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Episode 35: Where Did Fresh Expressions Come From? Learning from the UK with Michael Moynagh
Episode 3514th March 2023 • Pivot Podcast • Faith+Lead
00:00:00 00:51:19

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Special Guest: Michael Moynagh.

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Michael Moynagh: And so people will be volunteering to contribute to your parent church's life even before they see themselves as church goers and even before they see themselves as followers of Jesus. So you're making all these connections right from an early stage.

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Terri Elton: Welcome to Pivot. I'm Terri Elton from Luther Seminary.

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Dwight Zscheile: And I'm Dwight Zscheile and I am so excited to have as our guest in this episode, Michael Moynagh, who comes to us from the UK. He is a leading scholar, educator, trainer and practitioner in the mixed ecology and fresh expressions, the author of multiple books, including Being Church Doing Life 21st Century Christian and Church in Life, Innovation, Mission and Ecclesiology. And it's such a delight to have Mike Moynagh with us on this podcast. Welcome Mike.

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Michael Moynagh: Well, thank you, Dwight, and it's great to be here. Lovely to see you, Terri, and looking forward to our conversation.

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Dwight Zscheile: We wanted to begin by going back a bit historically to the genesis of the Fresh Expressions movement in the Church of England and in the UK more generally, and we'd love to hear a little bit about that story. Where did this come from? Why? Why did it emerge and particularly what was, you know, what's been your role in it over the years and your story in connection to it?

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Michael Moynagh: So in terms of my own story, I'm a Church of England minister and was leading a parish church down in the southwest of England in the 19 early 1990s. We were doing some of the stuff that you might call fresh expressions today. But remember, one of the things. I used to do is it was before Alpha. Even, and I used to run these just looking evangelism courses every Monday evening. And so I'd run them for a term. At the end of the time, we'd spin out the group as a home group. What I noticed was and so we just kept multiplying these new little groups around the parish But what I noticed was that if people were belonging to that group and were already fairly involved in the church, then yeah, they would come on Sunday morning. But for those people who didn't get involved in the Church, they would come to the group week by week. But they'd never come on Sunday. And so by the end of my time there, I began to think to myself, Well, why am I even trying to get these folks on Sunday, you know, you know, to normal church, Why don't I just start a separate congregation for them? And I began to think, where in the pub could I hold it? And sort of and that sort of thing. But in my mind, I. Was still stuck with. The idea. I had to get them there on Sunday. I couldn't work out how to do this because I had three morning congregations already on Sunday morning and I was expected to be at all three, so I couldn't see how I could do a fourth without giving up something on Sunday. Or just something would have to give. And I couldn't work that out. And so, you know, it was time for me to leave the parish anyway. But that was the beginning of the questioning that I had, which was actually, "why do we need to get these people to church in a conventional way?" And then why do we need to get them there on Sunday? Why can't we get them there on Thursday or Wednesday or whatever? But I hadn't made that whole journey by that stage in the early 1990s. Now, I think in terms of the wider church, people were realising that conventional evangelism, you know, we'll do an outreach event and then come to church on Sunday simply wasn't working. People didn't want to come on Sunday. They found the existing church alien. It met at the wrong time. They had family commitments. They may have been on shift work. There were a hundred reasons why they couldn't make it on Sunday. And so you might do all these great Alpha courses and outreach events. And we saw this with Alpha time and again. People would come to Alpha. But they wouldn't come to church and that was one strand that was feeding into this. And the other strand was that people were doing conventional church planting and they were finding that that didn't work. So they would, for example, take about 50 people from the congregation down to a school. They'd start a new service in the school. The people who came were often Christians from other churches who said, "This is a better show than we've got, let's join in." But the people who didn't come were folks who weren't coming to church. And so there was a realisation that this traditional way of church planting didn't work. And so what happened was Fresh Expressions. And I could tell a story but won't at the moment. But what happened basically was the people said, We've got to go out. And make contact with people who never come to church. How do we do this? Well, let's go and ask them and listen to them and listen to God. And then they said, we've got to find a way of loving them in a practical way. And so they'd start sort of outreach activities of Love. They might start they might start meeting them in a pub. They do all sorts of outreach activities which were kind of forms of love and kindness, and we can talk about examples of that. And then people would gather around that waterhole form community. And then in the context of community, people would say, Now let's share the gospel in the context of community. And then as people begin to come to find, it's no good inviting them to church on Sunday. Let's just let them form a little congregation where they are. And so when I began starting talking about this in the early 2000, I remember a couple coming. I used to use the language of emerging church. In those days, people would come to me, I remember a couple coming to me and saying, You know Mike, we must be doing Emerging Church. We've been lent a church house. We're living there for free. We've got to know some of the young people in the neighborhood. They don't go to church. So we've invited them into our sitting room. We have tea with them, we hang out with them. So that was the act of love. Community was forming. We've begun to share the gospel with them and I guess they're forming a little church in our sitting room. And so people began to discover these different ways of doing church in the late 1990s, and then the Church of England cottoned on to this. They wrote a report called Mission Shaped Church. A Report which pointed to examples of this and called on the church to bless it and encourage it and give it support. And our new Archbishop at the time, Rowan Williams, he discovered these new types of church in Wales and he came in as Archbishop of Canterbury and said, "One of my priorities is to give space for these new expressions of church. So that's a very quick potted history. You know, the Mission shaped Church report published in 2004 and was very seminal in terms of giving permission for people to do this.

