Out of Nothing: A Cross-Shaped Approach to Fresh Expressions

By Andrew Dunlop

The two key questions often levelled at fresh expressions are ‘What is Church?’ and ‘How on earth can a fresh expression be evaluated?’



In "Out of Nothing", Andrew Dunlop offers an account of his journey in starting a fresh expression, and along the way proposes an alternative theological foundation for evaluation - the Cross-Shaped approach. Dunlop proposes a theological foundation which goes to the heart of God's action in the world.



Both accessible and critically engaged, the book will provide an important resource for both pioneers and for those studying pioneer ministry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SCM Press
• Release date: Oct 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9780334056706

Book preview

Introduction

‘Throw your hat in the ring!’ came the words from my training vicar as I told him about the job opportunity in another diocese: Pioneer Minister, Northampton West. I was coming to the end of my third year as a curate in a large city-centre evangelical church in Plymouth. This church, with its prominent location and civic responsibilities, had given me an excellent start to my ministry experience. There were four services on a Sunday, each with a distinct style. The congregation was active and engaged, we had lots of links into the community and there was a steady stream of people coming to faith through the regular Christianity Explored courses that the church ran.

But over the course of my curacy I began to develop an interest in fresh expressions of church,¹ aware that there were areas and groups of people in the parish we were barely impacting. In my final year, alongside a group of lay people and a Methodist colleague, we began to explore what a fresh expression might look like in the Barbican area of the city. This was a small area, one of the oldest parts of Plymouth, which had historically been a focus of activity through the fish market. After the market closed it became an area focused on creative arts, with quality bars and restaurants that drew tourists. There was plenty of new-age spirituality on show but little Christian presence. So we met regularly to pray over the course of several months in an artisan chocolate café and shop, owned by a Christian from another congregation who had a desire to use her business for God. This was exciting as the possibility of new things arose. We had a small team, a place to work from and the idea of starting a discussion group, initially based around the film Chocolat.²

Then I spotted the job advert by accident as I was browsing through the website of the Fresh Expressions organization. I went for it, not expecting to get it, but three months later I found myself moving into a house on a new-build development on the edge of Northampton, with my wife, Sarah, baby son and cat. The role was to pioneer new forms of church among people living in new-build housing developments on the western side of Northampton. I had long had a desire to serve in an area in which I could be at the heart of building community among the unchurched, as this is where I felt my personality and gifts lay. The idea of working on a new build was opened up to me by Revd Penny Joyce, whom I had met during my theological training when she was pioneering on a large development in Witney, Oxfordshire. Her example was an inspiration and opened up a desire that was confirmed to me while on retreat before my priesting in 2008. This job appeared to check all the boxes, so I was very excited to be moving in August 2010.

At that time Northampton was home to about 200,000 people and there had been extensive building around the edges since the 1960s. Now, with the Labour government focused on home-building, Northampton had once again been earmarked as an area for extensive growth. On the western edge lay the former village of Duston, which had been home to a large industrial component factory until 2002. This village was subsumed into the urban area of Northampton as it grew post-war, and further building in the 1960s, 1980s and 2000s took the residential population beyond the boundaries of the old village. On the edge of the village was a large estate that had belonged to the former St Crispin’s psychiatric hospital, originally established as the Berrywood Asylum in the Victorian era. (The building was closed in 1995 and has lain derelict ever since.) These areas of development lay just three minutes’ drive from the M1, from which London, Nottingham, Birmingham, Oxford, Cambridge and many other places could be reached in under an hour, making it an attractive location for commuters. Northampton itself had good employment prospects, with some major banks and technology firms based on business parks on the outskirts of the town, and its central location making it an attractive base for warehousing and logistics.

Three areas in the pioneer role description were earmarked for thinking about. St Crispin’s was the area we were living in, so this was the obvious one in which to begin. The new-build development sat in the grounds of the former hospital, dominated by the latter’s derelict buildings. The intention was that these buildings would be converted into luxury apartments with underground parking, a community hall and plenty of outside space. When we arrived, only two of the old hospital blocks had been renovated, a situation that remained the same throughout my time there. The hospital’s cricket ground and bowling green had been preserved and were now owned and used by local clubs. The derelict building was surrounded by white builders’ hoarding and dominated the centre of the estate. Around the hospital were houses and flats built in a more recognizable new-build style, ranging from one- and two-bedroom apartments to five-bedroom detached houses. Also on the development was a large self-contained private retirement village (which was very difficult to get access to), a post box, a small play park for under-fives, and the local Church of England primary school, which had moved from Duston village to brand-new premises, doubling in size in the process. The first shops arrived several months after we did (but six years after the first residents moved in), and included a café, grocery store, beauty salon and toyshop. There were also plans for playing fields and a community centre with changing facilities. The café and toyshop would become important to our pioneering activities. Due to being situated in previous cultivated grounds, St Crispin’s had something of a countryside feel to it. The large established trees that had been kept since the days of the hospital gave the development a settled feel, of having been around a lot longer than it actually had. The houses were relatively well spaced apart. There was an area of woodland in the centre of the estate and you didn’t have to walk far to get to fields that were still being farmed.

