Out of Nothing

A Cross-Shaped Approach to Fresh Expressions

Andrew Dunlop

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780334056683
• eBook ISBN: 9780334056706
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematic Theology & Ethics

The two key questions often levelled at fresh expressions are 'What is Church?' and 'How on earth can a fresh expression be evaluated?' In "Out of Nothing", Andrew Dunlop offers an account of his journey in starting a fresh expression, and along the way proposes an alternative theological foundation for evaluation - the Cross-Shaped approach. Dunlop proposes a theological foundation which goes to the heart of God's action in the world. Both accessible and critically engaged, the book will provide an important resource for both pioneers and for those studying pioneer ministry.

1

Where do we start?

The months of anticipation came to an end as the removal van pulled away, leaving behind a mountain of unpacking. We had arrived in our new house in the middle of the St Crispin’s new-build development on the edge of Northampton. We were two adults, one baby and a cat, and we had a mandate to start church. We were eager to get going, throwing ourselves into building relationships with those who lived around us, but there were many questions buzzing around in our heads, the answers to many of them still unknown. What would our new church look like? Who would it be for? Would anyone actually join us? Where would we meet? What would we do when we gathered? How much of a vision should we set at the start? How will we get started? This was a blank sheet of paper, a fresh start for the Church in this community, so there were no set precedents or expectations. It struck me that the way to proceed was to take one step at a time, not getting too far ahead of ourselves. The first step was surely to build relationships with the people around us.

But before I discuss how we started and what we did, there is a more pressing question: Why are new forms of church needed? Surely the local parish church would be able to serve the needs of all the residents in their parish? In this chapter I will give a brief background to fresh expressions of church, define what they are and introduce some theory about how pioneering may take place. I then discuss the early questions we asked, the activities we began and the way we engaged with our neighbours.

What are fresh expressions and why are they needed?

From the middle of the last century there has been increasing recognition that some areas, cultures, subcultures or people-groups were not being reached by traditional forms of church. This can be seen through several factors. Official statistics show that attendance in Anglican churches in England and Wales has been in decline since the 1930s, with particularly steep decline in the last decade of the twentieth century, despite an overall increase in UK population in this time.1 In 2001, the first year that there was a question about religion on the UK census, 71.8 per cent of British residents claimed affiliation to Christianity. This number dropped to 59.3 per cent by the time of the 2011 census. Clearly there are all kinds of reasons why someone may choose to answer this question in this way, from faith conviction to national identity, but the drop in numbers of those claiming Christian affiliation demonstrates an increasing reluctance to identify with the Christian heritage of the country. Also clear is that Christian affiliation alone does not translate into church attendance. Attendance across all denominations in Britain was estimated to be 5.8 per cent of the population in 2010, a number that has also been in decline in the last 40 years.2 So both in terms of church attendance and Christian affiliation, Christianity appeared to be in decline.

Another factor is the changing demographic of traditional church congregations. Between 1979 and 2005, the number of churchgoers across all denominations who were over the age of 65 as a percentage of the total had nearly doubled, while that of those aged between 15 and 29 had shrunk by more than half (Archbishops’ Council, 2007, p. 33). Bear in mind that this is half of a diminishing total and the full picture revealed by these statistics comes into place: congregations seem to be getting smaller and older. Anecdotal research reveals a similar picture. One can step into many churches across the country and see almost nobody between the ages of 12 and 40, and very few children. The implication is that these demographics are either not being reached by the local church or many people simply do not like what they find there.

This data needs to be read in context; it is simply not true to suggest that the Church has been universally in decline in the UK as Christendom has come to an end. There are numerous examples of new churches and growing churches that have been written about in detail. For example, David Goodhew, who heads the Centre for Church Growth Research in Durham, has written extensively on church growth and new churches established since 1980.3 These are to be celebrated and we can learn from what they do well. Such growth is patchy across the country, and while some of it is within the historical denominations, growth can also be seen in free churches, new denominations and multi-ethnicity churches. In later writing focusing on the theology of church growth, Goodhew suggests that the ‘theology of decline’ implicit in Western Christian thinking needs to be discarded, not only because of the examples of growth that can be found but also because this theology can act as a self-fulfilling prophecy, discouraging some from investigating strategies and theologies that could lead to growth (Goodhew, 2015a, pp. 33–5). There are churchgoers who have worshipped for many years in the same church and have never seen it grow in their lifetime. The idea that the church inevitably shrinks can be difficult to shift, but this narrative must be challenged. Simply because a trend may be evident in the present does not mean it need always be so.