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Terri Elton: Love that story and to kind of going back to the organic nature of how this was and just paying attention. I want to ask a question about the blessing of the church. As you just said, it seems like sometimes the blessing is a blessing and sometimes it can be a curse, right? Because then the church wants to take it over or make it their own or whatever. What were the opportunities and challenges at that moment? Because I can imagine one of the things about the Church of England is it's a it's a Church of England, which is really different here than in the US context, but it also gives it the ability to spread in a really different way or to be resourced. So talk about that a little bit.

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Michael Moynagh: Well, this is exactly what Archbishop Rowan Williams had found in Wales. I mean, this is such a sign of a godly man. I think he said when he became bishop and the archbishop there, that he would go and spend time on the edge of the church to see what the Holy Spirit was doing. And when he went there, he began to meet some of these people who were starting these unconventional forms of church, and they would say to him, Archbishop, we're terribly embarrassed that you've come because we don't really know what we're doing here, to be honest. We don't even know if we're allowed to do it. And we're a bit worried that you've shown up that you might suddenly sort of shut us down. It was that kind of a mood and that kind of a conversation. And Rowan Williams said, you know, he just sensed that there was something of the Holy Spirit at work in all this. And so one of the things that we had to do in the Church of England was to give people permission to do this, to give them the confidence to do it. And so this is why the report was very important, because it said to the bishops "We need to recognise this and give it permission to do that." And they developed, to be honest, some pretty thin theology. But it was very incarnational theology got us started, but it was quite controversial, it wasn't adequate, and a lot of our theologians found it very difficult. So we had to go on and do the the really good theological work later on. But but it was inspirational. And for many people and I know lots of our pioneers, really, and began to, you know, influenced by mission shaped church and began to pioneer themselves because they had permission and because the incarnational theology did speak to them. And it was great because, you know, it said, look, Jesus went out into the world, immersed himself in the culture of the day, all we are doing as his body is exactly the same. And we're allowing forms of church to emerge that are appropriate to the context and in context of a national Church, which we are in the Church of England, which feels called to serve every person in the country. We were able to say, if we're going to serve these people, we need to be there alongside them and we need to be starting little communities with them and among them. Otherwise, we're not fulfilling our ministry, which is to be a church for everyone. So that was the kind of theology we began to evolve and in time we deepened it and and made it more robust. So the first thing we had to learn was to give people permission. The second thing we had to learn was to give it good theology, and we had to develop that. And we had our critics, which were great because the critics made us go back and do some of the good theological work under a number of people who did that. And it was brilliant, you know? So that was good. I think we found that we had to sort of provide a catalyst to help people. And so the archbishop and the Methodist Church set up a little organization called Fresh Expressions. Which was a kind of little Ginger group. We created video stories of what people were doing and spread those stories around and spread the news around and did vision days and so on. So we were spreading the word. And that was important. So we needed a little catalyst to do that. So that was a third thing. In any institution, there are roadblocks, there are institutional obstacles. And so we had to address some of those. And try and sort of push away the roadblocks. And that, I think is a fourth thing you have to do. And then as we went along and we can make this list as long as you like, but I think one of the key things was a need for bishops to move from a permission giving role to a proactive initiating role. And we've moved in the Church of England much more to that second. And we now in our our official policy is to create a mixed ecology church with lots of different expressions of church for different people in different places or supporting each other and alongside one another. We're hoping for 10,000 of these new types of Christian community to emerge by 2030. And that's very much part of our policy and our aims and objectives and so on. So we've become much more proactive. So there's a shift from permission giving to proactivity, if you like.

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Dwight Zscheile: So, Mike, I wonder for some of our readers who aren't as familiar with fresh expressions, if you could just share some stories of examples of, you know, what do these communities look like? I know there's quite a bit of diversity. And what are some of your favorite case studies, if you will, or stories or examples?

