A friend asked me the other day, “Of the plants that you helped to pioneer through the years, how many are still on the road today?”

…It may sound like a pointy question but pioneering equals experimenting and we often find our way forward much as the Apostle Paul’s team did with a here, here, here, not here, not here, here kind of pattern. Experimentation, of necessity, means a range of results. The answer is that 6 out of 8 plants have continued on, grown, seeded, combined with or morphed into other communities, remaining to this day. Those 2 exceptions, the 2 that didn’t get traction? I’ll come back to those in a minute… Meanwhile, what are the factors that have made the six lasting plants last?

Congregational pioneering in the 1980s

NOTICING A PATTERN IN THE 1980s

In 1985 I took up a role as Pastoral Assistant to the church of St the Martyr, Queen Square, in Lundon at the node of Holborn, Clerkenwell, Bloomsbury and King’s Cross. My brief from the Senior Pastor, Revd. Donald Werner, was to pioneer a student congregation. At the time the church had an evening congregation of around 30 with a varsity contingent of 3 student nurses and one medical student. Two years later the evening congregation gathered a regular 120 with 100 university students on our books.

The “apostolic method” I stumbled upon flows from questions posed by three NT sources:

#1) “How can I make myself a welcome guest in the lives of others, so that I can share life, minister to needs and proclaim the Kingdom of God?”

Luke 10:2-9 -Luke 10:2-9

#2) “How can I intentionally share my life and faith with people with such power, love, conviction and transparency that seekers can emulate my faith, and have others in turn emulate theirs.”

I Thessalonians 1:5-8

#3) “How do I gather those who are ‘with me’ – those whom I am discipling?”

Acts 18:5-8

To boil those questions down a bit, we could ask, in the following order:

• Step 1 – How to mingle?
• Step 2 – How to teach relationally?
• Step 3 – How to gather?

If that sounds calculated and complicated, it really wasn’t. At ground level, the first two questions were simply about enjoying the hospitality of the student scene, befriending, sharing lives, discipling and mentoring as best as I knew how.

Fresh-Expressions pioneering in the 1990s

The third question of “How do we gather those we are discipling?” was not answered by me. Rather, the answer emerged organically through the constant hospitality of a number of group households within the fabric of our fellowship. I think of Beth’s household, Steve’s household, Ruth’s household, Simon & Will’s household. Debbie and Liz’s household.

These were the homes that opened their doors to our new body of student friends, generously including them in their hospitality and in their dispersed social activities. It was the open hospitality of these homes, scattered from the West End to the Barbican and from Holborn to Camden, that provided the bedrock to our community. This hospitality of Christian group-houses was the gathering-glue held those among whom I was moving, and who increasingly were choosing to worship with us in our evening service at that time. In this way my apostolic model of #1 mingle #2 make disciples, then #3 gather really proved its mettle for us.

 

“The Ranch” in “The New Monastic” – aka one of the key gathering households of Jesus Generation in Canberra

GETTING INTENTIONAL IN THE 90s AND 00s

I followed the same method in the 90s and 00s in building my own network Jesus Generation, which ran from 1997 to 2009. The seedbed for JGen‘s growth lay in the hospitality extended to me by the student and youth scenes first of Portsmouth UK and then Canberra, Australia. I found doors open into the university scene in Portsmouth, a place on the chaplaincy and a fluid extra-mural student and youth music scene in Canberra.

Neo-monastic pioneering 1997-2009

In both places I found believers on the very fringes of the church scene and seekers beyond it who welcomed me into their households and their own patterns of gathering. Later came clarity as to those whom I was mentoring and discipling, those who were sharing my rule of life, and those who were boarding with me. Then followed the third question: “How do I gather those I am discipling?” JGen followed the same pattern as St George’s church in London – only this time very intentionally.

INHERITED CHALLENGES

By contrast most established congregations with inherited patterns of Sunday meetings and small groups tend to reverse the apostolic order and ask themselves: “How do we disciple the people we’re gathering?” 

Congregations often proceed last of all to what was, for me, the first question: “How do we connect with those beyond the community of faith?”  

In this way established churches reverse the apostlic order which I have found to be so fruitful. 

The needs of a gathered community brings its own imperatives. In that context “how do we connect?” can easily morph into more of a program-oriented question in which the responsibility for community and connection is dispersed or corporatized. The danger is that this pattern leads the individual believer away from the territory of their own initiative and social ability.

These are the kinds of tensions that the missional believer and the mission-hearted church must continually negotiate.

That’s why whatever part of the church spectrum we may occupy, from mega church to micro church, from open church to intentional community, for the Great Commission to shape our lives as it should, I recommend that each believer finds a way to inject into their praxis those three apostolic questions:

How can I make myself a welcome guest in the lives of others?

How can I intentionally share my life and faith with people with such power, love, conviction and transparency that seekers can emulate my faith, and have others in turn emulate theirs?

How do I gather those who are ‘with me’ – those whom I am discipling?

AND TODAY?

To this day those three apostolic questions still inform my own rhythm of life – albeit in ways very different than when I was an eager, young church-planter.

And those two exceptions I mentioned – the two plants that didn’t take? Those were the two where the combination of home life and the secular work necessary to bank-roll the pioneering meant that in the final analysis I simply had insufficient hours to invest into those first two apostloic steps. So I guess my two exceptions were exceptions that prove the rule!!

A BEAUTIFUL AUSTRALIAN CASE STUDY IN 2023 FROM MY FRIEND IN GUNGAHLIN, CANBERRA –  MARK BERESFORD

Mark Beresford became the Congregational Pastor at Mosaic Baptist Church, Gungahlin two years ago and was excited for what it meant to do ministry in a rapidly growing area of Canberra. But the church property was in a neighbouring industrial area, outside of the hustle and bustle of Gungahlin.

So, Mark started asking himself what it looked like to be present in Gungahlin when the church’s Sunday services were in the industrial area. 

Mark started with moving his office. Rather that working at the church office, in a suburb where no one was during the week, he started doing his preparation and writing work in various cafes in Gungahlin, getting to know the staff and other patrons. He would go and visit the local barber shop on his breaks, connecting with the owner, a friend from church, as well as the other barbers. 

And he began to make connections.

Before long, he was regularly reading the Bible with a dozen people, the vast majority of whom don’t go to church. 

Over the past six months, Mark has been talking with his friend at the barber shop about experimenting with a simple church. The location was superb, with the barber shop being in the centre of Gungahlin and right at the tram stop.

Every Wednesday at 6:30pm, Mark opens the barber shop for the Open Circle, named as such because it is “open”, always welcoming to anyone, and a “circle”, where every voice is heard and valued. 

Mark invites the people he’s been reading the Bible with, as well as people from the main church, along to the Open Circle. They have a simple discussion around the Bible, enjoying learning from the unique perspectives of each of the people there, many of whom don’t go to church. 

“It really is just a bunch of people gathering around the Scriptures and thinking together and being open about what the Spirit might say to us,” Mark reflects. 

After two years of building, the Open Circle is now six weeks old and taking on a life of its own. People now approach Mark to ask what the Open Circle is and if they can come. Some come along at the first invitation, others are reading the Bible with Mark one-on-one to build their confidence. Everyone at the Open Circle is there because of their relationship with Mark. They have caught the vision of what the Open Circle can be. 

“This is what the church is meant to be,” says Mark, “a group of people in community learning about and gathering around Christ”. 

Mark hopes to plant more Open Circles across Gungahlin; at different places and run by different people, but all following the simple model of reading a passage from the Bible and asking open questions about what they have read and who they might share it with.