Sociological theories have also been built on the back of statistics of decline. For example, Steve Bruce, building on sociological contributions from the mid-twentieth century onwards, contends that as societies modernize, the desire for religious affiliation and practice reduces resulting in societies becoming more secularized. Secularization is an inevitable by-product of modernization. Bruce claims this secularization theory has been the driving force of the decline in religion in the West, and he sees no signs of this trend reversing (Bruce, 2002). This theory has rightly been challenged by, among others, Grace Davie, who sees the church maintaining an important role in people’s lives even though they do not attend. They have a vicarious approach to the church, wanting it to be there, ready to be turned to should the need or desire arise (Davie, 2015, pp. 81ff.). This can often be seen in villages where the local church is earmarked for closure; the most vociferous opposition can come from those who hardly ever attend.

Despite this it is difficult to deny that attendance has been falling for many decades. Attributing it purely to secularization would be to accept that the narrative must always be one of decline. There are probably several factors that led to decline, none of which indicate that the trend must continue. Michael Moynagh, who has become an authority on new forms of church and whose work I will be exploring more fully later, mentions some of these factors. He writes that the development of (good) organizations and activities, in the latter half of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth, unintentionally acted in competition with the church (Moynagh, 2017, pp. 125–6). The welfare state reduced the role the church played in alleviating poverty, compulsory education reduced the role of Sunday schools, and an increase in organized leisure drew people to other places. At the same time, social pressure to attend church waned. Industrial owners who may at one time have insisted on or encouraged their workforce to attend church – such as Titus Salt or John Cadbury – were gradually followed by those with new attitudes. Overambitious church building, coupled with a reliance on philanthropy (neglecting teaching on regular giving), resulted in financial pressures once the number of philanthropists declined. This led to a focus on maintaining buildings, often having to cut ministry or outreach budgets to pay for them. Money raised went into maintaining the church rather than back out into the world. This can be described as a ‘growing self-absorption’, marking a slow withdrawal from the world and limiting imagination for new forms of church (Moynagh, 2017, p. 126). In short, the church failed to adapt.

Of course, if we were only interested in numbers, this would be concerning. Given that, with a missional interest, many in the church are passionate about helping others to connect with God, we do need to look at current practices and forms of church and ask whether they are serving their purpose. There are generations, cultures and subcultures in our country who were and are not being reached by traditional forms of church. In order to meet Jesus’ call to ‘make disciples of all nations’ (Matt. 28.19), the Church needed a different approach to mission. Starting from the mid-twentieth century, it began to adapt, experimenting slowly at first.

Fresh expressions thinking developed from these early experimentations. As long ago as 1957, the Anglican bishop and missionary Stephen Neill, inspired by his experience in South India, recognized that traditional forms of church in the UK needed to change to meet the needs of current society. Speaking of larger cities where the church was on the fringes of the society and populations were becoming more mobile, he wrote:

It has become increasingly recognized that it is useless to talk about bringing these people back to the Church. They have moved away from the Church, or perhaps have never been seriously conscious of its existence. It is for the Church to follow them, and to make their acquaintance in the places where they live and work. (Neill, 1957, p. 65)

He went on to talk about experiments in some British cities around small groups and celebrating the Eucharist in homes.

In a few places church leaders began to see the need to form new congregations in places that, for various reasons, were not being served by the parish church. This took the form of establishing daughter churches or church plants, which may or may not have met in ecclesial buildings. One example close to my new-build area of St Crispin’s was St Francis Church. This was established in the wave of house-building in Duston in the 1960s. Several families moved from the parish church and were joined by new incomers. Some new church plants rented buildings and began to address cultural differences, reflected in the style and shape of church. The parish church in Chester-le-Street, County Durham, planted eight different congregations into different areas of the town between 1971 and 1984. They used the imagery of a strawberry plant sending out runners into new ground. Three of their church plants are still meeting today.

As a curate, my father planted a new congregation for families in a school on a council estate in Barking, East London, in 1972. After gaining permission to develop some simpler liturgy from the forward-thinking chairman of the liturgical commission, Ronald Jasper, they experimented with different forms of worship, including new technologies such as video clips, all informally delivered in jacket and clerical collar rather than robes. Since the intent was to communicate the faith simply and to grow disciples, they also ran their own sermon series rather than following the lectionary. About once a year he would preach a series on the Christian basics, but he also taught topically, on Christian attitudes to prayer, money or worship for example, and preached sequentially through some books of the Bible. To people from that estate, the location in a school hall formed less of a cultural barrier to access than the church building itself would have. This was all very innovative for the time – all this was taking place when the official liturgy of the Church of England was still the 1662 Prayer Book. He speaks of a congregation numbering from 60 to 100, made up mostly from young families living in nearby tower blocks who did not previously attend the parish worship. Although the PCC were largely supportive, there were the inevitable murmurings similar to those that often plague fresh expressions today, of whether the new venture would cost money and whether the families would ever come to ‘proper church’. At some point after he moved on, this new congregation was moved into the church to join with the morning parish worship in a new family communion format, which apparently gave the existing congregation a real boost but may have marked the end of innovation and contextualization.