The second area, separated from St Crispin’s by one of the major roads into Northampton from the M1, was built in a completely different style. Upton, which had won awards for its design, contained a number of houses built in a very eco-friendly style. Although the range of the size of the houses was roughly the same as in St Crispin’s, there was little space between them, and many were terraced. In front of each house there were fewer gardens; behind each block of housing was a large parking area. While Upton did have a community centre, opened around the time we arrived, other community facilities, such as a shop, were a long time coming. There was also a play park (suitable for over-fives), and an area of country park on the edge of the estate.

When we arrived, development in both St Crispin’s and Upton had stalled due to financial pressures from the global recession, so although the road structures were in place, much of Upton in particular was open ground. The major road dividing the two estates meant that they were quite separate entities and did not operate as a single community.

In both estates there were high numbers of families with young children. Most of the kids were primary-school age and below, which meant that we, with our six-month-old baby, had some major things in common. Many were also educated to degree level and were pursuing careers in management or business. These were aspirational people building their lives, careers and families. Owning a new-build house, moving up the ladder, was part of that. Most of the homes were privately owned or privately rented. Upton had a higher proportion of housing-association homes due to the developers of St Crispin managing to satisfy the government quota for these by building the retirement village (though in fact this was very different from social housing).

The third area of investigation for fresh expressions was Sixfields leisure park. This was home to several leisure-based businesses, such as a cinema complex, ten-pin bowling centre and gym, as well as many chain restaurants. It is also the location of Sixfields Stadium, home to Northampton Town FC, to whom I would serve as chaplain for two memorable seasons.

In practice I began by focusing on St Crispin’s, in part for pragmatic reasons: it is much easier to influence a community when you are resident in it. However, unknown to the diocese at the time of forming the job description, a Baptist pioneer minister had recently moved to live on the Upton development. It made sense, where we were doing similar things, to stick to the estate in which we were based, but we did manage to work together productively on a few projects during the course of my time there.

So these were the settings in which I was to pioneer. Even before arriving I had a loose idea of how I wanted to see the work develop. I expected anything that was created to be relationship-based and community-focused, with any activities arising from the relationships formed and the needs we were to encounter. Forming relationships in the community, something which fits my gifts and talents, was to be central.

This book will tell the story of pioneering in this setting, addressing the questions that arose during the process of developing Berrywood Church. The questions addressed in the first few chapters form the background for the overarching questions that shape this book: How might the validity, fruitfulness or success of a new ecclesial community be judged? What foundations or yardsticks are we to use? Pioneering ventures are often time-limited and have a specific set of outcomes or targets provided by the diocese or sponsoring organization. My project was no different. In this book I argue that not only can the notion of a cross-shaped church shape the form of church that develops, it can also inform questions of fruitfulness and success. This argument is played out in the final four chapters of the book.

Chapter 1 addresses some of the background to what I was doing in Northampton, engaging with some of the practical issues of starting out (such as building a team, naming a church and actively listening to the context), describing what we did at Berrywood. I also explore the development of the Fresh Expressions movement in the UK, which led to the writing of the influential Mission-Shaped Church report, which in turn fuelled the growth of contextual church-planting initiatives in the early twenty-first century. I offer some definitions of fresh expressions, unpacking what these mean for my context and describing the processes that are recommended in pioneering a new church.

In Chapter 2, noting that our fresh expression, like many others, attracted a fairly homogeneous group of people from similar backgrounds and in the same life-stage, I ask whether this is a legitimate place from which to start a new church. Can a church be homogeneous or should diversity be the aim? In doing so, I investigate the biblical basis for fresh expressions from descriptions of the early Church in the book of Acts.

Chapter 3 charts our progress towards creating a gathering for worship. From this experience I question what it is that makes a church ‘church’. What elements or practices need to be present? In unpacking this question, I engage with different understandings of church from various traditions.

