maggi dawn

Training for Fresh expressions and pioneer ministry

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.

Beyond in Hove

Beyond starts up in Hove later this month. Beyond is another "church" that breaks the traditional boundaries, it's being started up by some great people, so if you are down in the Brighton/Hove area, check it out.
27th April 7pm 
Old Market Theatre, Upper Market Street, Hove, BN3 1AS

emerging wider

One of the things I've been musing on of late is what the whole vibe of "emerging" means if you take a step back and allow for the fact that what is happening in some of the exciting and buzzy little urban-monastic churches in pubs or living rooms is also happening in the larger context of Church. I don't agree with some of the more radical proponents of emerging that "church is dead" - it shows a profound lack of grip on Church history, say nothing of a touch of arrogance, to suggest that anything we Emergers are doing is really so "new" that is ordained to be the replacement for Church as we knew it. Sure, it has an element of "new" about it, in the sense that our culture and our generation is new. But in truth there is nothing new under the sun, as someone said more than 2,000 years back. And the Church has a history, like it or not.

The really interesting questions that surround the Emerging conversation have less to do with the how and why of a deliberate strategy to re-create the shape of Church, and more to do with how the concerns of Emerging are, in fact, emerging in different settings all over the place - messily, imperfectly and in unexpected places - which, in fact, is more faithful to the concept of emergence.  For many Emergers, the least expected place of all to find an emerging congregation would be slap in the middle of a suburban Parish church. But that's what is going on in quite a lot of places. Like this one, for instance.

Edit: "E~mergent kiwi" Steve Taylor, whose work I have long been interested in, blogs from another such congregation, this time in New Zealand, and picks up the conversation here. 

St Lukes Hollingway in London is one; Big Bulky Anglican has plenty to say on the subject; there are lots and lots of examples of this "emerging" phenomenon occurring in traditional-shaped settings (including my own Chapel). I guess they get less attention because they are not so noticeable. But make no mistake, the Church as we know it is far from dead - unless, as Bob C notes in the comments below, you allow for those recurring degrees of death that are part of the process towards resurrection.