While this sort of planting was rare in the 1970s, it increased throughout the early 1980s but there was still no recognized strategy. This changed with the founding of the church planters network under the leadership of Bob and Mary Hopkins, and soon afterwards the first church-planting conference was held at Holy Trinity, Brompton (HTB) in 1987. The pace of church planting would increase throughout the 1990s as church planting caught on, aided by the 1994 Church of England report, Breaking New Ground. Since then, HTB has pioneered the way in consistently releasing groups of people to revitalize closed or dying churches in London and, more recently, in other major cities.

The Church Army researcher George Lings has written a detailed account of this progression, so I won’t repeat it here. However, he notes that around this time, church planters began to realize that there were groups of people who would not be reached with a geographical mindset to mission (Lings, 2012, p. 169). Charting an increase in the number of new church plants – 234 between 1990 and 1998 – he notes that some of those were targeted not at a geographical area but at specific groups of people (most frequently youth). As a result there was variation in styles of worship, depending on the cultural tastes of the intended congregation, and the new ventures met at different times of the week, not necessarily on Sundays.

The Mission-Shaped Church report of 2004 marked a further watershed in church planting. Recognizing that things had moved on in the ten years since Breaking New Ground, it offered examples of these new contextual forms of church that had been emerging over the previous decade, and introduced methodologies and a little theology. Wanting to avoid terms already in use, such as ‘emerging’ and ‘emergent’, which had been claimed by similar movements in the USA, the writing committee settled on ‘fresh’. This reflected the promises made by new ministers in their ordination service to proclaim the faith ‘afresh in every generation’,4 and effectively introduced the term ‘fresh expressions of church’ (Croft, 2008a, pp. 4–5). The report recognized that fresh expressions attempt to do something different from and more contextual than inherited church models, yet do not neglect the tradition of the church. Crucially, Mission-Shaped Church gave permission to parishes to try new things, and it rapidly became the springboard for the Fresh Expressions movement. Regardless of what label is being used, be it emerging, fresh expressions, new contextual churches or new ecclesial communities, Mission-Shaped Church offers an ongoing mandate. The support offered by the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, helped move the language of mission and church planting away from its evangelical roots to be engaged with by those from all traditions. While there is still a long way to go before fresh expressions thinking is accepted by every part of the Church of England, the sheer range of traditions represented in the examples given on the Fresh Expressions website demonstrate that fresh expressions can work in charismatic, liberal, conservative and catholic traditions alike.

Definition

The Fresh Expressions organization defines fresh expressions as: ‘new forms of church that emerge within contemporary culture and engage primarily with those who don’t “go to church”’.5 There are several key elements in this definition. First, they are a form of church. This indicates that the shape they take may look radically different from how church has usually been experienced. There is no pattern or blueprint that dictates how all fresh expressions will look, although different categories will have significant things in common, which will be discussed in Chapter 2. However, they are to be a form of church, therefore some of the marks of what it is to be church will be evident in the fresh expression. The answer to what these marks may be is not a straightforward one and different approaches will be discussed throughout this book.

Second, they are expected to ‘emerge within contemporary culture’, recognizing that working patterns, social interactions, life priorities have been in a rapid state of flux during postmodernity. Due to changing work and leisure patterns, Sunday mornings can no longer automatically be considered the best time to have a church service. When I was young (in the 1980s), there was little to do on a Sunday besides playing with friends or spending time with family. Now there are many choices of leisure and consumer activities, not to mention the increase in the number of people working in shifts. John Drane describes the current age as one in which – in the West – people are economically well off, with plenty of material possessions, yet more unsure of themselves, lacking confidence (Drane, 2008, pp. 2–28). Adulthood and its associate responsibilities are delayed as many enjoy an extended youth, taking opportunities to explore, find and define themselves. The social theorist Jacopo Bernardini rather harshly describes contemporary young adulthood as: ‘tend[ing] to childishness without pleasure, to indolence without innocence, dresses without formality, has sex without reproducing, works without discipline, plays without spontaneity, buys without a purpose, and lives without responsibility, wisdom or humility’ (Bernardini, 2014, p. 41).

Whether or not we accept Bernardini’s analysis, without doubt society has changed dramatically from the days when inherited church traditions and practices were considered a foundation of British weekly life. The culture gap between church practices and general society has grown. Society is simply more fragmented and unpredictable. Making value judgement...

Table of contents

• Out of Nothing
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Where do we start?
• 2 Can a single-demographic church work?
• 3 What makes a church?
• 4 Where do we start?
• 5 A cross-shaped church
• 6 Out of nothing
• 7 What is success?
• Bibliography
• Index of Names and Subjects