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Michael Moynagh: Yeah, I'll give you 2 or 3. I love the story of Saturday gathering. It started in what we would call a food bank or a food larder. And they were giving out free food on Saturday mornings. It was run on an ecumenical basis and the Christian helpers one Saturday said to the clients of the food bank, they said, You know, we're going to be here this evening. And we're going to. Eat together. And we'll hang out together. We might look at some stories that Jesus told and discuss them, and we'll just have fun. Come and join us, if you like. And so 12 people came on the first evening. I think after about 18 Months, 60 people were coming. They were eating together, although beginning to sing some Christian songs, they're doing a little bit of Bible study together. They were learning to pray together. And then after a couple of years or so, a Church of England bishop was invited in to baptize and confirm, I think, up to 20 of these folks who'd become Christians through this. And the leaders went along to the other church leaders in the town and they said, you know, we've got a problem. People are coming to Saturday gathering and they're saying "it's our church". So we seem to have created a church. That's the last thing we wanted to do. Do you mind? And all these other leaders said, "Well, I'll tell you one thing, they're not coming to our church. So this is great." And so a church emerged. So that might be one example. I love this story because it's so different about a friend of mine called Tim who is meeting with some young adults who are very disaffected with church, effectively had dropped out of church. They decided to host free canoeing for families. So they advertised on social media and in other ways. "If you want free canoeing, come on, Saturday afternoon." The little group paid for the canoes and families went canoeing together. And then they'd have a picnic or a barbecue and eat together. And one of the young adults would either tell or read a little Bible story for the children. The adults would listen. And they did this for a while. And then Tim said. You know, if you want, you know, I see you quite enjoy the story. Tell you what, every Tuesday we meet for food and story. And we look at some of These stories about Jesus and stories he told and discuss them, see what we think of them. Why don't you come and join us? And so. A little group. Began to do that and began then to make a journey into, you know, studying the Bible, learning how to worship and so on. And this is a long journey. And it had its ups and downs. You know, it's, I tell it quickly as if it was, you know, smooth and progressive, but there were setbacks and hiccups and all the rest. But but that was it. And then quickly, a third example from near Cambridge, a woman in a village would take her children to school. And she got to know other parents and carers at the school gate. And as she got to know them and listen to them, she discovered that many of them wanted to hang out together and get to know each other. So she went to the school teacher, got permission to use the staff room. And every Thursday after they dropped their children, they would meet in the staff room. She provided decent coffee and croissants and fruit juice and all the rest. And she, I'm just about to offend all the women here because she said to me, she said, "Mike, I wasn't sure if they'd talk and so I got a little video for them to watch. And I said, "Goodness me, you're all women. How could you not possibly talk?" But anyway, she would show them these little Nooma videos by Rob Bell, looking at, you know, issues of everyday life from a very gentle Christian perspective. And the women who didn't go to church they'd talk about that. And it settled down group of about 15, 18 people would meet regularly. And then after a while, she noticed that some of them were becoming quite spiritually hungry. And so she said to them, "If you want to explore more, I'm going to meet on Tuesday morning and we'll have coffee together and we'll look at some of the stories about Jesus, and see more about him." And so they read scripture together. They met together. They did some Bible study together. They learned to pray together. They did some simple worship together, and they became effectively a little worshiping community, a congregation you might like. And after a while they said "Sue, we love all this. It's so exciting. And we'd never heard about Christ in the way that you're describing Him and so on. But it's no good for our partners because they're at work. It's no good for our kids at school. And so they said, Can't we do something for them and our friends?" And so they started a new initiative on Saturday afternoon, all age basis with food and fun and Bible story and so forth. And I think that became the center of the community. I think the Thursday morning gathering at school began to dwindle because they all got older and the kids went up to sort of secondary school and so on. And so this new group became the sort of center of the community. But if you listen to all those stories, they all follow a particular journey. You know, they start with listening to God and listening to the people in the context, you find a simple way to love people. Free canoeing. We give you free food. We, you know, come and meet together in the school staff room. We organize that our community forms around that activity. You know, free food for the Saturday gathering. They come and eat in the evening and then community forms. And then in the context of community, they begin to share the gospel. They begin to talk about their experiences of Jesus. And then as people come to faith, they form a little worshiping community where they are. They don't come to church on Sunday. They start becoming church, if you like, or congregation where they are. And then at their best, in the case of Sue, for example, they go and repeat the whole process again. And so it's sort of a process of: listen, love, community. Share the gospel. Something akin to Church, of Christian community emerges connected to the wider church. And then you repeat the process. And we found that time and again, in lots of different ways. And it's always much more messy than that little journey describes. But they basically follow that little journey, and we call it the missional journey.

