I have been reading about and listening to some blogs around “Fresh Expressions,” a Church of England initiative to reach out to the de-churched and the unchurched around them. Church planters and churches are encouraged to look at the people groups around them who don’t know the Gospel of Jesus. They then seek ways to serve them, live their lives among them, and to live out the love of God in Jesus in their midst.

Out of these relationships grow diverse groups of church. To quote the Archbishop if Canterbury, Rowan Williams, “[C]hurch is what happens when people encounter the Risen Jesus and commit themselves to sustaining and deepening that encounter in their encounter with each other.” No one expression of church – traditional, contemporary, liturgical, surfer, children – is the only expression. Each is a fresh expression.

Click on http://www.cofe.anglican.org/info/papers/mission_shaped_church.pdf for a wonderful book, Mission-shaped church: church planting and fresh expressions of church in a changing context. How can we be church in our new context, here in Winnipeg? Let me know what you think about that.