Fresh!

An Introduction to Fresh Expressions of Church and Pioneer Ministry

David Goodhew

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780334043874
• eBook ISBN: 9780334048787
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Cristianesimo

Fresh! offers a strong rationale for fresh expressions and pioneer ministries rooted in scripture and in the breath of the Christian tradition. This is tested against the realities of contemporary British culture and critiques of the notion of Fresh Expressions. It offers practical guidance for starting and sustaining such ministries in the long term. It provides a survey of best practice within Fresh Expressions and pioneer ministry.Fresh! comes out of the mature reflection of church leaders and theologians who have been active in such ministries over a number of years, showing how such ministries are integral to the work of the church both now and over the long term.This is combined with valuable practical advice - the best kind of practical theology.

1. Fresh Expressions and Pioneer Ministry: Central to the Christian Tradition

I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures. (1 Cor. 15.3–4)

Introduction: why bother with fresh expressions and pioneer ministry?

It may be that you are asking: ‘Why bother with “fresh expressions” of the Christian Church? Why attempt to “pioneer” a new form of Christian ministry? Isn’t the key thing to do the existing forms well?’ Alternatively, it may be that you have been immersed in a new form of the Christian Church – and wonder why you should bother with more traditional forms, which you feel do not connect with the contemporary world.

Both these views have a point. In an age of fads and fashions, it’s easy for churches to seek what’s recent – ‘froth expressions of Church’ – as opposed to what’s holy. Some scholars have attacked the theological basis of fresh expressions and pioneer ministry – with some justification. Conversely, some – not all – current forms of Church do not connect with the surrounding population, and a handful are close to death. Ignoring this fact is not showing ‘faith’; it is being delusional. That raises the question of whether we need to go much further down the road towards fresh expressions and pioneer ministry than we have already. What then is to be done?

Making sense of fresh expressions and pioneer ministry requires a theological justification for these practices. This chapter provides that by offering three theological reasons why fresh expressions and pioneer ministry are central to the Christian faith:

They root us in the Apostolic Christianity of the New Testament, including the Christianity of Paul and the Corinthian church, to whom he wrote the words at the head of this chapter.

The Christian tradition, from the New Testament to the present, is about being fresh.

Because of who God is – the hallmark of God the Holy Trinity is that he is a God who pioneers fresh expressions of Church.

This chapter will unpack each of these statements of the Christian faith in turn. This leads into a further question: ‘What does the contemporary context – the experience of living in the twenty-first century – demand of the Christian Church?’ That will be discussed in Chapter 2.

Apostolic Christianity

The world of the early Church

In a post-Da Vinci Code world, it is widely assumed that the New Testament paints an inaccurate picture of historical reality. This is not a volume of New Testament studies, but we should emphasize here that we have good grounds to be sceptical of such scepticism! There is substantial and credible evidence to show the historical accuracy of the New Testament – as leading scholars such as Tom Wright and Richard Bauckham have shown.2 Fergus Miller, not a biblical scholar but one of the foremost living historians of the ancient world, writes: ‘The best introduction to this world is the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles.’3

The ancient world was multicultural, multi-ethnic and had many different faiths. It was a mix of rich and poor, urban and rural. There was neighbourliness, freedom and culture, but much cruelty and warfare too. There were all kinds of gods and goddesses and all manner of philosophies, and people were free to choose between them as long as the overarching power of the state was acknowledged. It was a world in which key individuals and groups wielded huge power in politics, the military, business and culture. We could be talking of any Western society today, but all this was just as true of cities like the Rome and Corinth to whom Paul wrote the letters that form part of the New Testament. Even Jerusalem and Galilee were multicultural in a number of ways – Pontius Pilate had to write the sign over the crucified Jesus in three languages (John 19.20). It’s easy to emphasize the differences between the world of the New Testament and our own, but we also need reminding of the many points of similarity.

The world of the New Testament was like ours in many ways, but harder and harsher overall. The narrow city streets were trodden by the wealthy in togas and by their slaves. Each lived in a world without modern medicine and with frequent epidemics, in which living beyond 40 was a notable achievement (Acts 4.22). Having children and being a young child in such a world was extremely risky and widows and orphans abounded. People were crammed together within the city walls in urban pressure-cookers that not infrequently exploded. The riot described in Acts 19 is recognized by historians as epitomizing the nature of life in an ancient city. No wonder people readily sought solace in a range of gods, goddesses and magical charms. The lid on the pressure-cooker was kept down by the Roman state and its army. The emperor in person might be far distant but he was forcefully present nevertheless – not least by often being declared ‘divine’ and therefore worthy of worship. But the lid was also kept in place by indirect means. From more benign forms such as the theatre, to the bloody safety-valve of gladiatorial shows, ancient society found a range of ways to live with its demons. This was a world in deep need of good news.

Conversion to the Jewish faith, while possible, was unusual. Moreover, stress on maintaining boundary markers between Jewish and Gentile worlds discouraged traffic between them. Thus excavations of the temple mount in Jerusalem unearthed a stone inscription warning gentiles that if they came into the part of the temple reserved for Jews, they would be executed. By contrast, the pagan empire – in which most of the post-resurrection New Testament takes place – was on one level rather tolerant. There was a wide range of gods, and when Romans came across a new deity, that ‘god’ was simply added to the rest. In Bath, archaeologists have unearthed a temple to Sulis-Minerva. Minerva was the Roman god, Sulis a local British one – the Romans displayed a rough-hewn ecumenism by splicing the two together.

