One of the most popular and fruitful forms of fresh expression over the past few years has been Messy Church, which was first pioneered by Lucy Moore and her team. Typically, Messy Church builds a community around a monthly event, which brings parents and children together to engage in creativity, worship … and food! It is relaxed, fun and accessible for people wanting to belong to a Christian community but struggle to be part of traditional church. Continue reading “Messy Church – Nurture and Discipleship”
Category: Models and Types
Lucy Moore was the original pioneer who developed the first Messy Church in their Portsmouth parish in the early 2000’s. With her role in BRF (Bible Reading Fellowship) and the DVD telling the story produced by Fresh Expressions the principles enabled the model to spread and be adapted to a wide range of contexts. Continue reading “Messy Church”
Bob Hopkins explores the background and principles of cell church. Were cells just the latest fashion, or a vital mission strategy for 21st Century? How do cells fit into the church’s mission strategy? Continue reading “Introduction and background to cell church”
George Lings, director of the Sheffield Centre and previously an ACPI trustee reflects on the strategic importance of an emerging breed of “Network Churches”.
Are they churches on the Internet? Churches for fishing communities? Just a new name for eclectic churches ? Sorry it’s none of those. By Network church I mean “a Church of England church which has been deliberately set up, and officially authorised, to work only with networks of people. Unlike a parish it has no exclusive area to call its own.” Continue reading “‘Network Churches’ – What do you mean?”
In 2004, the Mission-shaped Church report emphasised the importance of engaging with the increasingly dominant network society today, analysing the forces shaping this society and presenting some principles for engagement, as well as presenting some examples of fresh expressions arising amongst such networks. In this article Bob Hopkins looks at some of these principles and how they have been expressed across the church planting and fresh expressions movement. Continue reading “Network church – Planting into social networks”
From early in the recent UK church planting story, in the 80’s and 90’s multiplying discreet congregations within the existing church building was common. Many examples of this proliferated but need to be distinguished from a related strategy for growth which would be called ‘duplicate services’, as this name implies a single congregation just grows by offering identical services at different times on a Sunday. Continue reading “Multiple Congregation Planting”
