plea from churchless christian
"Don't organise yet" shouts churchless christian :

"Already in NZ we are seeing the organic ness of this new move of God be formalised into systems and structures. I really encourage people to sign nothing and agree to nothing official at this time but instead commit to building strong relationships that make you truly submitted one to another."

posted by alexander @ 4:33 PM    1 comments

1 Comments:

I agree, and whilst on the subject it got me wondering if all the linking and sharing ideas via blogs etc is as healthy as we think. This low level organisation smacks of some quick fix stuff and may in the long run be counter productive in the real reimaging of church

By  Anonymous, at 7:32 PM  

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church planting initiative
Great to talk to Roger Chilvers yesterday who is Director for Church Planting Initiative, a partnership between







CPI exists in order to channel income from Brethren and other independent churches which are being closed down, into fresh church planting initiatives. So that as one church dies and goes into the ground, it's seed is used to plant and bring new growth somewhere else. Brilliant. They have seen around 10 new works start, some of which are already self supporting. Plus they are working alongside a number of existing churches who are considering planting.

posted by alexander @ 3:28 PM    0 comments

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organic multiplication





These guys are helping train and release 1000's of young leaders in Eastern Europe. Here's a great article written by one of their leaders, Dave Patty, on organic multiplication.

Here are a couple of quotes:

"Organic multipliers are more tribal story tellers than technocrats. They collect and repeat live examples of the principles they teach and make heroes of the guy who is actually doing it. They raise the gene pool by highlighting the healthy and making memorials to godly growth.

Organic multipliers are careful not to inoculate people to truth by teaching it in a way that does not require application.

Organic multipliers build delivery systems that reflect their core convictions. Community must be taught within community, discipleship must by taught by discipling the student, a love for Christ taught by people who are in love with Christ.

Organic multipliers recognize that methods, structures and programs are extremely important but must be kept in their place."

posted by alexander @ 9:49 AM    0 comments

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stories of emerging church from around the world
Lausanne paper 2: The realities of the changing expressions of the Church.

Here's the 2nd paper from the Lausanne conference. There are some great stories of very different settings. I doubt some of them would qualify for the title 'emerging church' in most Western settings, but seeing how most of them are experiencing phenomenal growth I thnk we better sit up and learn from them!

Here are the conclusions of the report, beginning with an echo of Roland Allen:

"We are confident that the Spirit of Truth continues to guide the people of God in these matters as well as in other areas of Christian life if they remain open to the Lordship of Christ.

So as we conclude this report on our study and reflection, we wish to bring this message to the churches round the world:

The Holy Spirit is leading the Body of Christ into many new and creative works resulting in expansion and fresh expression of church today. Furthermore, engaging new generations, unreached peoples, and rapidly changing cultures with the gospel necessitates new expressions that are both contextually relevant and biblically counter-cultural.

Therefore,

• We call established churches and mission movements to acknowledge, understand, support and bless creative expressions of the church that are missionally motivated.

• We call emerging church movements to value the experience, history and theology of established churches and seek expressions of unity as well as diversity in the Body of Christ.

• We call established as well as emerging churches to engage in the ongoing task of contextualising of their ministries in light of their continuously changing culture.

• We call for the launching of creatively contextualised church planting movements amongst the unreached people groups, emerging subcultures and minimally reached populations of the world."

posted by alexander @ 11:39 AM    0 comments

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what is a missional congregation?




Today I want to flag up the first of 2 interesting papers from the last Lausanne Forum for world evangelisation. This one is about becoming a missional congregation. Here are a few quotes followed by a link to the whole paper. If you go to the paper you can skip the first section which is just a bit of background to the forum etc.

"It is our deep conviction that congregations both in the West and in the Two-Thirds Worlds must make the transition to become “missional congregations”. Just what is a missional congregation? Missional congregations are those communities of Christ-followers who see the church as the people of God who are sent on a mission. To a large extent their identity is rooted in what they do apart from a church service or a church building. They cease to yield to the Christendom assumptions that the surrounding culture will naturally want to come to church, or that coming to church is the goal of all mission. They no longer see cultures in terms of Christian and non-Christian. Instead all cultures, be it the historic West, former colonies of the West, or countries with little Western contact are all equal candidates for mission involvement. These Christ-followers seek to embody the way of Christ within their particular surrounding cultures and not necessarily within the four walls of a church building or service."

"It seems safer to remain in our congregations and hope people will come to us. Maybe the safest place for the church is to be where Jesus is."

