Fresh Expressions programme  

The Archbishop of Canterbury introduced the Fresh Expressions programme as an initiative to support and enable mission with the Church. It is an initiative that continues to flourish and develop. Archbishop Rowan writes:

Essentially the Fresh Expressions programme is not simply about a kind of scattered set of experiments; it’s about that gradual, but I think inexorable shift, in the whole culture of our church that has been going on in the last few years, and which will undoubtedly continue to grow and develop.

And that shift in culture is about the way in which discovering new expressions of the Church’s life has now, rather paradoxically, become part of the blood stream of the traditional, mainstream churches’ life. …

Remember that that is what we’re thinking of, not a series of scattered experiments, not a series of enterprises in religious entertainment, not, God forbid, a kind of dumbing down of the historic faith and its requirements so that more people may get vaguely interested.

The point of Fresh Expressions is the point of the Church itself, that is to provide a place where Christ is set free in our midst.

As we are reminded in scripture, ‘Where there is no vision, the people perish’ Proverbs 29.18. Fresh Expressions of the Church offer us a vehicle with which to reach out to others and for new communities of faith to be encouraged and developed.

The Fresh Expressions programme reminds us that all we do, our liturgy, our worship, our outreach has to become an encounter with the missionary God – so that as the Orthodox say, our life is the ‘Liturgy after the Liturgy’. To quote the Pentecostal theologian Simon Chan, ‘Eucharistic worship does not end in cosy fellowship, but in costly mission to the world.’ (Article in Pneuma – ‘Mother Church’).

At its best, the Fresh Expressions programme invites us to integrate the wisdom of traditional patterns of the Church with contemporary society in the twenty first century. Such fresh expressions of Christ can offer to us a vision of communities of the crucified where new things are brought out and the tradition is handed on:

The point of Fresh Expressions is the point of the Church itself, that is to provide a place where Christ is set free in our midst.

For further information see:

http://www.freshexpressions.org.uk

http://sacramental-fresh-expressions.ning.com