This was written in 2022 looking back at 2 years of chaotic ministry with Covid-19 being in the foreground and background of everything.
In a pioneering context discipleship can be hard to see. Many of the expressions of pioneering are of one person leading something new. Discipleship seems to be something that discussed in church or talked about in youth settings.
What does a disciple look like? A disciple looks a lot like Jesus, with dirty, dusty feet and a willingness to clean other people’s feet. Walking alongside Jesus and at the same time expressing faith in a way that invites others into the conversation; being in the world but not of the world is in itself an invitation for others to walk alongside Jesus as well.
This essay can only be written with the disruption of the last 18 months of COVID-19. Somehow, somewhere, we seem to have lost our sense of belonging and connectedness not because of the physical barriers but because of the emotional barriers. We are a tactile people, even those who cannot bear touch do so from a privileged position of choice. Choice was ripped away from our communities. But this overarching sense of loss of community is not the only story.[1]The Spirit and Jesus are at work in our neighbourhoods, fermenting a new kind of community in all kinds of unexpected places. To be a disciple in this context is completely different to two years ago. Some leaders discovered they were not disciples and have refashioned their lives in the world. To cultivate community, projects “need not apply here”[2]. More projects will not resolve the deep frustration, isolation, and disconnection that our communities face. Plans and outcomes need to take the back seat and allow God to steer the vessel. With the Godhead in charge deepening roots of connection can be witnessed, and with cute tactics and attractive techniques thrown out of the fast-moving vehicle what is left is relationship. Then a shift can occur in the journey; as the humans begin to pay attention to what the Spirit is forming amongst the church community and its neighbours. When a group of Christians attend to the Spirit, a desire to tend to one another occurs. When a group of Christians begins to tend to one another under the direction of the Holy Spirit then the stories of others are heard carefully.
Heather Morris[3], author of the Tattooist of Auschwitz, was working with elderly people in Australia and began to listen carefully to a man who had a story to tell. That story became that book. She listened to other stories and they became other books. Listening to, engaging with each other and our stories allows us to notice and name those stories. And this gives voice to the Spirit who works without ceasing in our communities. When a space is created, not by a magic formula, expertise or techniques, but by being vulnerable, honest, and raw, accountability and discipleship organically grows.
In this pivotal time of still being under the pandemic of COVID-19 there is much bewilderment, exhaustion and a sense of profound loss. It is as if we are perpetually mourning. It is into this pivot the Spirit speaks; it is not about us, it is not about a church building, it is not about being professionals. It is all about the good news of Jesus Christ. That good news did not stop when the country started working from home, when health care workers were elevated to the status of saints, when we wore new masks that covered the old masks and when we maintained 2 metres from another human being. The Spirit has never stopped calling all creation into the embrace of God’s Kingdom.[4] The world has not been abandoned and there is still kingdom work to be done. There is still a community to be built and it will come as learning, listening, discerning and tasting what the Spirit is growing within and without our church community. Newbiggin[5] quite rightly suggests that a community, centred around Christ and committed to prayer, will explode with love, joy and hope (p. 116).
The two fresh expressions of church that have been chosen for this task are The Table and Home Café. Both are based in England and are led by Idrina and Meg respectively. Both offer hospitality and occur in buildings owned by the church but that is why the similarities end.
The Table is an expression of church together; no matter what religion or no religion and is centred around the table. Table being the setting for communion. It began after years of making relationships in the faiths of Buddhism, Hinduism, Muslim, Sikh and others with the proposition what would it look like if we came together in an Anglican setting and broke bread together. It is a place where the intersection of religions and the Godhead occurs.
Idrina states, “At the table we embrace.”
Russell, Clarkson and Ott concur, “where all peoples are welcomed and the gift of difference is celebrated.”[6]
Conversely Home Cafe began as a business that utilised a church space, with a business plan, with an assumption that a profit would be made.
Meg: once we started telling people the story of how we wanted the cafe to come about it and what we wanted to happen in the cafe we got people on board. so it was important for us to know the story first to explain the story to others. When we explained what we wanted to achieve that caused excitement in other people and they wanted to help.
Explaining the vision can be hard. Lois in his seminal work, states, “to make great work, here’s how you must spend your time: 1% inspiration, 9% perspiration and 90% justification. So being creative as a pioneer is 1%, 9% is perspiration to articulate the vision and 90% of a creative’s time is spent in justification.[7]
Meg states “you have to be able to take risks, yes there are financials and you have to take care of those but you also have to jump in and experiment.”
The month that Home Cafe broke even,
Meg states, “COVID-19 arrived and we were shut down.”
