“Loving First”—The "How" of Fresh Expressions

Part Four: A Vine of Many Branches

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”-John 13:34

The Great Commandment “to love God and neighbor” comes before the Great Commission “to go and make disciples.” I believe these are sequenced in the Bible in this order for a reason. Jesus emphasizes with the disciples learning to love God and each other under his tutelage through on-the-job-training before sending them out to all the world.

The great tragedies in the history of mission emerge when Christians have omitted the great commandment. For instance, a replacement model of mission involved going into foreign territory and literally attempting to wipe out the people who were already there. Famous examples of this are the Conquistadors in South America, or protestants in North America. Another blunder was the ennoblement model of mission, in which natives inhabiting their homelands were viewed as primitive, non-enlightened cultures, and if they were Christianized, they would become enlightened like the supposedly superior Eurotribal peoples.

In each of these examples, constructing church buildings and mission stations was the key to the strategy. Once the church was planted, the missionary extracted people from their web of social relationships to be properly Christianized at the compound.

The omission in these methods was an essential ingredient of the way, truth, and life of Jesus… love.

In Fresh Expressions we begin with “loving first.” In fact, the “how” of cultivating new Christian communities is love itself.

We often think of love as doing or performing a specific task based on our emotions. However, in this context let us think about love from the perspective of being. Being present, attentive, being joyful, peaceful, patient, kind and nonjudgmental. Yes, love at its core is showing up and being who we are, wherever we find people. This is practical love, and practical love has to be organized.

Proximity matters. Perhaps that is because the work of love demands ongoing relational movement. In the book The 21^st Century Christian Michael Moynagh and I suggest that people will be loved into our faith by starting not in our Church, but in their world. The big question Christians need to ask is who is in our proximity and how can we love them?

We express love as we really hear and see the people in our community. The first step to loving people is listening to them getting to know them, their cultural context, hopes, dreams, and challenges. This requires time, empathy, discernment, and accessibility.

Cultivating a fresh expression is a journey. Think of your team as a group of adventurers embarking together out into unknown terrain. There is no map per se, no step-by-step plan that if taken will lead to a finished “product.” However, there is a compass. Every step is not known. There will be stop signs, detours, and U-turns. You may never actually arrive at the destination. But each of the following movements, and the journey itself is good, beautiful, and true.

I’m often asked, “what’s the difference between a fresh expression and an outreach ministry?” The simple answer is a fresh expression becomes “church” in its own right. Are the people gathering in this community becoming disciples of Jesus Christ? Do they say, “this is my church” or “these are my people”? One way to understand potential and actual fresh expressions is to locate where you are as a community in the following circles:

Stage One: Listening

The first stage of cultivating fresh expressions within the community is prayerful “double listening.” Double listening includes listening to both “God and context.” Rather than assuming we already know our context, this requires us to take a posture of curiosity and wonder. We look at our community with the soft eyes of a learner. This cannot be overemphasized. 

Stage Two: Love

This is simply about finding ways to be with people in our community, loving and serving them with no agenda. This is about a posture of mutual vulnerability or what I like to call withness. We can never be a “witness,” until we have first been a “withness.” Once we understand this dynamic, from a place of genuine presence, as needs emerge within the community, we can work together to meet those needs. 

Stage Three: Community

The fresh expressions approach is one of long-term incarnational engagement. It is through the repeated patterns of faithful presence that loving and serving becomes authentic community. Time is the fertilizer of relationships. As relationships gain strength, trust begins to build among the group. A profound sense of connectedness begins to form, as we gather around the habitual practices. The community becomes a source of life as we experience the healing of our isolation. Not only do we enjoy being around each other, but it becomes something we look forward too. We start to find an authentic sense of belonging. 

Stage Four: Share Jesus

In this stage, the group begins to intentionally explore the Christian faith. This occurs through a mixture of both formal learning (intentional conversations) and social learning (simply sharing in the rhythms of life together). More mature believers may begin to form mentorships with younger apprentices, spending time outside the group, discipling them through the messy relational process. There is no formal program. We are operating primarily in the realm of improvisation, sensitive to the nudging of the Holy Spirit, responding and adjusting as we go. This kind of evangelism requires us to be sensitive to the fact that God is already at work in every life before we arrive. But this must be balanced with our call to share our faith in Jesus with others. When disciples of Christ are beginning to be formed, we are moving fully into ecclesia, a community centered around the risen Jesus, or simply …  church.

Stage Five: Church

When people are beginning to enter into relationship with Jesus, bend their life to the truth of scripture, and become passionate about self-giving, other-oriented, withness, church is taking shape. This may not appear to be our conventional understanding of church. Each fresh expression may be as diverse as the group or practice it is centered around, but the marks of the church begin to become a kind of compass for the journey: one, holy, apostolic, catholic—in fresh expressions language, we remix those words to speak of the essentials as inward, upward, outward, and ofward. The church is essentially these four interlocking relationships: with one another, with God, with the world, and with the wider church.

Stage Six: Repeat

The potential for multiplication with fresh expressions is huge. In the McDonaldized church we are often focused on durability, something is healthy if it withstands the test of time. However, a close reading of Scripture and Christian movements in history show that “durability” in an institutional sense is not the main concern. There are periods of the church’s life when it flourishes briefly then goes underground or takes a new form, for instance in Jerusalem or Antioch. The greater concern is multiplication. While there is certainly a sameness and stability in the church, she has survived the test of time not by staying the same for long periods of time, but through multiplication in an unending array of contextual variations, while staying rooted in the first principles revealed in Scripture.

The journey describes how most new Christian communities seem to emerge over time.

Of course, this process is messier in practice than this diagram might lead us to believe. It’s not usually a neat or even linear process. The church is often guilty of looking for quick fix solutions, short cuts, and formulas. Thus, we prefer the metaphor of a journey in which there is a series of movements. A team can be moving forwards and backwards, one simple step at a time.

For the most part, the journey of forming Fresh Expressions will happen in some sequence of these stages. Expect the adventure to be filled with unexpected twists, turns, and even setbacks. As we keep moving, following the Spirit, we explore new horizons of possibility. Each movement overlaps with the ones that precede and follow it. We never stop “listening” and “loving,” or “building relationships,” as we journey towards church. It’s also important to note that each movement of the journey is inherently good in itself. They are not a means to an end, rather each dimension is an end in itself.

God wants us to listen. God wants us to love. God wants us to deepen relationships. God wants us to share our faith when appropriate. Even if a church never forms, the journey itself is worth taking and innately fulfilling. We carry with us the learnings and relationships formed over each step that we take together.

When we begin with “loving first” we will always end up right where we are supposed to be.