Why Fresh Expressions of Church?
Part Three: A Vine of Many Branches
Let me start with the disappointing news right up front… fresh expressions is not the next “save the denomination plan.” It is not a “church growth” strategy. The end goal is not “butts and bucks” or people in the pews and full offering plates. And I understand if you want to stop reading now.
Okay, now that we got that out of the way! Fresh Expressions is a way of living incarnationally in the world. It is about people. People who will likely never step foot in our inherited churches. People that you know among your own family, friends, and coworkers. People that you love.
While the denominational impulse is often self-preservation, the way of Jesus is about self-donation. Fresh Expressions is grounded in the “ecclesiology of gift,” and to learn more about that, please see Michael Moynagh’s newest book, Giving the Church.
Many people who teach about the “why” of fresh expressions (and similar movements) often start with statistics about church decline and denominational erosion. I care about denominational decline. I care about the inherited church. I want to see people in the pews of the church I lead every Sunday morning. In fact, that’s largely why I have been cultivating fresh expressions for over fifteen years. But that’s simply not the “why.” It’s not the right motivation.
I wrote Deep Roots, Wild Branches in 2019. The book has become a well-used resource within the Fresh Expressions movement. It was there that I first began to articulate in writing what I had been teaching for years. The greatest motivation for Fresh Expressions was a Biblically grounded response to the epidemic of loneliness.
Before the onset of the pandemic, I was starting to recognize in my own ministry the prevalence of loneliness. People are connected through digital flows, and yet isolated, longing for authentic connection. Human beings of all races, ages, and socio-economic status experience the soreness of isolation to some extent.
On May 3, 2023, United States Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy released an advisory titled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.” The report details the rise of this epidemic and the significant mental and physical health consequences, including increased risks of heart disease, stroke, dementia, depression, and premature death. Dr. Murthy describes the healing effects of social connection and community and calls for action to address this crisis and emphasizes the importance of building social connections to improve overall well-being.[1]
Additionally, Murthy summarized the data pointing to the marked decline of religious affiliation since the 1970’s and noted its role in increased isolation and loneliness. The advisory suggests that religious or faith-based groups can be a source of regular social contact, serve as a community of support, provide meaning and purpose, create a sense of belonging around shared values and beliefs, which was also associated with reduced risk-taking behaviors.
Long before Covid19 and “social distancing” this spiritual sickness was destroying more lives than any plague in human history. The virus of loneliness that had been spreading beneath the surface was unmasked during the pandemic. The only cure for this soul sickness is true community, or “social solidarity.”
Although we have never been more connected in human history, we have never been more alone. Perhaps the supercomputers in our pockets that connect us in blazing 5G speed only provide the illusion of connection and a superficial form of relationship.
In the last post, I described the work of sociologist Manuel Castells and the new emerging social structure of the “network society.” This society is based less on locality, and more centered around flows of information and technology. A form of microelectronics-based connectivity allows us to establish distanced contact at the speed of digital light, but it also results in deterritorialization, or the loss of commitment to a place and the bundle of relationships it provides.[2]
In The Anxious Generation, sociologist Jonathan Haidt explores the impact of digital technology on our youth, documenting the rise in adolescent mental health issues, particularly among Generation Z, due to smartphone use and social media. Haidt suggests we inadvertently ran a mass experiment on our children by giving unrestricted access to the internet, powerfully addictive devices, and by overparenting in terms of not allowing them to socialize through unsupervised outdoor play.[3]
Haight notes a roughly 150 percent increase in depressive episodes among U.S. teens. The increase in mental illness among Generation Z is concentrated in a psychiatric category known as internalizing disorders. These are disorders in which one feels strong distress inwardly, including emotions like anxiety, fear, sadness, and hopelessness. Those experiencing these symptoms often withdraw from social engagement.[4]
Robert Putnam, documented the erosion of social capital and neighborly good. He explores the diminishing connections within communities and the negative implications for society. In the emerging social milieu, clubs, civic organizations, and churches are left vacant, Putnam describes this shift as “bowling alone.”[5]
Surgeon General Murthy suggests that small, meaningful acts of connection can make a big impact, and that faith communities can and must play a role in this. In this primarily secular analysis, religious communities are seen for the benefit of the deep relationships that are formed within them. Amid the increasing trends toward polarization, churches can be one of the few places where people of different perspectives and political views can work together for the common good. The depth of these relationships can lead to increased mental health.