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Terri Elton: I love that and I love the organic nature of those stories that you that you told of people started where they were and they were just noticing. My question would be, as you moved from more organic to more systematizing, right, to more kind of proactive, as you said, and kind of looking around the whole country and saying "how we how might we find leaders to start these missional expressions?" was it more like we're going to scout and watch and and point out, "hey, you're doing this? Could you become a fresh expressions kind of ministry?" or was there some kind of training that people went through or some conversations and then they went and began like, how was that process of leadership for these new fresh expressions?

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Michael Moynagh: So let me give you two different models. So one model is I'm involved as a consultant to the Diocese of Oxford's new congregation program. And what we did during lockdown was we went and and we went to our local churches, we call them deaneries. And we said that if you're vaguely interested in developing mission we will meet with you in twos and threes. So come from your parish or your group of parishes. And we'll just have a zoom conversation With 3 or 4 of you. And the Zoom conversation would start, "Just tell me what already outreach activities have you got?" So they talk about lunch and clubs and coffee mornings. And I would say to them, "you know, have you ever thought if you restart that coffee morning, you could put a little spiritual extra alongside it?" So what you could do is you could say, "If you want to stay behind at the end of the coffee morning, we're going to have a little spiritual zone. And we're going to light a candle and we'll play some Christian music and we'll read a passage from the Bible or from a spiritual writing. We'll have a few minutes of quietness and you can pray to God if you believe in God or just have had positive thoughts for other people and situations. And then we'll just wind up at the end with a very short prayer, maximum ten minutes." And then I would say to them, "You can imagine what would happen. You know, you do this for some months and then someone says, "Hey, I'd like to talk about, you know, these Bible readings and I've got ideas and I disagree with them. I've got questions. Can we talk about it?" And so you begin to extend the time to 25 Minutes. Well, what have you got? You've got some worship and music. You've got some prayer, you've got a scripture reading. You've got the sermon in the form of a discussion. What have you got? You've got a little congregation there. So these clergy would go, "Aha." So I would say, "Look. If you want you can add a spiritual extra to an outreach activity that you've already got or if you want, you can start from scratch and you may have 2 or 3 people who are longing to do something in the community, some outreach, and they can follow that little missional journey of listen, love, build community, share Jesus, start a worshiping community connected to the wider church, do it again. And then I'd say, "Now look, if you are interested in doing that, the next step is for you to bring your lay teams to what we call a Greenhouse." And you bring them to this Greenhouse and they will meet with other teams and the other teams from the locality, they'll all be doing different things. But what they'll do is they'll all have in common that they're trying to travel around this missional journey and then we will meet 2 or 3 times a year, either in a long evening or on a Saturday morning when the teams will come together and they'll do their planning. They'll ask three questions: Where have we got to on a missional journey? What could we do next? Brainstorm ideas. What will we do next? Come up with a plan. And we actually also have a resource and I wave at them this little book, which is our resource, and I say here, has got lots of different stories and ideas and frameworks that you can dip into that will help you travel around that journey. So you're not stuck. I don't know what to do. You just say, I've got to the listen stage. How do I listen? You read a couple of chapters in the book which will take you no more than 20 minutes. And that will give you all sorts of ideas and frameworks and stories about how other people have got started. So we did that. And what the clergy said to me was they said, "Mike, we've heard about Fresh Expressions so many times. But we never knew how to get from A to B. These little learning communities help us to get to B because we can see that you share the mission or load and you help them through these missions, these communities, these greenhouses to travel around the journey. And so we started rolling out in Oxford. We've probably rolled out about 7 or 8 of these greenhouses. We've probably about eight teams in each one. And we've done that from the, you know, over the last two years, tail end of the pandemic coming out of lockdown and then the last year. So we think this is amazing because everyone's so exhausted by the pandemic. So to get sort of 60 to 70 teams doing this we think is a sheer miracle. So that's one model. And then another model very quickly is a group of Roman Catholic and Protestant churches that I'm working with in Switzerland, and they are forming a little Institute because in Europe, if you're a Catholic church, you probably have two Priests in the parish and you may have 30 paid lay workers. And so they said, we're going to form this institute and we're going to train these lay workers and we'll train them in one strand of theology, and then we'll train them in that missional journey and structure a whole curriculum around that missional journey. And then we will do 1 to 1 coaching with them while they're there. And we'll say, when you go back to your parish this next month, go and find a team and who might you come back in a month's time until tell me who might be in your team and why you're thinking and praying about that person. And so they coach them. All the way through and then they say when they've left, you know, we might have one team and then a second team. And then a third team. When we get to three teams, we'll bring them together into a greenhouse, one of these learning communities. And so. They're starting very slowly, one team at a time, but they say we'll just keep on building up, building up. And when we've got too many teams for us to to coach, we'll pay for a third person to come and join us so that we can expand the coaching resource. And we'll just expand our resource at the pace that God takes us to start these new communities. So my model is you just go out to the parishes and draw people into the greenhouse. Their model, which I'm working with and I believe equally strongly, is you start by training a training institute, you give them good theology. It's a two year training, 1 or 2 days a week. You train them in the missionary journey. And you use the material in this textbook here and add to it some theology. And so on. But then you coach them in great detail month by month, and then as teams emerge, you bring them together into these greenhouses where they learn together and share together and where they get excited because they're meeting with other teams who've got so many different interesting ideas and they see God at work in them.