Here are some other areas covered in the paper:

"2.10 Missional congregations create holistic structures
2.11 Missional congregations structure for a lay-leadership orientation and broad
delegated authority
2.12 Missional congregations structure for worship, community and mission
2.13 Missional congregations structure for clan, synagogue and temple
2.14 Missional congregations structure for come and go
2.15 Every member can serve in mission
2.16 Missional congregations reflect the priesthood of all believers
2.17 Missional congregations create multiple options for maximum involvement
2.18 Missional congregations train their members as missionaries
2.19 Members are trained to be disciples
2.20 Leadership for missional congregations
2.21 Missional leadership flows out of a new understanding of priesthood of all believers"

Becoming a missional congregation in the 21st century

posted by alexander @ 10:48 AM    0 comments

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AoG church planting towards a cpm
Met with AoG Church Planting Director, Tim Robertson yesterday. Great to catch up and hear how things are going amongst the AoG. Not only are they working through a significant transformational process with many of their existing congregations to bring mission to the heart of their lives but have also recently launched an intiative called X-pansion aimed at their larger congregations. The idea is to inspire and help these congregations become resourcing centres for fresh church planting initiatives in whatever form these take. Their long term desire is to see a church planting movement triggered by spontaneous reproduction. The challenge is whether these leaders are willing to take some risks!



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emergingchurch.info day
Yesterday was spent in Birmingham at St Martins Church in the Bullring. Surrounded by some amazing architecture; the gods of 'shop' and christendom side by side.

I joined a group of around 30 to offer some feedback on the emergingchurch.info web site
.

Hosted by Chris Stoddard from the Reaching the Unchurched Network we heard from Adrian who is the designer and main editor of the site which has proved phenomenally successful with over 250,000 hits per month. Given its success they need to ensure that any developments on the site are going in the right direction, hence the day.

We then heard some real live stories from 3 very different missional works in Birmingham. Firstly Geoff from B1, then The Sanctuary, led by Pal Singh and finally Richard Sudworth who blogs here. It was very good to hear all of them sharing openly and honestly about the failures and struggles of pioneering in this new territory. We are presently, and probably for the forseeable future, in a transitionary period. This is not a time to set up 'successful' models which answer peoples immediate question - 'how do we do this emerging church thing?' It is rather a time to ask what is happening and why? Part of that process involves lots of courageous exploration and experimentation, which by nature entails more failures than successes. We need to allow room for this brave experimentation and for the failures along the way because in the end we will all benefit from the lessons learnt.

It was good to meet up with a variety of people currently planning or actually doing pioneering work in different parts of the country. I came away with a similar feeling I have had on previous 'emerging church' events: a lot of this 'emerging church' stuff is important, fascinating and helpful, however I have a gut feeling that something fundamental is being completely missed by a lot of these guys. I suppose one of the questions I want to ask at these events is 'how much of this stuff is reproducible?' Why? Because if we are ever going to see something akin to a movement generated on a national basis then however church is being expressed will have to be easily reproduced. I wonder whether a lot of these EC expressions are in truth still mimicking the essential structures of the existing church?

posted by alexander @ 1:41 PM    3 comments

3 Comments:

Hello, it was nice to meet you in Birmingham. It was an interesting day, I must admit I wasn't entirely sure why I was there, but I was glad I went.

I'm interested that you felt something missing from all this emerging church talk, would you be able to elaborate on that further? I think it might be important.

By  lou, at 2:11 PM  

Hi, likewise. Glad you found your way here. In answer to your question: I was hinting at it in the questions I posed after that. It seems to me that most EC expressions have quite a narrow missional focus, they concentrate (& do it extremely well) on being missional culturally, usually in a very niche way, which again is fine. But they don't have anything beyond that. There's nothing in their thinking or ecclesiology which might flow further and embrace the nation as a whole. They are still fundamentally focused on trying to build a "successful" stand alone work in one place, rather than something with a total outflowing dynamic. Difficult to explain in 1 para! Try http://www.simplechurch.co.uk/NWOBC5.htm in the meantime!
BTW like your sites, you're a good designer, where did you learn?

By  alexander, at 2:42 PM  

Thanks, that's very useful.

As part of my degree I looked at the emerging church discussion and at some diferent models of church. I found the study really interesting and helpful but I also felt that there was something missing. I think I'm going to blog on this really soon because I think it needs more than a paragraph to get my thoughts sorted out, but it is partly to do with emerging churches being limited in scope.

I'm glad you liked my sites, I trained as a programmer and was quite happy just working on the backends of websites until I was asked to try out designing a couple of front-ends for projects, and I just picked up the design side of things as I went along.

