Fresh Expressions: rewriting history?
There was an article in the Times on Saturday about “Fresh Expressions” churches, including a highly entrepreneurial venture in Polzeath. Nice to see some good news about church in the media – that’s something that doesn’t happen too often. I’m left scratching my head about its historical accuracy, though… the article makes it sound like the Church of England had a brilliant idea in 2002, after which a whole crowd of people followed their lead.
What really happened was that long before Mission Shaped Church or Fresh Expressions, a whole lot of people either left church or divided their loyalties in order to start new congregations outside the formal structures of the Church. The Mission Shaped Church report was in part a way of persuading the church at large that they either needed to make room for such alternative congregations or stand back and watch while a whole lot more people left the church in favour of these new projects. Stephen Croft, Graham Cray, Jonny Baker and a number of others then put in a lot of work to open up space for such congregations within Church of England and Methodist structures. But the resulting “Fresh Expressions” was a new title for something that had been going on for a good 15 years already (some would say longer).
For the record, the Goth Church in Cambridge morphed out of the Ambient Mass congregation which I began with a crowd of students in 2000, three years before Mission Shaped Church was published. Ambient Mass grew out of my experience with Holy Joe’s in London, which began in 1990. Vaux was at least as old as Holy Joe’s (older, I think); the Late Late Service in Glasgow went on since the early 90’s, and there were a host of others around then – Grace and Sanctuary are another two that come to mind.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m extremely happy that the Church of England and the Methodist Church have been imaginative and bold enough to open up to these new ventures. I just think it might be good to keep a grip on historical accuracy…
What are your recollections of new congregations, either before or after the official “Fresh Expressions” venture?
7 Responses to “Fresh Expressions: rewriting history?”
Comments
Pingbacks and Trackbacks
Reply
-
author musician theologian
Maggi has kept a blog since September 2003, writing about theology and faith, the arts and literature, and a little about life and random nonsense...
In an increasingly secularised society few people have a good working knowledge of the Bible. Yet a great deal of our culture is built on stories or ideas that come from the Bible. Literature, art, music, language and even the fabric of our society - such as our justice system - are built on Christian concepts and biblical references. The Writing on the Wall provides a fascinating introduction to the Bible's best-known, and most influential, stories. Each chapter gives some background to the text of the Bible, and shows how the stories have become enmeshed in Western culture. Adam and Eve, the ten plagues of Egypt, The Prodigal Son and Mary Magdalene all feature - along with how the Bible has influenced everyone from Shakespeare to Monty Python, and Caravaggio to Banksy. 
Giving It Up explores the Lenten idea of 'giving up', taking it beyond the traditional idea of simply abstaining from something, and suggesting instead that what we need to give up is our existing ideas about God. With a daily readings for each day of Lent, from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday, it follows the heroes of the Bible who had to give up their own too-small ideas about God.
This is Maggi’s bestselling book of daily readings for each day of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany. Advent is the beginning of the Church year, and marks the anticipation of the coming Messiah. These readings explore how beginnings and endings in our own lives are illuminated by the different Gospel narratives of Christ's coming.
-
Search
-
-
My own experience was that we were getting on with it before the CofE/Methodists gave it a home with the “fresh expressions” label. I remember being presented with Mission Shaped Church and having conversations that started with phrases like “Oh, so that is what we were doing….”
But I can’t think of any movements in any institution I have had involvement with that started as a brainchild at the top. When I was a teacher we would do something in the classroom and see if it worked. Then we would look at why it worked. Eventually someone may catch on and call it… a curriculum. Why would the church work differently?
good post maggie and i agree with your point. people prefer easy stories but we need some accuracy – including all the wonderful experiments and expressions that have come out of non-Anglicans (Urban Expression for example)
USA the same thing is happening with a reduction of the EC movement to a few well published pastors inside a single organizations in the 90’s – a good decade after many of the first efforts had begun.
ahhhhhhh
thanks for the comment, Andrew, and the link. Maybe we should write the book and set the record straight?
There was also the Nine-o-clock Service in Sheffield in the late 80s into the 90s. Met an unhappy end, but could be described as a fresh expression. Was also within the C of E.
The strength of Mission-Shaped Church (and what people might forget) is that it was a description of what was already happening – not a prescription for what *should* happen. In that respect, I think we can all agree that MSC helped to get the message out a bit wider, that some revolutionary gatherings were cropping up at grassroots level all over the place.
For me, NOS was the big, grand, jaw-dropping, eye-catching beginning; but the folk from Late, Late Service in Glasgow – Andy Thornton and Doug Gay, in particular – really helped people like me to understand how to translate the principles of alt.worship into our local setting. I remember fondly some of their seminars at Greenbelt’s HQ back in the day.
We’d formed Live On PLanet Earth by the early 90s, and were working out how the inner-city experiments from Sheffield and Glasgow and Bristol and all that could translate into the rural setting of the Weald of Kent!
It’s tremendous that the whole ‘emerging’ thing has emerged; but it’s also really important to maintain the excellent level of theological, artistic and cultural engagement that was achieved by alt.worship from the start, and which may sometimes be lost on churches who are simply seeking to attract a few more people, or look a bit more up to date. There is more to this journey than that…
Most of the churches mentioned in the comments seem to be within a certain ’set’ or structure… for example the Anglican or Methodist Churches.
I became a christian in 1974 and that was through a small group that met in a home. Unstructured but entirely missional (we started a ’sunday school’ where 140 kids showed up to the first one!) the emphasis was hugely relational. One of the first things I experienced was collectively reading through the book of Acts on a Thursday evening, where another newcomer remarked… “so this is just like us, isn’t it?”
Fresh Expressions is a wonderful thing, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that what I’ve described above is happening all the time, right out on the margins, all around the world. Most of the time these insignificant groups are just getting on with it and have little desire to advertise the fact or to be aggregated into something larger, more cohesive and ’successful’.