It's an amazing thing to me, and really exciting, to look back 18 years, and see how far pioneer and emerging groups have come in that time. In early 1990 I was one of half a dozen people who started a group in South London - not knowing really what we were doing except that there were Christians we knew who didn't want to abandon their faith, but really didn't connect any more with traditional church activities or language. We tried to reinvent the form while staying true to the theological and liturgical threads of the tradition. As far as we knew, we were - with an appropriate mix of courage and caution - just making it up as we went along. We stayed connected in various ways to the traditional church (some of us never left the trad. Church as such, in fact) but also gave ourselves plenty of freedom to try new things. Some of them worked so well the trad. Church eventually wanted us to teach them how to do it. Some of them were not so good and we quietly abandoned them.
Anyway, eighteen years later and the Anglican and Methodist Churches have taken more steps forward in their embracing of all this alternative/emerging stuff, and Fresh Expressions is now offering training courses for people involved at all levels. I'll be teaching on the Cambridgeshire course, and looking forward not only to the course, but to thinking about how new ways of Church demand new ways of approaching teaching and training (what a travesty it would be if we started giving lectures and assessments on this now...! ). I am dreaming about how to give away wisdom, knowledge and experience in a way that opens up the way for people, rather than boxing them into an "approved" way of doing it.
Dozens of others are involved, and the courses are springing up all over the country. Go here for more.