Being ‘religious’ in the empire meant offering sacrifices to whichever gods you were either obliged to sacrifice to or felt an affiliation towards. You didn’t need to believe in them. The Roman poet Juvenal said of Roman religion, ‘These things not even boys believe’, yet participated enthusiastically in religious sacrifices.4 Belief in these gods did not usually entail following a particular code of behaviour. Following Mithras or Isis had no more of an ethical dimension than, say, following astrology today. Ancient paganism had no notion of religious conversion in the sense of an exclusive change of faith and ethics. But while paganism had a degree of tolerance, this had tight limits. Every god was equal, but some were more equal than others. Notably, citizens were expected to offer sacrifices to the ‘primary’ gods, especially the emperor. You might not believe in them, but you had to worship them. Many of the early Christian martyrs fell foul of this dictum. So Roman pluralism might appear tolerant but was in practice intolerant. It absorbed the gods and goddesses of other cultures, but on Rome’s terms.

With its wide range of nationalities and ideologies, the ideological context of New Testament faith has surprising resonances with our own context. They found themselves operating in this swirling mass of ideology, mostly with little wealth and little credibility. They faced many obstacles – laissez-faire paganism that couldn’t see the point of deep conversion, and a Judaism so protective of the God of the Old Testament that it was hard for others to draw close. In increasingly secular Britain we can identify more easily with the first Christians than has been possible for many generations. There are more than a few similarities between ancient paganism and contemporary relativism, which sees all forms of faith as equal and yet strictly adheres to a predetermined narrative.

In the ancient context, Christianity offered something very different. Unlike Judaism, it was passionately concerned to offer the good news of Jesus to everyone, Jew or gentile. Unlike paganism, the first Christians believed that accepting that good news meant an exclusive adherence to Jesus as kyrios, as Lord, and a growing conformity to the values of his kingdom – rather than seeing faith as an ideological supermarket in which you filled your trolley with whatever you chose (as long as you touched your forelock to Caesar). The early Christians made concerted efforts to encourage others to follow Christ. Acts shows Paul engaged for whole years at Corinth and Ephesus, arguing all day long with Jewish theologians (Acts 28.23), preaching through the night at Troas (Acts 20.11). He argued with passers-by in the marketplace of Athens, held extended debates in the lecture hall of Tyrannus in Ephesus and entered into extended dialogue with high-ranking officials like Felix and Agrippa.

The book of Acts presupposes the uniqueness of Christ and that encouraging people to follow Christ was both acceptable and essential practice within the Christian Church. Such presuppositions are problematic for many people in the contemporary West, which likes to see all faiths as leading equally to God. But rather than submit to the prevailing relativism, we need to test such a world view. Saying that all faiths lead to God sounds tolerant, but means boiling those faiths down to a common denominator, which has an uncanny habit of resembling modern Western thought. While speaking of the uniqueness of Christ can raise the accusation that the Church is being arrogant, that Church now operates in a post-Christendom context where, stripped of much of its power, it can speak humbly yet boldly of Christ.

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Why saying ‘all faiths are the same’ doesn’t work

Saying that ‘all faiths are the same’ is a common view and can sound tolerant. But there are serious problems with this notion.

• It confuses the need to respect all people with the idea that you have to treat all viewpoints as equally true. Christians recognize, following Genesis 1, that everyone is made in the image of God and worthy of respect. But that doesn’t mean each faith can be equally true. The different faiths differ markedly – so saying that they’re ‘really saying the same thing’ means ignoring what each is actually saying, which is hardly showing them respect.
• Attempting to find a ‘common denominator’ between the faiths is difficult because it usually ends up looking like a version of modern Western thought – not a common denominator at all, just bolstering a specific viewpoint.
• Ignoring different views means ignoring reality. In important areas of life we recognize that we disagree. No one would suggest that Greenpeace and climate-change sceptics can both be right. To claim that contradictory opinions are really the same is to evade the issue over which they differ. To live is to choose.
• Classical culture helps us here. Roman society worked on the polytheistic principle that ‘all faiths are legitimate – you just pick and choose’; only what was meant by this was that ‘all faiths are available – as long as everyone doffs their cap to the emperor’. So too in our own day: saying ‘all faiths are the same’ requires us to doff our cap to the norms that govern modern Western states. Relativism as a creed is not tenable.5

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Apostolic theology

The first Christians did two things: they bore witness to Jesus as Lord; and they formed a community. In theologian-speak, their Christology was an ecclesiology. ‘Christian communities are the sociological explication of God’s universal lordship in Jesus Christ.’6

The first Christians continually stressed that the historical Jesus was the lord, the kyrios. That had seven aspects:

1. Alongside the Old Testament they stressed that there was one God who had made the world and that the world was good. So while some parts of gentile culture were to be commended, others were to ...

Table of contents

• Fresh!
• Copyright information
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: This Book is a Boat
• 1. Fresh Expressions and Pioneer Ministry: Central to the Christian Tradition
• 2. Fresh Expressions and Pioneer Ministry: For Such a Time as This
• 3. Fresh Expressions: What They Are and What They Are Not
• 4. Best Practice in Fresh Expressions
• 5. God’s Call to Pioneer
• 6. How to Pioneer a Fresh Expression of Church
• 7. The Long Haul
• Members of the Research Group
• Conclusion. Fresh: A Call to be Apostolic, Catholic, Holy and One