Breakfast surprises

Breakfast on Saturday morning turned out to be an extra session for the Summer School for European Studies. Officially we had finished the evening before, and the first participants were packed, ready to leave Le Rüdli, the Swiss schlössli which had been our home for the past two weeks. Then we discovered who was sharing our breakfast table.

An unassuming English couple named Bob and Mary Hopkins had arrived the day before for a few days' retreat. Bob and Mary are personal friends, old YWAMers, and pioneers of church-planting, Anglican-style.

According to the Bishop of Sheffield, Dr Steve Croft, the Hopkins have played a significant and influential role in the dramatic revolution that has been taking place in Britain's churches over the past decade.

Even the Financial Times has noticed this revolution, called Fresh Expressions. Last December the paper observed: The Church seems to have found new ways of speaking to people, whether in a virtual meeting online or via a physical encounter at a café, an evening in the pub or at a cathedral service. Unlike other rescue packages, 'Fresh Expressions' is a grassroots movement and has never been imposed from above. It's simply a way for individual churches to work out their own ways to reach new people.

In our last week of the Summer School, we had asked what it would take to recover faith, hope and vision for tomorrow's Europe. One crucial element we had explored was the transplantation of churches into the cultures of the 21st century.  

That is precisely what Fresh Expressions is all about.

Impossible

So now, over muesli and yoghurt, Bob and Mary took turns to tell us some of the beginnings of this 'grassroots movement', going back to the early nineties, to their time in YWAM in St Helens, near Liverpool. During intercession, they began to see the need for church planting within the Anglican tradition. For that to happen, however, major changes would be needed. In fact, it would require overturning 1300 years of church laws! But Bob and Mary were too young as Christians to realise such changes would be 'impossible'.

Never before in the English Church's history had initiatives outside of the parish system been legal. That system had been put in place by Theodore of Tarsus who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 669, and who first organised the whole country into dioceses and parishes.

Yet the Hopkins began to see the need for many new forms of church to be allowed to spring up alongside the existing traditional parish churches. In a world now being shaped by the internet, mobility and multi-culturalism, people now met in social and cultural communities as much as geographical parishes.

Working together on the DAWN-Europe team back in 1990, I remember asking Bob who he thought the new Archbishop of Canterbury would be. He answered that he knew who he wanted to be appointed, but that his choice-from humble, cockney origins-didn't stand the chance of 'a snowball in hell'. Bob and Mary had discovered that the Bishop of Bath and Wells, George Carey, was very receptive to their ideas for experimentation and innovation outside of a traditional parish structure.

Surprise

To everyone's surprise, it was indeed Carey who was appointed the 103rd Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1994, he championed the first ever General Synod study of church planting, Breaking New Ground. Church-planting conferences, facilitated among others by the Hopkins, helped bring such activity into the mainstream of Anglican thought. The Methodists also came on board by publishing Stopping the Rot: planting new congregations.

When Rowan Williams succeeded Carey as Archbishop of Canterbury six years ago, he stressed the need for a 'mixed-economy church', in which parish structures coexisted side-by-side as 'equal partners' with alternative forms of being church. The phrase 'Fresh expressions' of church entered the church vocabulary in 2004, along with the concept of 'mission-shaped church'.

By 2005 a national movement was underway, with a dedicated website, www.freshexpressions.org.uk. Last year Bishop's Mission Orders were signed into the Church of England statute book by the queen, legalising fresh expressions of church alongside the parish system.  

We finished our breakfast pondering what could happen across Europe if continental church leadership could learn from this radical British experiment.

Next week I'm on holiday in Ireland. So, till the 10th,

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