Fresh Expressions

We live today in a culture of ‘Big’. Big box stores, Multiplex Cinemas, massive subdivisions, and across North America in the last two decades, something else big-the megachurch. Because these churches are big they can offer the very best music, audio-visual presentations, great sound systems and specialized teaching skills. They are among the fastest growing churches today. However, many of these churches stress that ‘the bigger we get, the smaller we need to become’. Many of them have discovered that to disciple people effectively (or even get to know them) small groups are essential. They’re absolutely right, of course. And we wish them the absolute best in that endeavor.

But what does any of this mean to the thousands of small churches? Are there things that happen in ‘small’ that can’t happen (despite the very best intentions) in ‘big?

Story One

Last week three little girls, ages 5, 9 and 10 dropped by our church, while on their way home from school. They asked if the littlest one, Milly, could use the washroom. Afterwards, Amanda, 9, and the clear ringleader, asked if we had any papers that told when church happened. She said she once went to a Catholic school and had decided it was time for her and her sister to come to church. She wanted to know if I could show her around so she knew where to take her little sister when it came time for the kids’ program (which she had read about on the paper). When I showed then the sanctuary, Milly exclaimed, “Look at the pretty pictures!” Amanda knowingly replied, “Milly, those are stained glass windows”. 

Amanda informed me that she and Milly would only be here every second week because they were at her dad’s every other weekend. She wanted to know if it was okay for their mom to drop them off since ‘She doesn’t really go to church.’ Kerry, age 10, announced that she might be able to bring her mom along this Sunday. Then the three waved goodbye and continued on their way home.

I was left a little dumbstruck by the whole encounter, but I know one thing for sure: God is up to something in the lives of these 3 little girls: He is doing a new ‘small’ thing. And so I found myself asking a question about ‘small’: What if there hadn’t been a church in their neighbourhood?

Story Two

About ten months ago I sat and listened to three couples with toddlers talk about their lives, and explain why they found it so hard to honour a vow they made at their first child’s baptism, when they had promised that child would be “nurtured in the faith and life of the Christian community’. They spoke of both partners commuting long hours to work in the city. They spoke of dropping their kids off early each day at daycare and the guilt they felt doing that. And they spoke about how neither leaving their toddlers in the nursery or keeping them with them in worship worked. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to nurture their kids spiritually. They just couldn’t figure out a way in to do that. Maybe when their kids were old enough for Sunday School. Maybe someday.

That conversation gave rise to another ‘small’. It’s called ‘Messy Church’, and it happens once a month on Saturday mornings. It’s a time for parents and little kids, mainly ages 2 to 6, to learn and worship together. Messy Church has met eight times now. Attendance has ranged between 21 and 38. Almost all of the families who attend were very peripherally attached to the faith community. A few families have now brought friends and their kids. Several grandparents have started bringing their grand kids, whose parents don’t have a church connection. Through songs, games, crafts, stories and DVD clips, we’re reaching children and adults we wouldn’t have reached otherwise.

And so this week I found myself asking another question about ‘small’: if we hadn’t known the initial couples well enough to realize they weren’t at church, how would we ever have connected with them and their kids in a more substantive way?

Story Three

Out of the blue a man called and asked to talk with a pastor. The man told me his marriage was in serious trouble. He and his wife were new in town and had chosen us because we had the same name as the church they were married in (Christ Church …. go figure!). When I met with them two nights later it became clear that their marriage problems were very much related to deep pain in both of their pasts. They were both the children of alcoholics and had witnessed and experienced serious dysfunction in their families.

Somewhat to my surprise, I found myself inviting them to consider taking part in a program we were starting the very next night called The Twelve Steps: A Spiritual Journey. Five weeks into the program (being attended by nine people), they tell me that for the first time they are talking together about the pain in their past, and about spiritual issues. Last week the women’s sub-group of six all went to a movie together. The husband has decided to take holiday time on several Tuesdays so that his afternoon shift won’t interfere with him doing the program. Last Sunday they came to church for the first time. The husband told one of the Twelve Step leaders that he felt the sermon was ‘just for him’.

And so yet again I found myself asking a question about ‘small’. If the only ‘way in’ to hear the gospel is through a large group worship event followed by the bold step of voluntarily joining a small group, how many people who seriously need to hear good news about the transforming power of God are missing out?

The Fresh Expressions movement, sweeping through much of England and now taking off in Canada, tells us ‘small is beautiful’. In its skateboard churches, bakery churches, café churches, and Goth Eucharists they are reaching small groups of people no traditional church (big or small) can reach. I believe small neighbourhood churches can confidently say, along with Fresh Expressions, “Yes, small can be beautiful.” So let’s celebrate ‘small’, by keeping an eye on the big things God wants to do there.

When you hear the term ‘fresh expressions’ being used as a bit of a joke, at least you know it’s arrived! You can hear people talking about proposals for new arrangements in a PCC [parish council] or Synod as fresh expressions of church admin; or music groups as a fresh expression of organs…

What is obvious is that the language is here to stay. The last few years have established that the Church in the UK has recognised an inescapable truth. Renewal for the Christian community is never simply a matter of doing the same things better, though that is an essential part of it; it’s also about finding what new shapes for our life together are created under the pressure of mission. New wines and new wineskins, you might say; the idea is firmly rooted in the Gospel itself.

