Banks on 16 August 10 - 17:48
Posted by Andrew Wooding on 17 August 10 - 10:47
I presume you mean the Church of England when you say 'the Church'. This isn't necessarily an issue in other parts of God's church, and fresh expressions of church are seen in many denominations, not just the Church of England.
Sorry about this. I admit I often get confused when people refer to 'the Church' when they possibly mean just 'part of the church'.
Andrew
Posted by Gordon Banks on 17 August 10 - 20:40
Posted by David Muir on 17 August 10 - 12:54
When I was in Derby diocese I was the ‘attached priest’ to an Alternative Worship community there; and my role in part to be an advisor to the young adults who led and developed that community (whether or not they take the advice…) and in part and in the last resort to be the whistle-blower (that was in the wake of the Sheffield Nine O’Clock Service and all that). Maybe the best model for FXs is to have attached teacher/priests who don’t lead the FX but who are enough involved to know what is going on, have prophetic input into it, administer the sacraments, help to shape and form disciples – and blow a whistle to the wider church if everything seems to be going pear-shaped?
Posted by Gordon Banks on 17 August 10 - 20:54
Posted by Pam Smith on 18 August 10 - 09:58
"I have 'struggled' as a lay minister in the Church of England for 30 years and it 'feels' always that I am 'second class' and not quite made it to 'proper' ministry."
:(
I ran a prison chaplaincy as a lay minister - at the request of my Bishop - and it puzzled me that I was not invited to study days and other events that would have supported me because they were all labelled 'clergy.'
(I think Church Army officers get asked to such things as they have a status that equates to being a deacon as far as Bishops are concerned.)
You ask:
"Why is it axiomatic that the priest (sarcedotal church) is also designated the leader?"
I don't think it is axiomatic in terms of what is happening on the ground. However since the sort of recognition you are *not* getting comes from the centre, I wonder if it is a question of cultural blinkers. Development agencies and some mission agencies have caused problems in the past by imposing their own assumptions about how things should look onto a new context. 2 classic examples are aid agencies who gave money to groups of men, assuming that men are always the 'workers', in countries where women who are usually the farmers - and so the money was diverted away from agriculture - and the baby milk scandal where it was assumed that hungry babies should be given formula milk, rather than feeding the mothers so they could then breastfeed their babies. (In this case imposing an inappropriate cultural norm had tragic consequences since many babies were actually made ill by bottled milk made up wrongly in non-sterile conditions.)
I am really sorry you have had this experience of being overlooked, how disheartening. Perhaps this indicates that more attention needs to be given to resourcing and supporting what is happening rather than trying to make sense of it within existing structures. New wine needs new wine skins!
Posted by Pam Smith on 17 August 10 - 14:28
I'm sure that many ordained people would be more than happy to take the role that David describes and let someone else worry about the day to day practicalities of arranging meetings, keeping rotas going and (last but by no means least) ensuring financial stability since even the most basic group will incur costs over time.
I think it is hugely important that we acknowledge leaders within communities may be lay or ordained rather than forcing people into the ordained mould.
At the same time, I do worry that there is an underlying expectation that ordained people end up just being there to fulfil the sort of boundary setting role that David describes rather than to use all their gifts fully.
Boundary setting is a really important part of pastoral care but the worst case scenario is that the ordained person ends up as the 'parent' - and hey presto, there we are right back to 'Father knows best!'
Andrew's point that there are other church traditions to draw on is well made and I hope that discussions about how fresh expressions might develop will draw on the experiences of the whole church tradition.
Posted by David Muir on 18 August 10 - 17:28
With my role with the Alternative Worship group, it was definitely not 'father knows best'. They frequently ignored my advice and suggestions, and it was important that I allowed them to do so. In a sense that is precisely a 'parent' role in relation to our older children/young adults, knowing that they know the situation better than we do and we can only help them make their own wise choices, not tell them what to do -- because really we don't know. But we owe to them to offer our best judgment, and we owe it to the whole Church to make our best judgment about whether we need to distance ourselves publicly from this particular group because it is seems to be going off the rails. We might even be wrong about that, but again our best judgment is as good as it gets.
Posted by Pam Smith on 19 August 10 - 00:23
It seems (if I have understood correctly) your role was specifically to mentor a group of young people, who I assume may have been seen to lack the experience to go it alone, and part of that was to provide advice and sacraments where needed but also to act in a supervisory/boundary setting capacity and in extreme circumstances flag up to those in authority that there were serious problems.
I think that sounds different from the situation that a priest is brought in to provide the sacraments within a functioning and 'mature' fresh expression, and that priest then being assumed to be in leadership because they are a priest, over and above anyone in leadership from within the group. Which is where the feelings of being second best arise.
I certainly didn't mean to suggest that all priests should be expressing all their gifts in every situation - how exhausting for the priest and offputting for everyone else! - but surely servanthood, as you say, involves putting *all* our gifts at the disposal of the community we are called to serve - whether those gifts are 'amazing' or not. Mine certainly aren't.
All this talk of 'paid professional priests' overseeing others does make me wonder, though, what has happened to the concept of collaborative ministry? And if that makes me as an NSM somehow 'unprofessional'? :D
Posted by David Muir on 19 August 10 - 12:57
Depends what you mean by 'professional'. If a golfer 'goes pro', it means that golf becomes their primary occupation and they are free to earn their living from it. Being 'unprofessional' in what we do carries a rather different meaning, that the quality of what we have done does not live up to the quality you could expect from a professional. I think there continues to be a place for 'paid professional priestly' (PPP) ministry in the church today, and we need to think carefully how to deploy it. We must keep our expectations of such ministers high. Some unpaid/part-time ministers may also deliver very high standards of ministry, and many do, but I don't think it's fair to demand that.