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Dwight Zscheile: So for our listeners, just to clarify, the workbook that you're describing is called Godsend, and it is available on Amazon, it looks like.

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Terri Elton: And yeah, we'll put a link for it in our...

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Michael Moynagh: Yeah, first of all, it's a second edition. The one I've waved at you is the one that's on the Amazon UK. There will be an American version. It'll be published in the middle of May. So if you're... I don't know where this podcast is going up. But if the listeners want to wait till May, it'll be on the US Amazon or they can go on to the and I have to say the American book will be much nicer to look at. It'll be better designed and it'll be brilliant. So if I was in your shoes, I'd wait till middle of May. But if someone is sitting there and saying, I can't wait, then they just go to the UK Amazon, they can get it's: Godsend. My name is the author and they're looking for the second edition and there's a foreword By Michael Beck.

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Dwight Zscheile: Wonderful. So what you're describing is a lot it sounds like a lot of lay led expressions and a lot of lay leadership really, you know, permeating this movement, but with some really intentional connection and support from clergy. Do you want to just say a little bit more about that? Because I think sometimes, you know, clergy can hear about innovation work and they think, oh, my gosh, I've just got to now add this on to all this other stuff I'm already doing and I'm already burned out and depleted and I don't have time. But what you're describing is is quite different from that. Yeah, I think it does need clergy leadership and oversight but the laypeople can lead it. For example, you know, I've been to Florida and I've seen churches with fantastic luncheon clubs. With people who, you know, dinner church for people who are unemployed and so on, and they're led by laypeople, but they need to have the support of the clergy, obviously. So I think I'd be saying to the clergy, first of all, you need to have a vision for what this can look like. And the vision is of a wheel. There's a parent congregation, which is the hub. And then you've got around the rim new little communities, emerging outreach activities. It may be a luncheon club with older people. It may be a coffee morning, it may be a food parlor and an evening gathering with them. You know, it may be... in this particular church in Florida I visited there was a senior citizen, and she gets together a group and they they're all writing their autobiographies for their families. And and she realized when she heard me talk, she said that would be so easy to add a spiritual dimension to that. You know, as we as we look back over our lives, was God at work? Do we believe in God? Are we glad that he was at work? Or, you know, what do we think about it? And you add a spiritual conversation to that. So you want to imagine that around the rim of this church wheel these new worshiping communities emerging. And then you want to imagine that these. communities are connected to each other by the rim and they're also connected by spokes to the hub. And so what you've got then is a parent congregation with lots of congregations that are offshoots. All right. So that's your big picture. And in this particular church in+ Florida, as someone said to me, oh, you know, it's a real struggle, our dinner church, because the main congregation doesn't think there's anything in it for them. So I said, oh, no, no, that's because you haven't got this vision. If you've got the vision that you're all connected together, then the very first thing you do once a dinner church is settle down is you take your notice sheet that you give to everyone. By email. You print it out, and you put your notice sheet on the table. In the luncheon club, in the dinner church. And on that notice sheet, you put all your activities plus the dinner church so people will just hardly read it, but they'll register they're part of something bigger. And then someone will come to you and say, "Hey, look, I've been reading here, you're forming a choir for the carol service. Can I join?" And someone else will come to you and say, "Hey, look, I see you're looking for a bookkeeper to help your treasurer. I've done that sort of thing. Can I help?" And so people will be volunteering to contribute to your parent church's life even before they see themselves as church goers and even before they see themselves as followers of Jesus. So you're making all these connections right from an early stage. So I'll be saying to the minister, "Get that vision." That's the vision. And then I'd be saying to them, "Take this little Godsend book, read it." And then start talking to members of your congregation. Start with what you've got. What outreach activities have we got where we can add a little spiritual extra on an optional basis? At the. End of when we meet. You know, what are you doing? You know, if you've got sewing circles, what have you got where you could add this little spiritual dimension, a spiritual zone, whatever it is, headspace, whatever you want to call it. And so start with that. And then I'd say, as part of your pastoral work as a minister, talk to members of the congregation, say, "Take me into your lives." You know, who do you hang out with? What do you do during the week? What are your passions? And then begin to ask them, Well, if your passion is cycling, could you ever join up with someone else and form a cycling group? And could there be 1 or 2 people who don't want to go cycling because who organizes the food for when you get back so that you socialize together? And so I'd be you know, seeding all those ideas. And then as I do that, I'd be saying, right, if you're interested, let's go and meet regularly. And I'd be meeting with them regularly. And then I talk with one group and another, and if I got 2 or 3 groups, I then bring them together and start a little mini greenhouse, you know, a learning community. We're all following that little missional journey together, listen, love and so on. And we're learning from each other. We're praying together and we're doing it all differently. But we're going to encourage each other and meet regularly every three months, six months, whatever. So that's what I would do as a minister. And I'd be saying, "Look, part of this is what I would want to do anyway." As a good pastor, I'm helping my folks to enrich their discipleship in everyday life. I'm bringing together mission, church and personal discipleship in their lives. So this is what I'd want to do, isn't it? That's why I was called to ministry, you know. But I'm also wanting my church to reach out and to grow. And this is a great way to grow my church. So it's completely win win for a pastor.

