Church Planting

The Guide’s informative web site, “contains how-to-do-it advice on starting, developing and sustaining fresh expressions of church based on shared experiences.” A very valuable reasource for Fresh Expressions!

Some fresh, missional ways of being church are appearing in the United States. Read Missional to the Max to hear about Antioch (The Church of the Y, as in the YMCA), a rural ministry at Trinity Lutheran Church, and the house churches of Vineyard Central.

Interest in Fresh Expressions seems to be everywhere. Bishops are talking about it. Students are talking about it. Every church doing something new-even a coffee hour after the main service-seems to be boasting that it is doing a “fresh expression.” And, of course, Canada now has its very own Team Leader for Fresh Expressions Canada-Nick Brotherwood.

But already the question has been asked, “Is this just the latest flavour of the month?” Is it just one more in a long line of bright ideas from another country, “guaranteed” to solve our problems and grow our churches? We’ve seen these before: they come and go, and nothing much really changes. How is this any different?

The simple answer is: Fresh Expressions both is and is not the flavour of the month.

Yes, it’s the flavour of . . . the next five years

On the one hand, yes, it is definitely a new-and transient-phenomenon. Fresh Expressions in the UK, after five years, has just committed itself to another five years of existence. After that, Steve Croft, the first Team Leader told me, they are not committed to keeping it going indefinitely. But you will notice that I used the term Fresh Expressions with capital letters. That refers to an organization with a staff and programs and resources.

Steve’s goal is that Fresh Expressions would so influence the DNA of the Church of England that, by the end of the ten years, no organization would be necessary to sustain the fresh expressions (lower case) movement. And this seems to be happening. For example:

• It is now possible to be assessed, trained and ordained specifically for pioneering (rather than traditional pastoral) ministry. You can hear the podcast of talks given by Archbishop Rowan Williams to the first group of forty Ordained Pioneer Ministers (OPM) at Lambeth Palace here: http://www.freshexpressions.org.uk/podcast.asp?id=3091.

• Seminaries are reshaping their curricula accordingly. Some are appointing faculty to teach pioneer ministries. Trinity College, Bristol, has deliberately switched the whole thrust of its training from maintenance to mission. And St. Miletus College in London is a whole new seminary dedicated to training for “church planting, fresh expressions, and other pioneer ministries”, as the Principal, Graham Tomlin, told me.

• In April of this year, the Church of England created a “Bishop’s Mission Order,” an official means by which a fresh expression can be recognized by and accountable to a bishop, even when it crosses traditional parish boundaries.

All this means that, five years from now, if all goes according to plan, the doors of the Fresh Expressions office in Oxford can be closed, and a sign posted, “Mission Accomplished.” Then those for whom Fresh Expressions has been a Flavour of the Month will have to find a new one.

No, it’s the flavour of . . . the missional church

However, there is more important sense in which fresh expressions (lower case) is not the flavour of the month, never has been and never will be. Fresh expressions was not in the first place a national organization with its own staff and budget, encouraged by the Archbishop of Canterbury. All that is a recent addition to the scene. Rather, it began as a messy grassroots movement of entrepreneurial young people trying to figure out what it means to be a follower of Jesus in post-Christian, postmodern Britain. In other words, they began to think like missionaries, as Christians in every century have done.

That impulse led to experimental ministries in many different forms all over the country. Leaders realised that what was needed was not simply new forms of outreach and evangelism-which would simply prompt people to come to traditional churches. The more “unchurched” people were, the less likely that was to happen. So why not “do church” in a way that was appropriate for whichever culture was being reached? Hence many of these by definition did not look like traditional churches. Indeed, critics asked, “Are these truly churches at all?” Hence the coinage of the phrase “fresh expressions.” It enabled people to fend off criticism by saying, “Well, we are not saying these are churches-not yet anyway-but they are fresh expressions of church.”

So “fresh expressions of church” are simply what the church has always done when it finds itself in an new and different culture: figure out how the Gospel relates to that culture, and enable an indigenous church take root and become incarnate there. Naturally, that will always be different, according to the culture. Thus the term fresh expressions (with or without the capitals) may wither and die: but while the church is passionate about the Gospel, the impulse to incarnate it in every culture will remain.

The alternative, of course, is for the church to lose that missionary impulse, and then it will die because it will have become the unpalatable and stale flavour of an alien world.

What are Fresh Expressions of Church?

If people have an image of the Church of England, it is generally of an elderly, genteel and sleepy church, centering on ancient, decaying buildings in delightful rural settings.

Although those churches certainly exist, the full reality is very different. I think this came home to me some years ago, when two people independently told me that the Church of England had been planting new congregations at the rate of one every two weeks for the previous ten years. This was news to me, as maybe it is to you. A church report, Breaking New Ground (1994) dealt with this new reality, and the opportunities and challenges it brought.

