I see lots of activity presently in church planting, or what the Anglicans and Methodists call ‘fresh expressions of church.’ There are many larger churches with strategies for planting many new congregations throughout Britain. The development of emerging churches sparks great excitement or concern in equal measure.

But are we creating a safety net for Christians who are falling out of our ‘evangelical system’, or are they truly fishing nets?

I write this out of my experience over ten years of planting a church called The Net in Huddersfield, whose express aim was to reach the majority of the town who had no contact with any church. Here in Cambridge, as well as teaching and consulting, with a handful of friends, I am trying to plant a church that connects with sports people. I know from my personal experience how both exciting and challenging it is to create good fishing nets.

I was talking to some church leaders from a local church recently who had created a new church congregation on a Wednesday night to reach unchurched people. I asked them who was now coming to this congregation. They told me it was nearly exclusively fringe people from the Sunday church who found the normal services dull and sterile. I do think there is a place for safety nets, but my main concern is that often we think we are creating fishing nets, but soon discover they are unused nets and our focus shifts as Christians start to join and change the vision and values of this new group.

Does it matter?

Our world and its culture are changing very quickly. We may debate how much our nation is post-modern (I suspect not as much as we are often led to believe), but it is clear it is rapidly becoming post-Christian. Callum Browne sums this up when he wrote, “What is taking place is not merely the continued decline of organised Christianity, but the death of a culture which formerly conferred Christian identity upon the British people as a whole.”1 This is much more than declining church attendances, but the wholesale change of our culture.

This doesn’t mean we are any less spiritual as a nation, as new research from the Christian Research Association shows (visit http://www.christian-research.org.uk/). In a recent poll, 73% of people asked considered themselves as searchers, by which they meant someone who had reconsidered their core values or thought about the big questions of life in the last year. If someone had a church background, this often led to them looking to church, prayer, faith or the Bible, but if they had no church background (i.e. unchurched), then none of these ‘church-type’ things were on their radar at all.

This huge change has created new generations with very little contact with our churches. The research of Leslie Francis and George Richter brought this home to many of us.2  They showed in 1991 that around 10% of people were in church regularly, and 10% were on the fringe of the church. Of the rest 40% were people with some church background who had stopped going to church. This group, subsequently called the dechurched by others, could be evenly split. Twenty percent, termed the open dechurched had left for no particular reason, maybe simply getting out of the habit of church going or moving to a new area etc., but would be open to returning to church. The other 20% clearly knew why they had left and had no intention of returning. It may have been a falling out with church leaders or upset at changes made. They have been called the closed dechurched or dischurched by one of my students.

The other 40% were people with no church background whatsoever apart from occasional attendance at a wedding or funeral. These figures revealed that 60%, a majority of the British population were not looking to coming to church ever.

These findings were supported by Tearfund’s research on church-going in 2007.3 Their figures were very similar to Francis and Richter’s except in one vital area. The newer figures suggest that the proportion of open dechurched people has declined from 20% to 5%. This should raise alarm bells for us, as historically, this is the group that we are best and most effective at reaching. Much of the success of things like guest services, Alpha or ‘Back to Church Sunday’ are dependent on this group. Yet the research is telling us that now 66% of the adult population are closed to attending church.

The Tearfund report comments that, “this majority (the 66%) presents a major challenge to the churches. Most of them are unreceptive and closed to attending church: church-going is simply not on their agenda.” As leaders we need to understand that people are not sitting in their houses thinking ‘if only our local church would make their services more contemporary/ relevant / with better preaching/child friendly we will go’. We are simply not on their agendas at all.

These figures also hide one other important piece of information from some separate research. 60% of 60 year olds have some church background, 40% of 40 year olds and 20% of 20 year olds. So typically the older generations make up more of the dechurched people and the younger generations dominate the unchurched, and they are likely to be the growing group simply because of their age profile.

The Tearfund research concludes that, “this research helps us to understand that, the further people are from church (in terms of churchgoing), the less likely they are to attend in the future. Mission opportunities are very different when to step over the church threshold is an unknown experience.”