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Terri Elton: I love that. I was thinking about a couple congregations and some pastors that I know that I talk about and thinking, how would they hear that? And I wonder about two things. One is I'm in the Midwest. And many of us come from Heritage that reaching out and inviting someone into a community is as scary as about talking about Jesus. Those two things are not always in our DNA. And so part of what I'm curious about is how have you seen and maybe this is different in the settings that you talk about, but maybe not. How do you encourage people to say, hey, reach out to your neighbors and invite community? Because I think people are really longing today for community and that's a rich, ripe fruit for us to, you know, to tap into. But also, how did you help people give the confidence or the risk to talk about Jesus or to invite them into the story of the Bible or some of those that kind of second move? So talk about those two things.

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Michael Moynagh: Okay. So two two really important moves. Great questions, Terri. In terms of the first move, we always say to people: form a team. Find a friend or 2 or 3 people. Because it's really scary doing it on your own and then do it in an aspect of your life where you feel comfortable. So, for example, if you're a school teacher, take donuts into the staff from every Monday and give away free donuts. And just do that. Now this begins to answer your second question because when someone says to you, "Why are you doing it?" You just say, "Well, we're followers of Jesus and this is what Christians do." But if they say. "Well, hang on, what do you mean by that?" Then you say to them, "Look, tell you what. Me and my friend, every Thursday afternoon we meet for half an hour. And Jesus is known as one of the world's greatest spiritual teachers. So we look at some of the stories he told and some of the stories about Him, and we see what we think of them. So why don't you come visit us? We'll buy you a drink. And it's only for half an hour. So when the person comes. What you do is you read a parable. And then you ask for questions. The first question, you just say, This is what we do. We ask one question a week because we've only got about 15 minutes for this. So the first question is, if this story happened today, what would it look like? And so you talk about that and then at the end, you say, "What we'd like to do is: Have a bit of headspace where we pray to God as we understand God." And you just do that for three minutes. Then the next week and you do this anyway, whether anyone's joining you or not. But the next week, hopefully the person comes back and you do the second question: What's the story saying to you? What's it saying to me? Discuss that. And then the third week you say a third question, you recap first two is: Could the story make a difference to my life? Might it make me think about God more? Might it make me pray more? Might it make me think about this other person in my workplace differently or whatever? Could it make a difference? And you talk about that. And then you come back and you say, you know, we'd like to do an experiment. We'd like to see whether it. Does make a difference? We're really relaxed. Some experiments work, some don't. So we're not fussed about this. And then the fourth week you come back and you ask a fourth question: Did the story make a difference to my life? How? Now, the brilliant thing about this is that any Christian and non Christian can take part. You know, you don't have to get all wound up about telling your Christian story and telling them about Jesus because the Bible does the Evangelism and all the Christians are doing is simply joining in the discussion, which is as simple as joining in a discussion about a film. Now we have 4 or 5 different approaches that use the same principles that are here in the Godsend book. And so if, for example, someone was wanting to start out and they were really anxious about how do we take that step from building community to sharing Jesus. I would just say turn to the chapters in this book because they will give you just four different, really simple ways of doing Bible study that are completely non-threatening. Both to folks who don't go to church and to Christians. So the key thing is to find a friend or more do something in a passion of your life. If you like films then invite parents of the school to a film club. We're going to watch a video this Friday, and then next Friday we'll eat together and discuss the film from a spiritual angle. So that's what you do. So this is not scary because it's around what you enjoy doing. And so it actually enhances your everyday life rather than diminishing it. And, you know, it's not another task I've got to do for the church. No, this is my passion. I enjoy films. I'm going to be able to do this with other eople, and I'm going to make friends that way. And if you're an extrovert, you'll love it. If you're introvert you might find that a bit scary. So what you do is to join up with 1 or 2 other friends, so you do it together. And then if no one comes it doesn't matter. The three of us can shed tears together and drink all the alcohol that we brought in and hoping that they come, you know, that's that's fine. So it's no great big deal. And then, as I say in the Godsend book, we'll give you some ideas for how you can share Jesus in such an easy, natural way that even we British, who are ten times more shy about sharing our faith than you and even Anglicans who are ten times more shy than the average Brit, even they can share their Christian faith using these very simple approaches. So, you know, it's very much doable. But we've had to learn over the last 15 years how to do this stuff.

