“Fresh Expressions is proof the church is not dying,” Archbishop Colin Johnson, metropolitan of the ecclesiastical province of Ontario, is quoted by Kristin Jenkins in her editorial, “Don’t touch that dial!”, in the March edition of the Anglican Journal. Read the complete piece here.
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‘Seeing what God is doing and joining in.’
Speaking to the Church of England’s General Synod (Thursday 11th February 2010), Fresh Expressions (FE) Team Leader, Bishop Graham Cray, gave an update on the work of FE, saying much been achieved since the initiative’s launch in 2005 but there is “much, much more to do.”
No Plan B!
Rachel Jordan has some advice for Christians who believe that someone else is going to build the kingdom of God here on Earth.“There isn’t a Plan B – you’re it,” she says. “You are the people God has chosen to be his agents right here, right now.”
(photo by Michael Hudson, story by Stuart Mann)
Dr. Jordan, who is a leader in the Fresh Expressions movement in England, was speaking at the fourth annual Vital Church Planting Conference, held at St. Paul, Bloor Street, Feb. 2-4. The event, which attracted 180 clergy and laity from across Canada, was sponsored by the Diocese of Toronto and the Wycliffe College Institute of Evangelism. read more
Mission-Shaped Intro Off to a Great Start in Toronto
Mission Shaped Intro has got off to a great start in Toronto. Twenty people have come faithfully each week to sessions led by John Bowen and Jenny Andison. We have had great group discussion, watched video clips from such movies as Sister Act, and done a number of practical exercises. We have experienced a variety of styles of prayer, watched videos of fresh expressions of church in the UK, rewritten Acts chapter 2(!), eaten bread freshly baked during the session, and discussed why night clubs sound like fun while church sounds so boring. A measure of how well the session has gone is that several people are wanting to take the materials and use them to teach MSI in their own home area.
Port Colborne’s Church on Tap Featured in Fresh Expressions UK Podcast
Church on Tap, a pub ministry from the Parish of St. James & St. Brendan in Port Colborne and led by Rob Hurkmans, was featured in October’s podcast on the Fresh Expressions UK web site here:
http://www.freshexpressions.org.uk/podcast/oct09
Church on Tap was also profiled on video by Sue and Andy Kalbfleisch, linked to on our Fresh Expressions Canada list.
New Video Profile of Church on Tap
Sue and Andy Kalbleisch created this new video about Church on Tap, a Pub Church in Southern Ontario:
Great work!
Churches along the Ottawa get Messy!
“The Anglican Churches Along the Ottawa” tried something new. It was a movement that came out of nowhere and re-lit their torch of faith. It is called “Messy Church”.
The first Messy Church we put on at Holy Trinity, Hawkesbury, on July 23rd was a tremendous success…over twenty children together with their parents & grandparents – plus two babies. The evening started with a “messy church” grace, then supper, and kept the tradition of “messy” alive as church parishioners served spaghetti.
It was chaotic & wild….but the sound of children laughing, crying & playing was music to our ears!
It was all about Noah. After the meal we had craft & learning stations littered at the other end of the hall. At the end, all the children boarded a three dimensional ark made from lumber and cardboard…It was picture perfect!
We borrowed a lot from a Messy Church workshop we attended in Kingston earlier this year, and we borrowed a bit from the original model, but we incorporated more of our own ideas. It was a good sign when the children were crying because they had to leave! The comments and the phone calls are still coming in from parents who are asking when the next Messy Church is going to be. Many are sad because they have to wait until September.
The amazing thing through all of this, Holy Trinity Hawkesbury has now gained a Sunday School! 9 children from across the river in Grenville, Quebec, are without a Sunday School since the United Church had stopped Sunday School this past year. They are excited that we will be accommodating them, and they are at the ages where we might be looking at a Youth Group in a couple years…
Amazing News isn’t it- The Spirit is ALIVE here!
A Diocese of Ontario Vision Day Report
On Saturday, March 14 sixty-four people from across the Diocese of Ontario took part in a Vision Day held at Christ Church, Cataraqui in Kingston. The event, which was co-sponsored by the Diocese of Ontario’s Evangelism Committee and Fresh Expressions Canada, was the largest of its kind in Canada to date.
