Looking across the Ocean

Trevor and I were musing over the weekend about the creativity of Soul Survivor (which this year has teamed up with TearFund and renamed one wing of itself SoulAction and is encouraging groups around England to engage with 'Slum Survivor' - see the pictures to the right).

Anyways, Trevor and I came over here to England two years ago looking for 'success' that we could 'copy' in the emergent post-modern church environment of North America. This is not quite so daffy as it sounds. We North Americans like our formulas (even the more emergent of us often do) and we are all excited by the ideas that have been referred to in various emergent books as having come from England. So over we came. And frustrated we got. Nothing seemed nearly as big or exciting in person as it had come across as on paper. We became extremely frustrated towards the end of our stay, and pretty much were useless to the small church we had left nine months earlier when we came back.

What I am noticing this time around (probably because I didn't come over here looking for a clear fix) is that the most exciting thing about the 'Fresh Expressions' movement of the church in England is that it is creative. It doesn't/hasn't sat still. What they were doing that was cutting edge and exciting fifteen years ago is not still stagnating at the church Trevor went to youth group at. Instead, there is a new, fresh, alive group, that is defining its own vision for itself and its culture, and it is full of community and God's presence from what we can see.

I know that the folks at the Allelon conference two weeks ago didn't leave with a clear vision or a plan. I think that is wonderful. The commitment to pray the daily office and meditate on Luke 10:1 - 12 is even better. But I think there is a danger as we all move forward as thinkers on this subject of how we offer up missional lives to want to come up with a formula that we can readily transport to others to reproduce. And I think there is a real danger of trying to replicate in Canada and the US what has worked in the UK.

As we reflected on all of this together this weekend our conclusion was that perhaps the most valuable thing we could take from the church in the UK is their commitment to being creative - to being unwilling to rest on the previous success of an event or service or experience, but to be continually pushing the boundaries of their relationship with God, each other and the greater world.