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Dwight Zscheile: So I love the brilliance of beginning where people already are not going alone and then keeping it really, really simple. And I think there's the genius of that when so often I think it's easy, particularly for clergy to over complexify all of this and like, let's keep it really simple and accessible, which means it's then repeatable and multiply able, I mean people can take hold of these practices and improvise on them in whatever context or whatever community space that they're already connected. And I think this is those are really important points that you're sharing, Mike, that we want to just lift up as we think about how this really has spread as a movement across the UK in so many different contexts and spaces where life plays out, it's not one size fits all, even though the basic process is, you know, is simple and replicable, It can then you can sort of do jazz, if you will, on it and improvise in different settings and contexts. So that's brilliant.

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Michael Moynagh: That's a fantastic summary. If I may say so Dwight . You should be in my seat. You do much better than me. You know.

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Terri Elton: I loved the place you started with us. And within your movement of just opening up spaces for permission. I think so often in I'm an ELCA Lutheran and but think Episcopalians, Anglicans may not be that different. We get so caught in our head first, right? Do we have the right theology, those kind of things, as opposed to giving permission to experiment and to just wonder what is God? Where's God showing up and how can we lean in to that? And we get worried about where do we call this "church" or "not church," as opposed to saying "it's a life of faith of which we're just called into, into doing and being". And I too, I think those questions are amazing. And and I, I feel like it's both training and evangelism at the same time. Right. The leader loosely called leader that's teeing up the question is going to be as transformed in that process as maybe the person that just got curious and showed up.

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Michael Moynagh: Right. And Terri let me give you some statistical evidence for that, because in the UK and your your viewers and listeners. If you Google. Church Of England, the Fruitfulness Framework, the fruitfulness framework, Now what they did was that during a lockdown again, they went to 200 people in about 20 different new Christian communities, fresh expressions of church. They asked them about 24, 25 questions covering all sorts of different aspects of your spiritual life. So the sort of thing they'd say is when you joined your fresh expression, were you praying regularly? 45% of the people and there were many Christians said yes. And then they said now at the time of the survey, are you praying regularly? And the response is 65%. And for every question there was dramatic improvement. How do you feel about yourself? Do you know, do you feel you've got a meaning in your life? And I can't remember what the figures were, but I think it was something like, you know, do you feel compassionate to other people, you know, or do you feel like doing a good turn to other people? And, you know, 38% said, well, when we joined our first Expression, we did regularly. Now, you know, 68% would say we do this regularly. I can't remember if that's the exact figure. But for all these questions about, you know, how you feel about yourself, how you feel about other Christians, how you feel about your community? Around, about how you feel about God and relate to God? There were dramatic improvements in the Christian's spiritual health, and they coincided with their involvement in these new Christian Communities. So I go round now saying to church leaders: If you want to grow disciples, here is something much better than a discipleship course. Because I said, when I looked at these figures, I said, if I'd done that survey in my church down in South west England. And if I said, when you joined, when Mike came as your vicar in 1989, were you praying regularly? Now, five years later, are you praying regularly? If I'd seen those results, I would have gone around to all my fellow clergy and said, "Revivals breaking out here, make me a bishop." You know I'd die for those results. So what I'm saying to clergy is you can put everyone on a discipleship course as much as you want, but your chances of seeing that improvement in their spiritual life, in practice, you will almost certainly not see that degree of improvement. If you want to see improvement in people's spiritual lives, there is no better way than for them to be in mission with 1 or 2 other Christians in a walk of their life working with people who don't go to church. That stretches your faith, increases your dependence on God, encourages you to pray more, givesa focus for your discipleship that you didn't have before. I keep saying to people, "Look. Most people being a Christian is like playing soccer without goalposts or like playing basketball without a hoop. You know, you kick the ball around, you throw the ball around and you think, "What's the point of this?" And eventually you get bored and you walk off the pitch and you join the crowd walking by and the world disciples you. But if you give people a fresh expression, a new Christian community and they're involved in it, they have a whole focus for their discipleship between Sunday and the next Sunday. And that, as I say, is transformative for people's Christian lives. So I want everyone in Britain and everyone in America to say the key to getting disciples, to make disciples and just get spiritual growth is to encourage people to form these small new Christian communities. That seems to be the route forward. So why not go and do it?