The model of cafe was there to fund other events that Meg and her team wanted to get involved with. However, with the advent of COVID-19 that model was gone. Having the flexibility of a pioneer, as Gerald Arbuckle[8] says, “pioneers are dreamers who do,” Meg broke the mould and restarted as a social project.
“Before we were top level chatters and organisers but now we met the people on one-to-one basis and we could see the needs. We had the fantastic resource of being able to feed people. We started by cooking up what we had in the kitchen and offering it to schools, food banks all the local networking sites – Anyone who is hungry and struggling for food we’ll feed you. Grant money arrived and it ballooned. It enabled us to reach out into the community in a new way.”
COVID-19 is a really interesting pivot for this venture because it challenged their business model. However Home Cafe would not have got to where it is without it, opening up a whole engagement with the community. No longer speaking at strategic level; people were met in their need, the church congregation became involved with caring for people and meeting needs where before as a Pioneer “business” the congregation stayed away.
The Table which is based on meeting Jesus through the hospitality of the Lord’s table with stories, prayer, music and food is an extension of the hugely popular (more popular than Tesco[9]) Messy Church. The people who come are regulars but they only participate in “The Table” and not the other parts of church life. In part this is due to The Table meeting in the parish hall rather than the sanctuary, which may lead to perception of exclusion. When Jesus washed feet he included everyone at the table, by extension this means Judas Iscariot as well. To extend that grace in the context of The Table, would The Table need to move into the church building?
Both of these expressions analysed in Task 2 have one person to head the expression of pioneering. When interviewing them, there was an awareness that discipleship was not practically at the forefront. It may have been an aspiring frontrunner but was not a part of reality. For Home Café there was an awareness that the kitchen staff were not discipled. The ministry is a project, and the people who come to the project are pastorally cared for but there is a distinction between the workers and the people who come.
Oliver wrote, “If you notice anything it leads you to notice more and more.”[10]Shaw concurs and suggests paying attention is something we need to learn, lean into and practice.[11] Feet are smelly, dirty and full of fungi++.[12] Feet are what Jesus washed, he got down into the perspiring, sweaty, smelly feet and washed them. The only person there is witness to that did the same to him was Mary. The Table seems to be tolerated by the local church with just a by-line about it on the parish website. If foot washing were to be a thing in this space possibly what happened in a previous place (for me) would occur.[13]
For me, the humility required to wash another’s feet is the epoch of discipleship, to be in the place of foot washing on a daily basis means the posture of pioneering needs to be less about the person and more about the Godhead. John 3:30,
He must become greater; I must become less. Following as a disciple, focusing on Jesus first and then expressing that grace, love and mercy to one another which leads to desiring all to know Jesus first. The “up, in & out” of discipleship can be formed on our knees in prayer, in scrubbing floors and in washing feet.
Home Café could have been birthed in any building and before COVID-19 operated parallel but different to the existing church. It will be interesting to watch if after COVID-19 the model returns to the parallel but different or whether COVID-19 lessons of community, belonging and being together allow the two distinct ministries to blur the lines more until there is congruence.
The Table needed the anchor of Jesus to begin but as more weight is put on gathering diversity of religion it can be hard to see Jesus in the milieu of other faiths. I would question if the liturgy of communion is enough to set it as Christian in a lifestyle sense and could it be that Jesus is the “thing we have to do for funding/use of building etc.” Could community be made with dialogue of other religions and monotheism of Christianity be held apart, without a polemic or apologetic route? Could foot washing[14] be seen as counter cultural in all cultures and religions and could this or the 21st century equivalent of foot washing be the thing that sets Christianity in pioneering settings apart.
Following Jesus[15] first and then from that posture pioneering brings with it peace, love and grace. That in all things a person can fail but that is ok. Experimenting with seeing things differently, being a pioneer by virtue of their embodied difference can spur a person onto something new.
Personal Journal
The timescale is not yet but the culture of now makes me want to begin. “The stove is hot and the pots are bubbling away[16]” but this – this precious gift from God is in the central part of the stove on a long, slow simmer. I might be 90 before this thing is complete. One of the links for this task sent me to a FB page and of course I got sucked into clicking and clicking and clicking ending up with joining a group then I said enough and left the web behind to open more of Hirsch. A prompt came on my phone: the children you’d think they had never seen snow, in fairness Milo and LeBron the two dogs hadn’t. So I was in Messenger with a thumbs up when I noticed the group joining had been successful but I had to introduce myself. Back to web, back to FB – a few lines on “this” and then off again. Another link sent me back to FB and in the time it had taken me to read a page of Hirsch someone had replied… “I like your idea but for me in full time pioneer ministry I do not have time to develop a rule of life.” Do I need to explain to him? Do I say something pithy about being grounded in prayer, Bible, Jesus? Do I let it go? Gracious Suzie enters stage left and I talk about leaving guilt and shame behind in a rule of life. It is not a ruler; it is a rule and not a stick to beat. I prayed for the man who could so quickly reply with such verbosity but cannot find time to be with Jesus in the morning before anything else.