The Fresh Expressions initiative has managed to hold together a resolute commitment to new forms and styles with an equally resolute refusal to write off the best of what we have inherited. One of the things I have found most encouraging and positive in all this is the spirit of generosity it has nurtured. It’s always easy to claim that there is one and only one answer to the question of how to make room for new life in the Church.

But this has not been the agenda of Fresh Expressions. It has instead made us ask, ‘What is the kind of vitality, imaginative life, integrity and quality of worship that is appropriate in this specific circumstance, with these specific people?’ The traditional parish pattern, worked out with flair and commitment, may be completely the right priority to work on in some situations; in others, the actual needs of the people around will suggest new possibilities. And this is probably most often the case when we’re talking about those who live in less traditionally focused communities, those who have never had any experience at all of Church life – and many, perhaps most, of the under-25s.

So Fresh Expressions has encouraged two attitudes that I believe to be vital for a healthy Church. It has helped us to be positive about the variety of ways in which the call of Jesus Christ can be heard and prayed through and thought about; and it has helped us pay real and costly attention to the real questions and the real agenda of those with whom we want to share the Good News.

Certainly this has also meant an encouragement to take some risks. A fair number of new initiatives have flared up briefly and then faltered or dissolved, and this is bound to be painful. But the New Testament and early Christian history already show us plenty of instances where the new life of the gospel community comes to life in unexpected ways, some of them lasting, some transient.

The early Jerusalem community in the Acts of the Apostles is marked by an intense commitment to sharing all its material goods and by loyalty to the Temple. But it is not slavishly reproduced in other churches – and, so far as we can tell, it does not survive the scattering of the apostles and the later death of James the Lord’s brother.

Paul in Acts 19 encounters an established Christian group apparently working with a defective understanding of baptism, and he sets out to change its practice and theology. The letters to the churches in Revelation suggest a picture of local churches some of which are expanding or deepening their lives, and some drying up. There is no need to panic at the thought of risk and even at the thought that what we come up with is liable to change drastically or even disappear in the form we know it.

But, to live with risk like this, we need to have a clear and robust understanding of what the Church really is. It is not, in the New Testament, a carefully constructed human society, organising itself in local branches, with members signing up to a constitution. Instead, it is what happens when the news and the presence of Jesus, raised from the dead, impact upon the human scene, drawing people together in a relationship that changes everyone involved, a relationship which means that each person involved with Jesus is now involved with all others who have answered his invitation, in ways that can be painful and demanding but are also lifegiving and transforming beyond imagination.

The ‘strength’ of the Church is never anything other than the strength of the presence of the Risen Jesus. And one thing this means is that, once we are convinced that God in Jesus Christ is indeed committed to us and present with us, there is a certain freedom to risk everything except those things that hold us to the truth of his presence – Word and sacrament and the journey into holiness. These will survive, whatever happens to this or that style of worship, this or that bit of local Christian culture, because the presence of Jesus in the community will survive.

Fresh Expressions, I’ve suggested, has helped us see something of this liberating vision. It’s true, from one point of view, that this takes us beyond a concern with denominational identity; and for some this is worrying. Is it really Anglican, or Methodist, or Baptist? What I hope is that, in the next phase of the work of Fresh Expressions, as it continues to enter more fully into the bloodstream of the churches, we start asking instead – of Fresh Expressions, but also of some of our inherited patterns – ‘Is it really Church?’

Is this a place and a community where people are expecting the Risen Jesus to be tangibly at work and the Holy Spirit making a difference? Is this a place and a community where people can begin to see that what makes the Church what it is and holds it together is the sheer strength of God’s promise and invitation through the living Jesus?

You can ask that question without rubbishing or ignoring the precious heritage of witness that our denominations have accumulated. There are deeply traditional churches where the presence of the living Jesus is obvious and there are fashionable new ones where it isn’t. What matters is what I mentioned a little while ago: whether we are really trying to make the connection between what we say about Jesus and what the genuine questions and needs are of the people we are seeking to serve. Generosity and attention, remember: and all of it in the name of the One whose word of judgement and mercy and hope has the power to penetrate into the depth of every human heart and every human culture.

So, as this first phase of Fresh Expressions’ work moves into a new rhythm and style, I thank God that he has helped us turn our eyes back to the heart – and Head – of the Church, so that we see all that we do and say as the believing community hanging on his Word. Generosity and attention – and, undergirding them, gratitude and wonder. I’ll be praying that, in the next round of work and planning, it’ll be this gratitude and wonder that will more and more inform what we do – and that such gratitude will set us all free to rediscover some of what the essence of the church’s life is, and deliver us from that profoundly tempting and sometimes all-pervading anxiety which so chokes the Good News of Jesus and his resurrection.

Reproduced by kind permission of ‘mixed economy’, journal of Fresh Expressions UK. The whole journal may be read online at: http://www.freshexpressions.org.uk/uploads/documents/mixed-economy-journal-2008.pdf