Being Church, Doing Life

Creating gospel communities where life happens

Michael Moynagh

• Publisher: Monarch Books
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780857214942
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Christians worldwide are learning new ways to connect their faith to everyday life. Gospel communities are popping up everywhere; in cafes, gyms, tattoo parlours, laundromats. This movement, called Fresh Expressions, is attracting thousands and growing rapidly. With over 120 real-life examples, Michael Moynagh describes easy ways for ordinary Christians to embrace this highly effective approach to local mission. Anyone can do it!

PART ONE

Why communities in life?

Chapter 1

COMMUNITIES IN LIFE

In Ajax, a Toronto suburb, Ryan Sim is working with others on “ Redeem the Commute”, a mobile app and website for nearby commuters.

Busy young professionals often see the commute as wasted time. To help them redeem this time and make positive changes, Ryan plans to deliver good-quality content to their smartphones, starting with marriage and parenting courses. A Christian Basics course will introduce the Redeemer himself, followed by daily discipleship content for those walking with Jesus.

The aim is not to start a virtual church, but to bring young professionals together in a dispersed form of cell church. Participants who start a course on their own will be encouraged to join a discussion group, meeting weekly in places such as trains, buses, workplaces, and homes.

Churchgoers in the area will seed these new groups, which will be organic and self-organizing, centred on the gospel, and supported with coaching, oversight and regular visits from staff.¹

This may be light years from your experience of outreach and church. But it is the tip of an iceberg, one example among thousands of how Christians are increasingly sowing the gospel in innovative ways.

A new trend

To ignore what these Christians are doing would be to overlook signs of a new mega trend. It would be to bat away the Spirit’s call for individuals and the local church to reach out through witnessing communities in daily life. It would play down how ordinary Christians can take the lead.

Across the world

Hold your breath! A remarkable transformation is sweeping across the church. In North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere, new expressions of Christian community are beginning to emerge.

In extraordinary research, Dr George Lings of the Church Army Research Unit has examined in detail ten Church of England dioceses. “Fresh expressions of church” – new types of Christian community – comprise as many as 15 per cent of the dioceses’ churches and 10 per cent of their average weekly attendance. According to their leaders, roughly 25 per cent of those who come are Christians, 35 per cent are once-churched (people who had stopped going), and an amazing 40 per cent are never-churched. The numbers involved add the equivalent of one further average-sized diocese.²

Even more astonishing has been the pace of growth. The great majority of these churches have come to birth within just the last ten years.

Lings’ research merely scratches the surface. The Methodists and other UK denominations have also seen an upsurge of these new communities. In addition there are Christians who are starting witnessing communities without using the fresh expressions label, such as North Americans who identify with Forge International, 3DM or Church Multiplication Associates, founded by Neil Cole.

Cole, for instance, believes that church should happen where life happens. The movement of which he is part was launched in 2002. It planted ten churches in its first year and over 100 in the fourth, and has multiplied to thousands of churches “where life happens” today.³

On top of these are people who are starting communities without identifying with a denomination or network, such as the young couple who said to me, “We seem to be doing what you describe. We live in a poor neighbourhood, we’ve got to know some of the local teenagers, they now meet in our sitting room, and a kind of church is beginning to happen.”

These new types of community are not confined to the “global North”. They are beginning to emerge in Barbados, Chile, South Africa, and elsewhere. Through them, individuals are finding faith.

One man was brought by his girlfriend’s grandma to help out on one of the craft tables in an all-age example of these communities. He had no church background and was quite nonplussed by Christianity when he first came. He was not interested in church but was willing to get involved in this new expression of Christian community.

He came along again and wanted to help. The leaders then started the Journeys course and he decided to attend. “He was a bit into space life and belief in other things out there… not sure what, but couldn’t grasp Christianity. He is now wanting baptism.”⁴

We are at the frontier, it seems, of a new wave of Christian outreach and impact.

From church plants to intentional communities

This new work of the Spirit builds on a long tradition of church planting. In the global North, one planting model was for a local church to reach out for the kingdom by sending a sizable team to an area with little church presence.

The team made contact with people who were in limbo between churches or who used to attend church and were open to going again. (Reaching lapsed churchgoers was not always the intention, but was often the result.) When enough relationships had been built, a new congregation was launched based on these contacts.