I feel like I am in a results driven pasta machine where all the strands of spaghetti are being formed but under pressure of being squeezed out like the olive press exudes oil. At this moment I am looking at the not failures exactly but all the forms of rule of life that have inhabited my denomination and fallen away or decreased in importance. Not that “this” is important.
I want to be in a echo pool, swimming at my own pace ruminating on each step over and over as each stroke is made, making as little splash as possible listening to the Father, the Son and the Spirit, listening to the Church Fathers & Mothers, listening to the culture of goodness & social justice, listening to the new, embracing the old. Where will I stop my swim? Where will “this” come out of my head onto paper?
I want to sit in the graveyard of Ardfert cathedral and hear the nothing of a thin place where the roar of traffic is not heard, nor the voices of the dead long buried there. I want to ask into the ether of that thin place questions and listen to the replies.
I remind myself I am called to faithfulness and not success and I wonder. I close my books, save this file and pray that the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob will protect me for the rest of this day.
Appendix 1
++ Just in case the reader thinks feet are not full of stuff
Frequency of the microorganisms occurrence on foot skin.
Microorganisms Isolation Frequency Based on Samples Acquired from Examined People (N = 40)
Bacteria (%) Fungi (%)
Acinetobac haemolyticus2.5 Acremonium sp. 2.5
Bacillus aerius 2.5 Alternaria consortiale 5.0
Bacillus licheniformis5.0 Aspergillus candidus 12.5
Bacillus simplex 7.5 Aspergillus flavus 5.0
Kocuria rhizophila 7.5 Aspergillus fumigatus 25.0
Micrococcus luteus 22.5 Aspergillus niger 12.5
Moellerella wisconsensis 2.5 Cryptococcus adeliensis * 2.5
Neisseria flavescens 2.5 Cryptococcus magnus * 5.0
Pantoea conspicua 5.0 Geotrichum candidum 5.0
Pseudo. graminis10.0 Meyer. quilliermondii * 12.5
Pseudo. oryzihabitans 7.5 Mucor circinelloides 2.5
Pseudo. psychrotolerans 2.5 Naganishia diffluens * 17.5
Pseudomonas putida 7.5 Penicillium citrinum 7.5
Psychrobacter faecalis 2.5 Penicillium corylophilum 5.0
Staphylococcus cohnii 2.5 Penicillium funiculosum 2.5
Staphylococcus epidermidis 5.0 Penicillium glabrum 17.5
Staphylococcus fleurettii 2.5 Penicillium sclerotiorum 2.5
Staphylococcus haemolyticus 90.0 Penicillium sp. (1) 2.5
Staphylococcus hominis 52.5 Penicillium sp. (2) 10.0
Staphylococcus warneri 10.0 Pichia kudriavzevii * 5.0
Staph. xylosus 2.5 Rhodotorula mucilaginosa * 12.5
Wickerhamomyces anomalus * 15.0
[1] https://www.themissionalnetwork.com/author/alan-roxburgh/
[2] From a personal conversation, not verified: more money is thrown at Tallaght than anywhere else and yet deprivation continues to grow.
[3] Morris, Heather personal correspondence.
[4] https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/stories/the-soil-of-community
[5] Newbigin, Leslie, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids, Michigan: W.B. Eerdmans, 1989)
[6] Russell, Letty M., J. Shannon Clarkson, and Kate M. Ott, Just Hospitality: God’s Welcome in a World of Difference, 1st ed (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009) p. 55
[7] Lois, George. Damn good advice(for people with talent!): How To Unleash Your Creative Potential by America’s Master Communicator, (Phaidon Press, London.2012) p. 4
[8] “When I speak of creativity I am referring to ‘dreamers who do’ – that is those rather rare people who are gifted at both dreaming up the new and doing.” Gerald Arbuckle
[9] Lucy Moore reflecting that there were more Messy church events than Tesco stores.
[10] Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).
[11] Lucy Shaw, Breath for the bones, 2007, Thomas Nelson, Nashville. p. 134
[12] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6765982/
++ See Appendix 1
[13] I was invited to join in with the foot washing and being a sinner was invited to have my feet washed but I was asked to wash my feet at home first and wear clean socks – not sure if they knew I changed socks once a week or whether this was asked of everyone but it made me feel like I was only welcome if cleaned first.
[14] Mark Scandrette, Practicing the Way of Jesus: Life Together in the Kingdom of Love Madison, WI: IVP p.190
[15] The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. Colossians 1:15
[16] A favourite phrase of a colleague
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