 – See the “official” definition from Fresh Expressions, UK

Mission Shaped Church

Some of these new churches, however, did not fit the mould of what one might traditionally think of as an Anglican church. To give one of the more famous examples, how many Goths do you know who go to church? Probably not a lot. (OK, maybe I should have asked first of all how many Goths you know.) Yet there is a thriving church of Goths in Cambridge. Or what about skateboarders? The Church of England has a church of skateboarders.

Once again, a church report marked this new transition: Mission Shaped Church (2004), written by a group headed by Bishop Graham Cray. This not only described some of the “fresh expressions of church” which were springing up all over the country, but talked about the theology of such things, and gave encouragement to those who wanted to experiment with forms of church that would reach those presently “unchurched.”

Fresh impetus was given to this movement by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who set up an organization called “Fresh Expressions”, under the leadership of the Rev. Dr. Steven Croft, based in Oxford. Fresh Expressions has a website, which among other things provides a place for people to “register” their “fresh expression of church.” Presently there are some 650 registered, from all over Britain. Fresh Expressions also offers training in Mission Shaped Ministry to those who want to learn how to “do church” in a way that relates more closely to the culture.

So is this just the latest “flavour of the month” ministry gimmick, which will pass like so many more within a year or two? Rowan Williams thinks not: he sees it as the genuine spiritual response of a mission-minded church to the changing culture around it:

Essentially the Fresh Expressions programme is not simply about a kind of scattered set of experiments . . . it’s about that gradual, but I think inexorable, shift, the whole culture of our church that has been going on in the last few years, and which will undoubtedly continue to grow and develop.
(General Synod, February 2007)

Changing structures

One sign that this is a change that will last has been “a principled and careful loosening of structures” (Rowan Williams) in order to provide new wineskins for the new wine. For example, it is now possible to be assessed, training and ordained specifically to “pioneer ministries.” In other words, you may not have the gifts or the interests to pastor a traditional Anglican church, but the church still acknowledges that it needs you! Or again, General Synod recently approved what is called a “Bishop’s Mission Order” whereby a bishop can give formal approval to a fresh expression of church in his diocese which does not fit traditional ministry categories, and may cross traditional parish boundaries (a bigger issue in the UK than here). In fact, Steve Croft says one of the symbols of his ministry is a can of WD40—to help loosen up traditional procedures to make possible more of these fresh expressions.

What can the Canadian Church learn from this?

Canada already has its own share of fresh expressions of church—not as many as the UK, granted, but significant nonetheless. Up to now, however, nobody has connected the dots and pointed out that these are the same kind of thing.

You can read about some examples below, or see a complete listing on our web site’s Canadian Fresh Expressions List. At that page, if you are involved in what might be considered a “fresh expression of church”, let us know, and we will post your link.

• St. Benedict’s Table (Winnipeg)
• Messy Church (St. John’s NF)
• Emerge (Montreal)
• Church on Tap (Port Colborne ON)

Other denominations are doing this kind of thing as well, and we need to learn from each other. (Fresh Expressions in England is actually a joint project of the Anglican and Methodist churches.) Check out The Freeway, a Salvation Army church plant in Hamilton ON, for example.

More work needs to be done, however.

1. One foundation of the Fresh Expressions movement has been research into what is going on religiously and spiritually in Britain. (It is on this basis, for example, that they conclude that 40% of the population are unchurched: that is, they have never in their lives had significant contact with a church.) What are the Canadian realities? Undoubtedly they would be the same in some ways, but different in others. If Fresh Expressions is a response to a changing culture, we have to know how Canadian culture is changing. And research such as Reg Bibby’s could help us to understand that.

2. We need also to network people who are either engaged in fresh expressions of church, or would like to do so. This can happen through websites and blogs, of course. People interested in connecting with the unchurched are also beginning to gather each year at Vital Church Planting, the Anglican Church Planting conference in Toronto. It was here that the seeds of Messy Church were sown in 2007, and here that George Lings, a Fresh Expressions leader in Britain, inspired and challenged us this year. We are already hoping to bring Steve Croft and Sally Gaze (a leader in rural fresh expressions) to the 2009 conference.

3. Nick Brotherwood and Tim Smart from the Diocese of Montreal have begun to do Vision Days (using Fresh Expressions materials) in their area, and I suspect before long similar events will be happening in other areas.

This is an exciting development, and many people have a sense that, in the midst of all the troubles in the Anglican Church, the Holy Spirit is still at work. Watch this space for further news!

What is a fresh expression of church?

“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.” – From Fresh Expressions, UK

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More Information on Fresh Expressions

Canadian Fresh Expressions List – Please click here to see our brand new list of Canadian Fresh Expressions of Church and, if you are involved in what might be considered a “fresh expression of church”, to post your link.

 

Links:

• See all articles from this site on Fresh Expressions
• Video from Allelon’s site of an interview with Bishop Graham Cray
• Bishop Graham Cray’s PowerPoint Presentation from his lecture on Fresh Expressions at the Institute Dinner in March 2008
• The official Fresh Expression UK Site