By  lou, at 7:44 AM  

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organic church round table with Stuart Murray-Williams

Hit this image to find out more about & book for this roundtable event next month being organised by the guys at organicchurch.net

From what I understand, along with input from Stuart Murray-Williams there will be plenty of conversation. If you can make Northampton it'll be well worth it.

posted by alexander @ 2:56 PM    0 comments

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20,000 'Neo-Apostolics'
While researching his soon to be published book 'Apostolic Genius', Alan Hirsch, author of 'The Shaping of Things to Come' "stumbled upon some extremely notable, even astonishing, discoveries by important observers of the global Christian scene." Already in 2001, Professor David B. Barrett and Todd M. Johnson mentioned that there were already 111 million Christians without a traditional local church. Barrett highlights particularly the development of the so-called 'Neo-Apostolic' networks and movements, of which there are already over 20,000 around the world, numbering around 394 million Christians. According to Barrett, these Christians reject historical denominationalism and all restrictive central authority, and attempt to lead a life of following Jesus, seeking a more effective missionary lifestyle. They are the fastest-growing Christian movements in the world. Barrett estimates that by the year 2025, these movements will have around 581 million members, 120 million more than all Protestant movements together. Hirsch, who has invited all of Australia's missionary movements to a conference in Victoria (Forge National Summit, 1-3 July 2005), confirms the trend from his own experience, and believes that these new Christian movements "are simply under the radar of traditional Christianity", at least as long as it holds on to the classical Constantine church structure (pastor + building + programme = church).
Source: Alan Hirsch (www.forge.org.au), via The Friday Fax (www.bufton.net/fridayfax)

posted by alexander @ 10:20 AM    0 comments

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3 new churches being birthed
Here's an example of a conversation which is becoming an increasingly frequent experience for me:

Yesterday afternoon I received a call from a University Lecturer (and church planter) in Sheffield. A mutual friend had suggested he contact me on hearing his recent story and area of interest. Through his work on a city-wide (web based) prayer network over the past months the caller had begun to discover more and more small gatherings of believers in the City and beyond who for a variety of reasons had disconnected from the established church and were seeking to do church in fresh and different ways. As a result of his investigations three of these groups have asked him to help them in their journey down this new road. The three groups are all very different and will probably express church quite differently. I hope that we will be able to report further on how this actually happens and what common features, if any, emerge.

If you have a similar story then we would really like to hear from you so drop us a line.

posted by alexander @ 2:26 PM    0 comments

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training for the future shape of church
Alongside of the main church planting research project I have also been commissioned to do some research which involves mapping out all the leadership/training provision currently on offer for missional/pioneering leaders in the 'emerging church' scene (in the broadest sense!). Part of this will be to see what is currently on offer and then in conjunction with Michael Moynagh to make some projections of what training/leadership preparation may look like down the road.

So if you are involved with an organisation or ministry who is currently providing this sort of training - I need to ask you some questions! Please drop me an email asap. OR if you know a man who does....

posted by alexander @ 10:07 PM    0 comments

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new downloads available
Check out the resources available on the downloads page.

posted by alexander @ 4:45 PM    0 comments

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Updated Links page
Check out some new links on the links page.

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theRivers, the story of an emerging home church network in Staines
Check out another new story told by Steve Holloway from Staines in Middlesex.

"theRivers is a response to a number of different needs; ranging from one person longing to explore meaningful, missional and relational community (or church); to there being far too many people dropping out of churches and nowhere near enough wanting to belong to any.

Convinced that in general, people do not have an issue with Jesus or even the Gospel – but there is a credibility gap with the church as a whole – we took the opportunity to start with a clean sheet of paper."

posted by alexander @ 12:54 PM    0 comments

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colleen fleischman & a new way
Met yesterday with Stephen Rymer of New Way of being Church. I was primarily visiting their offices in order to track down some writings by a lady called Colleen Fleischmann. Based in S Wales this lady wrote a Thesis in 1996 on some of the (then) emerging ways of being church (I am reading it at present, and it is fascinating). I am particularly interested in her because apparently she gathered a substantial database of small, organic communities of christians all over the UK. If you have any further info on her and/or this potential databse PLEASE let me know!! ASAP.

Stephen & I had a long and very useful conversation. Once again I was surprised to discover large areas of overlap between "New Way's" DNA/values/experience and those of what I would identify as the emerging/new paradigm. A significant part of our conversation naturally then focused on the relationship between that emerging paradigm and the existing/inherited church. A lot of people are currently wrestling with this one.

Areas of commonality included:

• Nature of leadership
• Organic growth patterns
  
• Desire for real community & deep relationships
• Hunger for a 'real life' spirituality
• Applying the Bible to the reality of daily life
  

posted by alexander @ 10:38 AM    0 comments

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