At Berrywood Church our starting point was to focus on building community on the new-build development. Chapter 4 describes what we did to this end, and I analyse the implicit theology behind our actions. I also engage with other writers on fresh expressions, asking what theological concepts have been used as a foundation for thinking about these new forms of church, including Trinity, missio Dei, the kingdom of God, and the Holy Spirt. For each, I ask whether these are the best theological bases on which to build an understanding of church.

Chapter 5 begins my argument that our understanding of the church should be cross-shaped. The church needs to be first and foremost about Christ, understood through the incarnation, life, death, resurrection, ascension and return of Jesus Christ. Using a broad concept of atonement, I analyse how different approaches to atonement affect the mission and shape of the church. I conclude that as God reaches out to the world (understood through atonement), so the church, as the body of Christ, undertakes Christ’s atoning work in the world.

Building on this, I argue in Chapter 6 that the place of encounter with God is the best starting point to understand the work of the church in the world. God meets us, in Christ, out of nothing, at our places of nothingness; we bring nothing to the encounter. This place of encounter is a locus of atonement. I then suggest what God’s atonement in this place of encounter might look like in the church, thus creating a cross-shaped church. From this vision, one then finds a theological foundation by which the effectiveness of a fresh expression of church can be measured.

In the final chapter, I come back to the question of what is success in the light of the previous discussion, re-examining some of my initial expectations about the size to which Berrywood Church might grow. Returning to the cross-shaped approach, I give concrete examples of how God was at work in the place of encounter through the initiatives of Berrywood Church and suggest that this should be the starting point for both shaping and evaluating new ecclesial communities.

Notes

1 In this book I follow the convention of using lower case when referring to an instance of a fresh expression of church, upper case when referring to the Fresh Expressions organization or movement.

2 Dir. Lasse Hallström (Miramax, 2000).

1

Where do we start?

The months of anticipation came to an end as the removal van pulled away, leaving behind a mountain of unpacking. We had arrived in our new house in the middle of the St Crispin’s new-build development on the edge of Northampton. We were two adults, one baby and a cat, and we had a mandate to start church. We were eager to get going, throwing ourselves into building relationships with those who lived around us, but there were many questions buzzing around in our heads, the answers to many of them still unknown. What would our new church look like? Who would it be for? Would anyone actually join us? Where would we meet? What would we do when we gathered? How much of a vision should we set at the start? How will we get started? This was a blank sheet of paper, a fresh start for the Church in this community, so there were no set precedents or expectations. It struck me that the way to proceed was to take one step at a time, not getting too far ahead of ourselves. The first step was surely to build relationships with the people around us.

But before I discuss how we started and what we did, there is a more pressing question: Why are new forms of church needed? Surely the local parish church would be able to serve the needs of all the residents in their parish? In this chapter I will give a brief background to fresh expressions of church, define what they are and introduce some theory about how pioneering may take place. I then discuss the early questions we asked, the activities we began and the way we engaged with our neighbours.

What are fresh expressions and why are they needed?

From the middle of the last century there has been increasing recognition that some areas, cultures, subcultures or people-groups were not being reached by traditional forms of church. This can be seen through several factors. Official statistics show that attendance in Anglican churches in England and Wales has been in decline since the 1930s, with particularly steep decline in the last decade of the twentieth century, despite an overall increase in UK population in this time.¹ In 2001, the first year that there was a question about religion on the UK census, 71.8 per cent of British residents claimed affiliation to Christianity. This number dropped to 59.3 per cent by the time of the 2011 census. Clearly there are all kinds of reasons why someone may choose to answer this question in this way, from faith conviction to national identity, but the drop in numbers of those claiming Christian affiliation demonstrates an increasing reluctance to identify with the Christian heritage of the country. Also clear is that Christian affiliation alone does not translate into church attendance. Attendance across all denominations in Britain was estimated to be 5.8 per cent of the population in 2010, a number that has also been in decline in the last 40 years.² So both in terms of church attendance and Christian affiliation, Christianity appeared to be in decline.

Another factor is the changing demographic of traditional church congregations. Between 1979 and 2005, the number of churchgoers across all denominations who were over the age of 65 as a percentage of the total had nearly doubled, while that of those aged between 15 and 29 had shrunk by more than half (Archbishops’ Council, 2007, p. 33). Bear in mind that this is half of a diminishing total and the full picture revealed by these statistics comes into place: congregations seem to be getting smaller and older. Anecdotal research reveals a similar picture. One can step into many churches across the country and see almost nobody between the ages of 12 and 40, and very few children. The implication is that these demographics are either not being reached by the local church or many people simply do not like what they find