Whatever you make of these figures, I hope you see that we cannot keep doing what we have been doing because the situation has changed so much. Loren Mead commented prophetically in the 1980s: “We understood mission one way and organised life to accomplish it. We have awakened to find out the mission moved on us. To keep focusing on mission, we have to turn the furniture around and face a different direction. We may even have to move into another room.” 4 This change is not new, but has been experienced by the church since the Acts of the Apostles and throughout church history. There is no one model we can adopt that will provide us with effortless solutions, but I think there may be important principles we can apply and develop in our own contexts.

1. Public worship probably isn’t the best starting point.

Our immediate reaction to all this is often to create a new church service with better (or more relevant) preaching or worship or liturgy depending on our theology. Maybe we could even hold it in a coffee shop rather than a church building. But who are we likely to attract? Surely it will be dechurched people who are basically looking for an improved product from their past experiences. We even collude with this by promising church like you have never experienced before. If we truly want to be missionary and connect with the majority of our population, this will not work. When we started the Net Church in Huddersfield, we did not have any worship service for the first nine months, and I am not sure we left this long enough.

We are uncovering a pattern with churches that are connecting with unchurched people. This seems to begin with Christians, with a clear calling, listening to what God is saying to them about their community. This, over time, then leads to some kind of loving service which involves Christians connecting with people in their community or network through some means. Out of this community is formed a group in which people get to know each other and in which the Christians share their story. From this, evangelism and disciple making begin as people start responding to what they hear, and activities like prayer and Bible study begin. Finally, evolving public worship is created which is not purely an invite to worship with us in the mode we like, but a true organic attempt to create worship that reflects this new Christian community. Hopefully this worship will be attractive (whatever we mean by that), but what matters most is that it is transformative within that culture.

This whole process may take up to four years to develop. This doesn’t mean that the Christians are not worshipping and praying along the way, but it demonstrates the commitment required for today’s missionary endeavour. There will be many pressures along the way to circumvent this process, often from Church Councils wanting to see instant results. The danger is that the fringe can give you much quicker results, but this simply masks the underlying missionary need. One of the best examples of true missionary worship is from Somewhere Else .5  This is a Methodist church plant in Liverpool which is based around bread making.

2. Modification of the existing is not enough.

I do not think in our present circumstances that God is calling us to modify slightly what we are doing. If we are truly going to reach the majority of our nation, we will need to be more radical. I think that theologically Acts 1-15 gives us some important clues. In these early days, the church has to grapple with how it needed to change to connect with the Gentiles. We see the centre shift from Jerusalem, the story moves from a focus on Peter to Paul, the church goes west and, most importantly, church is done differently amongst the Gentiles. Acts does not show the apostles rolling out a Jerusalem model church which is then recreated in Antioch and elsewhere. Despite the important principles Acts 2 gives us, it is not a blueprint of how to do church in its details. We need to be investing in the important work of how the principles work out in our local context. One of the biggest dangers is that we do not plant churches, but clone them. We take another so called successful model and try to make it work in our context. It does not and will not. It is interesting to note that initial research done on larger growing churches suggest that they reach 4% unchurched people. The majority they connect with come from other churches or have church backgrounds.

Maybe we need a ‘Peter moment’ - that life changing moment in Acts 10 when he sees a sheet being lowered down full of unclean animals and God tells him to get up, kill and eat. It changed his whole outlook on his life, calling and ministry. Maybe we need a similar moment from God which helps us see that we cannot simply modify what we are doing, but that we need a paradigm shift.

3. Mission shapes the church.

I spoke to two ministers considering church planting recently with teams from their church. In our conversations, I suggested some areas or networks that were crying out for the gospel. The answer that I received back was clearly that this was not the kind of place the team wanted to go to! They wanted to make sure that where they went and what they did suited their needs.

This is one example of what others have termed church shaped mission rather than mission shaped church. 6   The danger is that we shape things depending on our own wishes, desires and preferences. We would think it strange if missionaries we sent overseas recreated their home church in Africa, Asia or Latin America, and yet we don’t ask the same contextual questions within our own country. Tim Dearborn famously commented that, “it is not the church of God who has a mission, but the God of mission who has a church.” God is not calling us to create mission-flavoured churches or fresh expressions of worship, but he is calling people to do whatever is required to enable unchurched people to find Christ and become his disciples. Are we really brave enough to let the mission shape what we might become?

