Sounds like a seriously boring topic...? Yesterday at Wycliffe I was in a focus day on Fresh Expressions of church led by a nice man called Steve Croft who is in charge of Fresh Expressions. If you haven't heard of this, the idea is basically about trying to start churches which meet people where they are rather than simply doing stuff in order to get people to come along to an existing church on a Sunday morning. So, to use some examples from yesterday, a parent and toddler church instead of a parent and toddler group to get people to come along on Sunday morning. Or a skater church for young people. Or a coffee shop church - and so on. Lots more info on the website.
I guess I tend to assume that this is a Good Thing because I became a Christian in a church/congregation like this. It's called Eternity (website being reformatted at the moment) and is a plant of an Anglican church in Warfield, near Bracknell. The pragmatic side of me says: this is a way to get more people to become Christians so we should do it.
But there was quite a bit of discussion in the focus day on this question. A number seemed quite concerned that this would undermine Anglican identity since these new kinds of church bore little relation to the way 'we' tend to do things: don't necessarily worship on Sundays, don't use standard liturgy, don't operate within a parish and so on. Others were concerned about the 'homogenous' principle, i.e. the churches grow best when they are trying to reach a particular group of people rather than build a community for all and sundry.
I have some sympathy for these concerns. The church is supposed to be a place where people come together from every age, nation, class, language and so on. It is meant to reconcile enemies and unite people who would otherwise have nothing in common. And to be Anglican it needs to have some kind of continuity with and relationship to other Anglican churches.
But at the same time I guess I want to defend the idea of Fresh Expressions for a number of reasons. The first thing that occurs to me is that actually most 'normal' churches actually operate on a homogenous principle anyway - they just don't realise it! So a parish church which is trying to reach the parish around it is in fact already trying to reach a group of people who already have something in common - namely, that they live in the same place. And almost invariably, these churches do not in fact bring people together from all manner of background - they tend to represent people of similar ages, class, nationality and so on (obviously there are exceptions).
The day reminded me of something else: being Anglican is not about sharing the same liturgy. You often hear it said, "The great thing about the Anglican church used to be that you could go anywhere in the country (or even anywhere in the world) and everyone would be using the same readings and the same liturgy" and so on. Anglicanism was meant to be somehow uniform.
I think that's terrible! It rejects the whole insight of the missionary movement that Christian faith needs to be contextualised and expressed in a relevant way to people - otherwise you are absolutising and exporting a strand of English culture (from several centuries ago!), not the gospel. And in fact, all mission is cross-cultural to at least some extent (especially in today's post-Christian/Christendom situation).
But most importantly, this insight is right at the heart of what it is to be Anglican. That is, the idea of contextualising the gospel is not some faddish contemporary novelty. It is written into the heart of the theological heritage of Anglicanism, it is what being Anglican is all about. The Book of Common Prayer was an attempt to express the gospel in a relevant way for sixteenth and seventeenth century England. Public worship was no longer to be conducted in Latin but in the language everyone spoke. It was never expected that this liturgy itself would become the eternal touchstone of authentic Anglican expression: the key was that Christian worship should be comprehensible to those who attended it.
My conclusion is therefore obvious: Fresh Expressions are trying to do the same thing today. It is important that they operate with the accountability and support of the wider Anglican church - and ultimately, they should play their part within the church more widely as we would expect any church to do: contributing financially to the diocese where appropriate, meeting with other churches for worship and fellowship, raising up and sending out missionary leaders. But these expressions of being part of the wider church are not dependent on Sunday morning, operating within a geographical parish, and using the same liturgy as everyone else!
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