Wellbeing—physical, mental, spiritual, and social—was the focus of Jesus’s ministry. Jesus didn’t just love people in a broad sense that lacked particularity. He loved real people, with real names, real gifts, real struggles, and real needs. He loved real families, in real places, in real communities, in a particular time and social reality. In the timeless words of theologian Howard Thurman, Jesus, came from a “disinherited” people, with their “backs against the wall.”[6] His ministry was one of healing, among those experiencing poverty, oppression, and social isolation.
Jesus stood up in the synagogue at Nazareth and stated that he was the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised” (Luke 4:18-19 King James). As Jesus went about doing those activities a community sprung up around him called the church. A community where the lonely found connection, where the “brokenhearted were healed.”
Matthew 9:36 reports that when Jesus “saw the crowds, he had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” The Greek word for compassion, splanchnizomai (splagchnizomai), means to be moved as to one’s bowels, hence, to be stirred to the guts. The bowels were thought to be the seat of love and empathy. So, Jesus has a gut-wrenching love that inspires him to act.
To describe the overarching health crisis as an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation” is to see the plentiful harvest with the eyes of Jesus, the people “harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36). Jesus offers an indictment of the shepherds, apparently, asleep on the job. The religious leadership of Jesus’s day seemed more concerned with upholding the ritual system than tending the relationships between God and neighbor. Perhaps they had collapsed into a state of compassion fatigue, which Jesus called “hardness of heart.”
How exactly did Jesus’s ministry heal the brokenhearted? He did this through the creation of a community. The unbounded kindness of God (Psalm 145:8-9) manifests in Jesus’ ministry of compassion. The quality of God’s being is expressed through immersion in human vulnerability and suffering, taking on communal expression. The church as the “body of Christ” (1 Cor 12:27) in the world is an enfleshment of Christ’s own compassion. The continued embodiment of this compassion is a gift. It is in fact the ultimate gift.
Amid what some have referred to as a traumatized age, clergy quit the ministry in droves. Those in other people-helping professions fair no better, reporting high levels of burnout. Churches across all mainline denominations are declining and thousands close their doors every year.
This is perhaps the saddest news of all, for it is the church alone that has a unique gift that can heal our aching isolation. The church as the body of Christ is eucharistic in nature: it is to be blessed, broken, and given to the world.
The quality of community that is offered in the church cannot be described easily. Perhaps it is better to reappropriate the biblical word… koinonia (Phil 2: 1-3). This is a kind of community defined by a depth of interdependence grounded in meaningful relationships. It is a community where we come to know what Thomas Merton called “the oneness we already are.”
Yet unfortunately most people see the church as a place of harm rather than healing. One in three Americans have experienced religious trauma.[7] The last place they would go to find healing from isolation and pain is the church.
The likelihood that most people will ever walk into the sanctuary of a church building on Sunday morning grows slimmer. Generationally, more and more people are completely disconnected from a faith community of some kind.
Within this scenario, the church can offer the world the greatest gift of all, in fact the only gift we can offer that no other organization can—communal life in Jesus. The life that heals our isolation.
Might fresh expressions be a twenty-first century way to bring healing amid an epidemic of loneliness?
The core motivation of Fresh Expressions—the big “why”—is sharing the gift of community with people in the normal spaces and rhythms of a lonely world.
[1] Murthy, Vivek. Office of the Surgeon General (OSG). Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community. Washington (DC): US Department of Health and Human Services; 2023–. PMID: 37792968.
[2] Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), xvii–xviii.
[3] Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. London: Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, 2024.
[4] Haight, 22-23.
[5] Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Revised and Updated. New York London Toronto Sydne New Delhi: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2020.
[6] Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (Boston: Beacon Press, 2022), 11.
[7] Slade, Darren M. Adrianna Smell, Elizabeth Wilson, and Rebekah Drumsta, “Percentage of U.S. Adults Suffering from Religious Trauma: A Sociological Study,” SHERM 5, no. 1, Global Center for Religious Research (Summer 2023): 1–28.