AOCM

So What is a Fresh Expression?

Revd Dr Steven Croft is the Team Leader of Fresh Expressions and former warden of Cranmer Hall.

Fresh Expressions is a new initiative established in 2004 by the Archbishops and the Methodist Council.

So what is a fresh expression of church?

For many years Christians all over the country have been taking new initiatives of different kinds. They are a response to the love of God (on the one hand) and a growing distance between much of our society and much of the church (on the other). It’s no longer enough to sit in church and invite people to come and join us. We need to go to where people are, to listen and serve and shape community in new ways. As Christians have done this, these new initiatives have often led to new communities of Christians meeting on different days of the week, in different places, learning to be church together.

In 2004 the Church of England published the report Mission Shaped Church. The report coins a new term to describe these new communities and calls them “fresh expressions of church”. It also discerns that they are a very good thing and that we should encourage fresh expressions of church in every part of the country. The Church of England is now well on the way to becoming what the Archbishop of Canterbury has called a mixed economy church: traditional parishes alongside fresh expressions of church.

Isn’t there a more precise definition?

Mission Shaped Church deliberately doesn’t define the term but describes a range of twelve different types of activity. We’ve waited a while before attempting a definition because the overall picture is still very fluid. In consultation with lots of people working in the field we published the definition in the box in May 2006. So far it’s been well received but no doubt we will refine it further in the years to come.

A fresh expression 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 key elements are a rooting in mission as the main motivation; incarnational mission in terms of the way things are established and a sense of journey, growth and development.

How much of this is going on?

We’ve been mapping it for two years and we are still discovering new things. There are over five hundred examples now on our database. Anyone can search it by diocese, district, county or category. Those five hundred examples alone involve over 30,000 people. I doubt that we have caught up with a third of the total so far. It’s a small but visible proportion of the Church of England and the Methodist Church and it seems to be growing.

Are they really that fresh? Haven’t we been doing some of these things for a long time?

Since New Testament times, Christians have been called to see the gospel embedded in different cultures in appropriate ways. So that’s not a new development. Some of the examples of fresh expressions we have come across are new and fresh for a particular parish or deanery - they may not have been tried there before (although they may be familiar to Christians elsewhere). Some are genuinely innovative.

We published a DVD earlier this year featuring fourteen stories ranging from Messy Church, a midweek all age congregation in Portsmouth to Mind the Gap, a Methodist cell church for young adults in Gateshead, to Legacy XS, a youth congregation based in a large skater park in Benfleet. There is immense variety, immense creativity, immense hope.

Is the Church of England changing to make room for fresh expressions and give them space to grow?

I’ve now visited all but two dioceses. Most are moving in this direction. Some are changing strategically and intentionally by planning to develop a mixed economy. Others are moving much more slowly but gradually beginning to own the vision. There are very few places where there is no movement at all.

In terms of the Church of England as a whole there are two key developments. The first are new guidelines on ministry - particularly the new selection criteria and the guidelines on ordained pioneer ministry. More than 20 candidates have been recommended for training for this focus of ministry and many more are in the pipeline.

The second is the new Dioceses, Mission and Ministry Measure making its way through the General Synod. This creates a new legal device, called a Bishop’s Mission Order, which enables the recognition of new non-geographical communities alongside parishes.

Is this just another suburban, evangelical movement or is there some breadth and depth?

There are lots of good examples of fresh expressions of church in a sacramental and contemplative tradition. I’m in regular contact with the leadership of Moot, an alternative worship community based in St. Matthew’s, Westminster. Contemplative Fire is a network of communities based in Oxfordshire which aims to teach the value of silence and contemplation. The Goth Eucharist based at St. Edmund King and Martyr in Cambridge has developed within a parish where all the other services were from the BCP. There are many examples of community initiatives developing into fresh expressions of church. There is energy behind these developments in rural areas: Norwich and Exeter and looking to provide new training courses from January 2007. We have a curate on a six month placement with the team at present researching inner urban fresh expressions and there is no shortage of examples.

Where are the problems and the difficult questions coming from?

There are lots. I wouldn’t want to pretend for a moment that everything is neatly sorted. Two loom large at the moment:

The first is that we are attempting these new developments in mission at a time of considerable anxiety. An emphasis on one thing (fresh expressions) can easily be “heard” as diminishing something else (traditional parish ministry). There is absolutely no doubt that we need both in order to serve the whole of our changing society and that both need each other.

Second, reflection on fresh expressions of church demands a great deal of thinking in two key areas of theology: missiology and ecclesiology. In recent years, we’ve not been very good at either. There are some good resources now to help us think about mission - not least the Anglican Communion’s five marks of mission which present a well balanced, wholistic view. Generally I’m not hearing a lot of arguments about whether mission is about evangelism or seeking justice or serving the wider community or guarding the environment. We have a common understanding that it is about all these things - even if that understanding is not yet integrated into the whole of the life of the Church.

But I think we are much further back in terms of thinking creatively about the nature of the church. Ecclesiology is a hugely significant endeavour raised by fresh expressions. How (for example) is a youth group or a midweek service for toddlers and parents really church? How can it develop a common life? In what sense is a church school an ecclesial community?

There are few resources - and that is something I would apply across all the traditions within Anglicanism. How do we define the essence of church? How do we describe and understand the richness of the church? How do we decide what is and what may not be church? How do we chart a specific Anglican identity within these frameworks? How do we rightly order ministry and the administration of word and sacraments within fresh expressions of church? And how do we ensure unity, holiness, catholicity and faithfulness to the apostles’ teaching and mission?

How will all of this affect my training and ministry?

Your training for Anglican ministry will not be complete without some exposure to fresh expressions of church and evolving thinking and reflection. They are part of the Church of England in the present as well as the future. Many courses, colleges and schemes are making rapid and good developments towards developing these areas of the curriculum and to develop specialised training for pioneer ministers. Fresh Expressions is developing a new one year part-time training course which we hope will eventually be available all over the country and an on-line guide to fresh expressions of church to be launched in January 2007. Many more curates will have the opportunity in the coming years to pioneer a fresh expression of church from 2007 onwards - a question about this now appears on all title post proformas. Vicars and the equivalent will increasingly exercise proactive missional oversight over mixed economy parishes. That will mean not just looking after existing communities but encouraging the development of fresh expressions of church alongside the established services.

It is a good time and an exciting time to be preparing for ordained ministry in all its forms. We are in the midst of re-imaging the church for the 21^st Century with all that that means. There are many signs of encouragement.

To find out more:
Visit www.freshexpressions.org.uk and sign up for quarterly updates

Watch the Expressions DVD: 1. Stories of church for a changing culture (CHP, 2005)

Read “The Future of the Parish System” edited by Steven Croft (CHP, November, 2006): twelve essays on the development of the mixed economy by (among others) Rowan Williams, Graham Cray, Martyn Percy, Grace Davie and Sarah Savage.

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Steven is also the author (with Roger Walton) of Learning for Ministry: a practical guide to study and training (CHP, 2005) and has just published his first work of fiction: The Advent Calendar (DLT, 2006).