With a powerful endorsement from the Archbishop of Canterbury, thousands of people across the U.K. have taken part in Vision Days, which are designed to create a forum for Christian communities to discover more about fresh expressions of church in their communities. Having now caught the attention of church leaders in Canada, receiving nods from The Primate and our Bishop George Bruce, the movement is beginning to generate interest at the grassroots level right here at home.
The Ven. William A. Clarke, who attended the Vision Day, said he was impressed to see such a strong turnout from among the older, more established crowd of committed church people in the Diocese, “maybe they are here because of a ‘we’ve got to do something’ attitude, or perhaps they are seeing through the eyes of their children and grandchildren that the traditional model of church isn’t working for them, and asking themselves if there is a way to find something new that will get their attention and get them involved again.”
At its core, fresh expressions of church are about churches listening to who people are, and how they are, and creating forms of church that connect with their needs. Officially, a fresh expression of church is “A fresh expression of church is a form of church for our changing culture, established primarily for the benefit of people who are not yet members of any church. It will come into being through principles of listening, service, incarnational mission and making disciples. It will have the potential to become a mature expression of church shaped by the gospel and the enduring marks of the church and for its cultural context.” The Vision Day was an opportunity to learn how fresh expressions can empower churches to relate to contemporary culture, instead of railing against it. Accidentally dressed alike in t-shirts and cargo pants, which they now jokingly call a fresh expressions “uniform”, the message from workshop leaders, The Rev. Ryan Sim (Parish of Kitley) and the Rev. Matthew Kydd (Parish of Oxford) was that we need to accept that the social landscape of Sunday has changed and that we can’t go back. Ryan Sim says that fresh expressions of church “answer God’s call to ‘go and make disciples’ and respond to the deep spiritual hunger that exists in our society today.”
One of the key features of a Vision Day is a character discovery exercise. Working in an interactive group setting, the exercise first challenges participants to identify a person or demographic whom they are not currently serving in their church community and then to imagine an identity for this individual – ranging from the simplest details like a name and what they might watch on TV, to more intimate details like where they might go on vacation and what they might do while away. The Rev. Blair Peever, Incumbent of Christ Church Cataraqui and member of the Diocesan Evangelism Committee said the exercise is designed to get people out of their comfort zones and to challenge them on “how much they know and how much they don’t know about the groups and demographics that they are not currently serving through their churches.”
In the second part, the groups were asked to tap into their imaginative centres and create a church for their characters. During the sharing portion of this exercise, participants were introduced to “Justin”, the skateboarder, who – sometime after his return from vacation in California – would attend a rather untraditional service right in the bowl of his local skateboard park. They might gravitate towards use of the Old and New Testaments in full-colour comic-strip form from the Comic-Strip Bible series. Another group developed a church for a homeless man named “George” who, together with his friends, would gather for communal acts of worship at mealtime in a soup kitchen. Their worship music of choice would be the “oldies” with a blues vibe played on harmonica. Because some of them might have literacy challenges, they might not use a written translation of the bible, but rather opt for the Gospel in a story-telling format. These are just highlights of the kinds of fresh expressions that were imagined as people freed themselves to envision their church reaching out to a changing society. The team’s hope is that parishes will conduct the same exercise, not with imaginary characters, but by getting to know those who actually live in their communities.
I was beginning to wonder if this level of “coolness” and Anglicanism could peacefully coexist in the real world, at which point Ryan Sim and Matt Kydd led us through a set of core values for fresh expressions that attempts to bring the “cool factor” in line with our theology and our traditions. In a conversation during the lunch break with The Rev. Nick Trussell, another member of the Diocesan Evangelism Committee, shared that “when we look at the core values of a fresh expression of church we will recognize them as the values of the churches we’re already in. Being mission-shaped, transformative, sacrificial – these are all marks of the church that we know and we can’t let those things go simply for the sake of fresh expressions. Fresh expressions need to be more than something that is just engaging or ‘cool’, they need to truly present the Gospel of Christ. We can get a community together around skateboarding, but we need to do it in a way that is done for the Glory of God”.
For more information about fresh expressions or to find out about an upcoming Vision Day please visit: http://www.freshexpressions.ca/