Many of these plants were replicas of successful churches or upgrades of existing church for Christians who were dissatisfied with the offerings elsewhere. Yet, as populations in the global North have pulled away from the Christian faith, clones of existing church have had – with some exceptions – a diminishing impact on people outside.

Partly in response to the limitations of traditional church plants, recent years have seen the mushrooming of intentional Christian communities. These communities look rather different from conventional church. They are church, but not as we have known it. They serve people whom traditional churches and church plants do not reach.

Some are connected to an existing church. They work with homeless people, serve the residents of an apartment block, enable the “late middle-aged” to get to know each other, teach English as a second language, or equip young people for work. In the process, openings are created for individuals to explore Jesus.

St Paul’s, Shadwell, in the East End of London, is a church plant from Holy Trinity, Brompton. Members of the congregation have now formed several new communities to serve demographic groups or geographical areas unreached by the new church.

One group has run a money management course for the local Bangladeshi population; another has facilitated a parenting support group, while a third has organized events on contemporary issues for young adults in a pub.

The church’s leaders pray that some of these communities will grow and spawn further communities, which will multiply again. They seek to “plant pregnant churches”.

Other communities are coming to birth beyond the orbit of the local church.

A young Brazilian man described his passion for surfing. The tussle between beach and church was a no-brainer. The beach won! But one day, as the evening was drawing in, one of his friends invited him to a group on the edge of the beach. It was a surfers’ church, complete with surfboard as altar. He now attends regularly.

There are over 300 such churches in Brazil, and an international network. In 2013 one of the Brazilian churches launched an offshoot in Hawaii.

Accidental communities

Alongside these intentional communities is a further development – communities that have sprung up almost accidentally, without a great deal of forethought. These involve Christians who never planned to lead a gospel community in ordinary life but ended up doing precisely that.

Hot Chocolate, for instance, started in 2001, when a small group of volunteers went out to meet some of the young people in the heart of Dundee, Scotland. That was their only agenda. The volunteers took hot chocolate with them and the young people started calling the encounters “Hot Chocolate”. The name stuck.

Within a few months, some significant relationships had developed. The volunteers began asking, “If you had a bit of space in the church building, what would you do with it?” The young people replied that they wanted rehearsal space and somewhere they could crash out and be themselves.

So it was that some thrash metal bands came to rehearse in the sanctuary of the church, and a space that the young people could call “home” was created within the building. Everyday life invaded the church.

Hot Chocolate has grown organically and sees itself as a community. It now has six paid staff (two full-time) and over a year works with about 300 young people, many from difficult backgrounds.

A number have found faith, often as they join the team and experience Christianity more explicitly. One young person started coming when he was thirteen or fourteen, found Jesus, and became a key volunteer.

Team members tend to describe their “church” as gathering round the dinner table three times a week. Worship, which includes a devotion, has evolved in response to the young people and the Spirit’s promptings.

“In a way,” says team member Charis Robertson, “everything that has happened so far in the way of church community is completely accidental.”⁵

These intentional and “accidental” communities are what I call “witnessing communities”. As I said in the Introduction, three words sum them up:

• Community. Christians prayerfully band together in small and sometimes larger groups.

• Visibility. These communities are present in everyday life, helping to make the kingdom tangible to ordinary people.

• Activity. They go beyond prayer support for their members. As groups, they launch initiatives to serve and share the gospel with others nearby.

Community

Witnessing communities have their roots in Scripture. God does not expect individuals to make a difference for him on their own. He wants them to work in teams. In Genesis 1 and 2, the creation mandate is given to the man and the woman together.

Adam and Eve were placed in a beautiful garden. They were to extend its boundaries till paradise stretched over the whole planet (Genesis 1:26). They were to do this as a team. “It is not good for the man to be alone,” God said. “I will make a helper suitable for him” (Genesis 2:18).

When things went wrong, God did not adopt an individualistic approach to salvation. He called Abraham and Sarah’s household and turned it into a nation. Through this community, God would bring salvation to the world.

The first thing Jesus did in his public ministry was to assemble a community of disciples. When he taught them how to “do mission”, he sent them out not as individuals but in pairs. Karl Barth, the great...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction – Wanting to make a difference
• Part 1 – Why communities in life?
• Part 2 – Tools for developing witnessing communities
• Part 3 – Tools for the wider church
• Appendix: How to evaluate progress
• Bibliography