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We think that most fresh expressions will develop as follows:

A fresh expressions journey

Prayer and listening - both to God and to the people you are called to serve - are central to this fresh expressions journey, at every stage.

Loving service: Unlike many traditional church plants, a fresh expression is unlikely to start with worship. If you launch a worship service, you know who is going to come – Christians! So if the aim is to serve people who do not come to church, you may not get very far.

Instead of starting with a worship service, fresh expressions are more likely to begin with loving service:

• a community café for the neighbourhood;
• kite-flying with a group of friends;
• a bus with food and videos for teenagers;
• an after-school club;
• a zone in which to relax and explore spirituality;
• a course on money management;
• a local campaign on behalf of asylum seekers ...

The possibilities are endless! Loving service (with three examples)...

Community: Building community within the context of loving service is vital. People you are called to serve may not come back if they do not feel accepted and valued.

But if friendships form, the coffee may be dreadful, the talk can be really boring, the building may not be perfect, there may be no wind to fly your kite, but people will still turn up. They will come because they like each other.

Your act of service will become an opportunity to meet with others. Creating community may be the biggest service you offer. Forming community (with one example)...

From Community to Discipleship: There seem to be at least three evangelistic pathways between community and discipleship.

• Include an explicitly Christian dimension from an early stage. Take a luncheon club, for example.

  Members might put candles on the tables after the plates have been cleared, play some Christian music, invite someone to read a few verses from the Bible, allow time for silent prayer and ask someone else to read a couple of written prayers – all lasting about 20 minutes.

  Guests could leave after lunch if they wished, or stay on for this time of reflection.

  As prayers are answered, this short act of worship might lead to a fortnightly Bible study after lunch, or a separate discipleship course.

• Include a more general spiritual dimension from an early stage. At the end of the evening, members of a divorce recovery group might be invited to share a period of quietness, in which they could pray to God as they understand him (or her) or think positive thoughts about each other.

  In time, they might be invited to share with the person sitting next to them their hopes and concerns about the coming week, and then pray for – or have positive thoughts about – the other person.  The leader could quietly pray that the Holy Spirit graciously responds.

  Feedback on whether this was helpful might create openings for the group to discuss what God is like and how he gets involved in people's lives.

• Create opportunities to form a separate explorers' group. As relationships develop and personal evangelism takes place, some people may become interested in examining the Christian faith. A group might meet at a different time of the week for this purpose.

To realise their potential, all three pathways depend on individual Christians being willing to share their faith with others on a one-to-one basis.

These bridges into discipleship are discussed further...

Discipleship. This is the process through which people explore and are nurtured in the Christian faith, including learning how to worship together. It is an essential part of the fresh expressions journey. Jesus called his followers 'to make disciples of all nations' (Matthew 28: 19)

We are preparing a substantial treatment of discipleship to be included in the third section of the Guide.

Church: As people explore the Christian faith and worship together, they are not encouraged to join 'the main church', which is the traditional approach. They are invited to explore what it means to be church themselves, as they meet and relate to each other.

Church begins to develop when there is growth in all four dimensions of UP, IN, OUT and OF – the marks of church described in Are fresh expressions proper church?

Not every group will be comfortable with 'churchy' language. For some people, today's church is such a put-off that alternative language has to be used, such as 'Christian community', to make clear that it is not the same old church that is being created.

But when Christians talk among themselves, we think 'church' is a good word to use because it reminds us that we are baptised into the whole body of Christ - past, present, future and around the world.

Other frameworks can be used to think about the development of fresh expressions. For example:

• The lifecycle – conception, pregnancy, preparing for birth, birth, infancy, adolescence, maturity and reproduction.

• A tree – the roots of research, calling and culture, for example, grow into a trunk of vision, values and team, from which sprout the branches of projects, programmes and partners.

• Yeast – twelve steps will function a little like yeast, allowing church cells to grow and multiply. (The Yeast Cell Multiplication analogy - and other frameworks and analogies - are examined here.)

We offer the fresh expressions journey - 'loving service', 'community', 'discipleship' and 'church', all underpinned by prayer and listening - as a distillation and simplification of these alternatives.

The journey will not always follow that exact sequence, but we think it normally will. (We discuss whether 'community' might sometimes come before 'loving service' in Forming community.) Evangelism is a vital bridge from community to discipleship.

This 'fresh expressions journey' is modelled on Jesus. He served people, he formed his followers into a community, he made them disciples and his disciples showed us what church can be like (Acts 2.42-47).

But it also raises an important ethical question. Is there a danger that the early parts of the journey will simply be a means to an end - that loving service and community will be valued only as a means of getting people into the faith? We discuss this in Does the fresh expressions journey risk manipulation?

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