4. This might change us.

We tend to think how this might impact the unchurched, but we also need to understand this will change us as leaders and our congregations. My own experience of the last ten years is that this has changed me dramatically. It has challenged many of my presuppositions and forced me to rethink some of my practices. It has certainly made me a lot more humble about what I know! Often it seems to be less about doing change and more about being changed.

As I talk to church leaders I have found John 12.24 to be a very challenging and yet important verse: “I tell you the truth, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” This gospel principle of dying to live often leads to discussions about what cherished activities or ways may need to die to enable new things to begin to take place. Often ministers say to me they would love to start something new to connect with unchurched people, but do not have the spare time, capacity or resources. This leads then to difficult conversations about what they may need to let go of to enable something new to live. It may be a cherished service, an established group, a successful ministry, but maybe the call is for it to die to allow something new to live.  That is hard for us to hear and even harder sometimes to manage as those involved tenaciously hold on to what they have.

I love the famous words of the Catholic missionary Vincent Donovan when he was asked about how to reach the youth of America. 7   He replied, “Do not try to call them back to where they were, and do not try to call them to where you are, beautiful as that place may seem to you. You must have the courage to go with them to a place that neither you nor they have been before.”

That will change us, as with those we are reaching, we find ourselves in new places, facing new situations, trusting together that God will show us the way.

5. Welcome the three eccentrics

Who are the Philips in our churches? They are the dangerous deacons who may take us into places that we have never been before. We need to ensure we allow space for these kinds of people who are often seen as the mavericks or the ones on the edge. They are not necessarily in church every week, or seen as the ‘right’ types. How do we encompass them into what we are doing while still keeping them dangerous?

How can we discover the Corneliuses? These are the people outside the church who may have something important to say to us from God.

Finally who are the Pauls who want to do it differently? How are we identifying, training and sending out our local missionaries. Can you identify these three eccentrics in your situation?

6. The challenge of discipleship.

In the Great Commission in Matthew 28, the command in the Greek is not to go (it is more in terms of ‘in your going’), but to make disciples. I think working with the unchurched that this is a massive challenge. As they have no church background, living Jesus’ way is a big deal in all areas of life. We need to be discovering creative ways to help them become whole life disciples of Jesus. It will not be enough to leave them and hope they pick it up as they go along. George Barna suggests that discipleship will need to be simple in its nature, relational in its emphasis and transformational in its outcomes.

So where do we start with all this. I find Alan Roxburgh really helpful in his book which is aimed at helping local leaders and their churches find solutions to the issues we have been looking at.8 He suggests there are five steps which may take a couple of years to go through.

1. Awareness of what is happening in culture and society and its impact on the church.
2. An understanding of why this is happening.
3. An evaluation of what we are already doing in church and how it matches up to what needs to be done.
4. Experimentation at the edges. Don’t change everything overnight, but maybe pick one area you can change now.
5. Commitment. Out of this successful experiment, the church can move forward into a new future.

None of these are easy or comfortable, but maybe God is calling us into a new missionary period. Back in 1927, Roland Allen wrote these words calling the church to a new paradigm in its mission overseas, and maybe we now need to apply it in our own country: “What is necessary is faith. What is needed is the kind of faith which, uniting a person to Christ, sets them on fire. Such a person can believe that others finding Christ will be set on fire also. Such a person can see that all that is required to consolidate and establish that expansion is the application of the simple organisation of the church.”9

David Male is Tutor in Pioneer Ministry Training at Ridley Hall and Westcott House, Cambridge and Fresh Expressions Advisor for Ely Diocese. He is an Associate Missioner for Fresh Expressions.

He has written Church Unplugged (Authentic) about how to create new churches and has a blog on which he writes about these issues at http://davemale.typepad.com/churchunplugged/

1. Brown, C.G., The Death of Christian Britain. (Routledge)

2. Francis, L and Richter, P., Gone but not Forgotten. (DLT)

3. Churchgoing in the UK- A research report from Tearfund on church attendance in the UK.

4. Mead, L., The Once and Future Church. (Alban Institute)

5. Glasson, B., I am somewhere else. (DLT)

6. Mission Shaped Church Report 2004. (CHP)

7. Donovan, V., Christianity Rediscovered. (SCM)

8. Roxburgh, A., The Missional Leader. (Jossey-Bass)

9. Allen, R., The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church (Lutterworth Press)