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We've had a great day today, we've spent time beginning to look at some of the core things
that we need to look at when looking at fresh expression of church and we started off with
'what is church?' and what really spoke to me from that session was the balance that
you need to maintain between different ministerial skills when you're trying to bring a new expression
of church together. It made me realise that none of us have all the skills that are needed
and we need to do an audit of what skills we bring and what skills we're lacking. For
me personally, I'm not particularly good at the pastoral side of things, it's something
I have to work at quite hard, and it makes sense therefore going into a new expression
of church that I look to bring people in who have those skills to support.
We then went on to look at a session called 'starting something new', which just looked
at everything that you need to bring together when you're looking at putting a fresh expression
together and just all the different complexities of doing that from start to finish and I was
quite pleased that with Boot Fair Church we'd thought of a lot of these things in terms
of what we're going to offer and who we're going to get involved with it. For instance,
we knew that we were going to be a project that's all about listening, it's all about
offering people somewhere to come and be safe, somewhere to come for shelter, somewhere to
come for rest, somewhere to come for prayer, and all about relationship. But what I couldn't
believe and the session helped me realise is we just hadn't thought that when we run
from May to September and we've built these relationships up we just hadn't thought through
what we were going to do when we get to September and the boot fair season is over. So that's
something that we need to go away and think about.
It did help as well though in giving us part of the answer in that what we need to do is
ask the people that we're going into relationship with what they would like going forward from
September, what they would like their church to be from that time, so it's certainly something
that we'll be looking to do. And then we ended up the day looking at leadership
and we looked at all the skills needed for leadership. For me, the big thing here was
realising that you need to ensure that you don't become isolated. That you have both
support and accountability all the way through. And equally, looking forward, that you think
about and develop the new leaders for the future, the succession part of it.
I've also had time to think about what we learnt from the last session, and in particular
we talked about vision there. I think I've come to realise that yes, we felt called to
go and offer this ministry, this Boot Fair Church to people, but we've not actually sat
down and said 'what is our mission?' So one of the things we will be looking to do over
the coming weeks, before we start up in May, is get all the people involved together and
actually look for an answer to that question, and pray for an answer to that question as
well, because quite often the answer will come from the Lord. So that when we're ready
to go in we have a much clearer idea of what that vision is.
So yeah, a great day, thank you ever so much, Fresh Expressions, for today.