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Dwight Zscheile: That's wonderful. Mike, I have one last question for you. So I'm also an Anglican. And you know, for those of us who are in traditions really influenced by liturgical renewal movement, which place the Eucharist sort of at the center of weekly gatherings for people, many of these fresh expressions aren't going to have Eucharist in that way. And how have you navigated that in the Church of England in terms of people's piety and experience of the sacraments?

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Michael Moynagh: So again. Our prayer is I have to say, you know, the story I'm telling you in real life is much more complicated and messy. All right? So, you know, don't just think, hey, I start one of these new communities I'll start a little luncheon club, and three months later, I'm going to have a new worshiping community. It takes much longer than that. And the, you know, the high points and low points in your journey. But we want them all to be sacramental. Now, many of our Fresh expressions Start out around a meal and they have A meal involved. So straight away, you know, the Eucharist came out of the meals that Jesus celebrated with his disciples. So straight away you are beginning a Eucharistic journey. What you can do is and what we encourage people to do is to say, look, if you're a layperson, when you get to the stage and people are beginning to worship and they've had these discussions about Jesus. And they're beginning. What you can do is to introduce a Remembrance of The Lord's Supper. And if you do this, you Need to say "this is not Holy Communion, as we understand it in the Anglican Church or as we understand it, as Lutherans or whatever." You just say, "this is a remembrance of the Last Supper. It's not a formal Holy Communion, but it's a way that we remember what Jesus did. Before he died." And you tell the story, you read a passage from Scripture, and then you just say, Let's pass around the cup, let's pass around the bread. And you just, you know, just share that very gently in a informal way. And, you know, within the Anglican Church, you know, we have these agape suppers and so on. And that's quite legitimate within Canon law. As long as you have said "this is not a Holy Communion". But you then go the next step. And you say it's really important that we do celebrate Holy Communion in a way that Anglicans traditionally understand it, or Lutherans. And so you might invite your local minister to come in and preside at a Holy Communion. Now, some of our pioneers say, "Oh, we don't like that because they're not already part of the community." But I say to them, no, that is the very point of inviting them in because they come in to remind you that you're part of the wider and bigger Church. So they come in and they preside at a communion. You might do that once a month, once every three months, even once a year. I keep reminding people that in Europe, you know, within the Catholic Church, often the Eucharist was only consumed once a year anyway, you know, twice a year. The efficacy of the. Sacrament doesn't depend on its frequency. So or you invite your fresh Expression, your new worshiping community, you invite them to join the parish church for a celebration of communion at Easter and, you know, at Pentecost and at Christmas. And whenever, you know, you might want to do that so you find ways to join up with your parish church. You find ways to invite the vicar. Or the Minister to come into the church so that you then have an authorized Holy Communion. As a part of the wider Church. And that's the way we've approached this. So, you know, you do a journey. And you have informal little celebrations of remembrances of the Last Supper, but then you have the formal one in some of the ways I've described.

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Terri Elton: Wow, I love that. That's really great. Michael, our time is running out. I really thank you for just for the great stories, for the imagination and really for the resilience of being on the front edge of what could it mean to have a mixed ecology, to reimagine church and reimagine what it means to gather and do life together around around faith in this time. And I'm grateful that next at our next episode, we get to look with Michael Beck around what how is fresh expressions kind of found its way into the North American context and kind of continue that story on this side of the pond, if you will?

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Michael Moynagh: Absolutely. I mean, he he's brilliant. because his little church in. Wildwood. They had 14 or 15 of these fresh expressions. So you want to get him to talk about some of those. They're great, great stories. But it just shows what you can do because it was not a big suburban rich church. It was a complete opposite. Yeah, near extinction, actually, and came alive again. Partly through these new communities. So I'm really glad he's joining you. I'm a great fan of Michael's.

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Terri Elton: It's awesome. Thank you for your time today. And we encourage listeners to continue to join us in this season of Pivot as we looked at the mixed ecology.

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Faith+Lead: This episode of the Pivot podcast was brought to you by Faith Lead. If you enjoyed today's show, head over to Fatale. Org to gain access to a free resources. See you next time.

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