Church for Every Context. Michael Moynagh

Christian community to find a place within the inherited church – and increasingly change it. A new attractor would then emerge, combining novel and existing forms of church in fruitful relationship.

      Stabilization involves

       adapting to the tradition, including the denomination;

       adapting to the context of the new church.

      Conclusion

      New contextual churches are emerging in Britain through processes of disequilibrium, amplification, self-organization and stabilization. Already they are having a substantial influence on ecclesial life, not only in this country but in other parts of the world. Do they represent the early stages in the birth of a new attractor, the mixed-economy church?

      There are positive signs. The idea of fresh expressions, even if the term is not used, is taking root in denominations beyond those officially involved in the Fresh Expressions initiative – from the Assemblies of God to the Baptist Church – and overseas (for example Robinson and Brighton, 2009). Denominations associated with Fresh Expressions have steadily deepened their commitment. By 2009 19 out of 43 Church of England dioceses reported that they had created a strategy for encouraging fresh expressions of church and church planting (A Mixed Economy for Mission, 3.2).

      A telling sign is how church organizations and networks are responding increasingly to the fresh expressions agenda, whether it is publishers, mission agencies or missional networks. Cell UK, for example, is now working in the spirit of ‘4 life’ to underline its focus on encouraging missional communities in the context of everyday life.

The number of fresh expressions continues to multiply. In 2010, the Methodist Church counted 941 fresh expressions, associated with 723 churches out of a total of 5,162 – 14 per cent (Are We Yet Alive? 2011, p. 14). In 2011, the Church of England identified at least 1,000 parishes – 6 per cent of the total – with a fresh expression of church.15 In both cases the definition was wider than the ‘new contextual church’ one used here. Even so, the relatively rapid spread of the language suggests that, at the very least, the concept of fresh expressions is helping the inherited church to think in more missional terms.

An informed estimate reckons that 50 to 100 churches had or were starting mid-sized communities by 2011, with the number of such churches growing rapidly. If each church had five communities, a not unreasonable assumption, 250 to 500 mid-sized communities – serving people outside the church – would be involved.16 Many of these may not have been counted as fresh expressions in the Methodist and Church of England surveys.

      Despite this progress, a 2009 report to the Church of England’s General Synod could identify only three dioceses (out of 43) whose strategies for fresh expressions really stood out. ‘Even in these dioceses there is still a long way to go before it could be said that a mixed economy church has been established as irreversible and normative . . .’ The majority of lay people were unaware or had only a very partial understanding of the mixed economy (A Mixed Economy for Mission 2009, 4.9, 4.28).

      Anecdotal evidence and some limited research (for example, Stone, 2010) suggest that most fresh expressions are small, have a significant proportion of people who already go to church, and where they are reaching out are connecting with people on the fringe of church rather than the growing numbers of never-churched. There are encouraging exceptions, but the overall picture is of the UK church being still at the beginnings of a journey to fresh expressions. Despite growing momentum, the vehicle could yet stall.

      Further reading

      Drane, John and Olive Fleming Drane, Reformed, Reforming, Emerging and Experimenting, Report for the Church of Scotland, 2010.

      Mission-shaped Church: Church Planting and Fresh Expressions of Church in a Changing Context, London: Church House Publishing, 2004.

      Wheatley, Margaret J., Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World, 3rd edition, San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2006.

      Questions for discussion

       Much of this chapter has been about official support for new contextual churches. What should individuals and churches do when this support is not present? How far does the spread of new contextual churches depend on official support?

       Do you agree that the mixed economy in Britain could yet stall? If so, what would avoid this?

       What are the lessons from Britain’s experience? If you were advising your network or denomination, what strategy would you suggest for multiplying contextual churches?

1 What counts as a ‘fresh expression of church’ is contested. The term certainly includes what I am calling ‘new contextual church’, but – as used in this chapter – fresh expressions also includes initiatives that would not strictly fit my definition.

2 For an accessible introduction, see Johnson (2002) and Wheatley (2006).

3 This is the strong version, which holds that a system can have qualities not directly traceable to its components but only to how they interact. New qualities are irreducible to the system’s constituent parts, so that in principle the system is unpredictable. A weak version of emergence holds that new properties arising in a system have characteristics that derive from existing elements in the system, as well as from the interactions between these elements. What emerges is predictable in principle because the new properties have some of their origins in the characteristics of the elements, but it is not predictable in practice.

4 Taking a different approach, Kester Brewin has argued that ‘the God who created evolution and dreamt up emergence’ has eschewed a purely top-down system of communication and chosen to ‘re-emerge’ within creation, bottom up, through Christ (Brewin, 2004, pp. 44–5). A fuller account than the one here might describe how the Spirit, acting on behalf of God’s coming reign, nudges creation toward the kingdom. If self-organization produces ever high levels of complexity, as theorists argue, the kingdom – to which creation is being drawn – can be seen as the ultimate level of complexity.

5 An alternative way of looking at the figures suggested that the percentage could be 4 per cent, still a sharp decline (Brierley, 2000b, p. 98).

6 Expressions: the dvd – 1: Stories of church for a changing culture, produced by Norman Ivison and available from www.freshexpressions.org.uk.

7 Theologically, this is interesting. The statement could be challenged if God is seen as a ‘stable system’, unchanging through and through, for this ‘stable’ God also innovated in bringing creation into being. On the other hand, if God is unchanging in his character but there is movement in his internal relationships – Fiddes likens them to a dance (2000a, pp. 72–81) – then the statement would be consistent with our understanding of