href="#litres_trial_promo">Murphy, 1995, pp. 325–57). Thus there is ‘a divine self-investment in self-organizing processes’ (Gregersen, 2008, p. 92).4
A fourfold model
The story of fresh expressions in Britain uses a model developed by Benyamin Lichtenstein and Donde Plowman. The model describes four conditions for ‘new emergent order’ within an organization (2009, p. 620). The first, disequilibrium, occurs when a system’s behaviour is substantially disrupted. An outside threat or new activities within push the system beyond its existing and normally accepted range of behaviours. The second condition is amplifying actions. These enable a small fluctuation in one part of the system to bring unanticipated and substantial changes to the other parts. As information jumps channels, becomes amplified and moves quickly through the system, small changes can cascade unexpectedly.
The third condition is recombination/self-organization. When new behaviours are repeatedly amplified, the system may reach the limit of its capacity. At this threshold, it can either collapse or reorganize. Self-organization (or emergence) occurs when agents or resources within the system recombine in new patterns of interaction, which tend to improve the system’s functioning. The fourth condition is stabilizing feedback, which ‘dampens’ or slows amplification and prevents change spinning the system out of control.
Disequilibrium
In Britain, the fresh-expressions story has its immediate origins in new elements that began to destabilize the status quo. Church was understood in conventional terms, but then some people started to express church differently.
Growing dis-ease with church
According to Goldstein, Hazy and Silberstang, disequilibrium typically begins with a growing realization that ‘business as usual’ does not work (2010, p. 105). In the British church, this realization – though by no means new – built up steam during the 1990s and intensified in the 2000s. There was mounting interest in how church should respond to the postmodern world, books such as Michael Riddell’s Threshold of the Future, published in 1998, and later blogs were highly critical of the existing church, and the emerging church conversation had growing influence.
In addition was the stark evidence that church attendance was in decline. Many congregations and clergy could see this in their own churches and experienced the consequences in repeated cycles of reorganization, designed to maintain the church in the face of falling clergy numbers. Christian Research reported that average Sunday attendance in England had fallen from 11.7 per cent of the population in 1979 to 7.5 per cent in 1998. The drop among young people was especially dramatic. Brierley suggested that if the current rate of decline continued the percentage going to church in 2016 would be 0.9 per cent. The church would have ‘bled to death’ (Brierley, 2000b, pp. 27–8).5 Though the rate slowed in the early 2000s, the percentage attending church in 2005 was down to 6.3 per cent (Brierley, 2006, p. 20).
According to an extensive Tearfund survey, in 2007 a quarter of UK adults went to church once a year or more – 15 per cent once a month. Among the remainder, 6 per cent belonged to other faiths; 32 per cent had never been to church (except for baptisms, weddings and funerals) and expressed little inclination to go in the future (the ‘closed unchurched’); 28 per cent attended church in the past, had stopped doing so and were not very or at all likely to go in the future (the ‘closed dechurched’). Thus two-thirds of the population appeared most unlikely to attend church on current trends. Only 6 per cent of the survey said they did not go to church but were very or fairly likely to do so (Ashworth, Research Matters and Farthing, 2007, pp. 5–7). This set out clearly the scale of the mission task in Britain.
More poignant were the experiences of many churchgoers themselves. The phenomenon of church leaving came firmly on to the agenda. Francis and Richter reported that nearly half of all church leavers found it increasingly hard to believe, did not feel part of the church, disliked the hypocrisy they saw in other churchgoers and claimed that church failed to connect with the rest of their lives. Around two-fifths said that their participation in church had become a chore, they found church boring and they were not interested in the activities on offer. Three-quarters believed that they did not need to go to church to be a Christian (Francis and Richter, 2007, pp. 318–32).
Many of the touted strategies to promote church growth seemed to bear limited fruit. Among evangelicals especially, power evangelism, seeker services, the purpose-driven church and other models appeared to work in relatively few cases. Two notable ‘successes’ were the Alpha course and church planting-at-scale particularly by Holy Trinity, Brompton in London (HTB). Other churches, however, found that the HTB church planting model demanded too many resources and that Alpha often yielded diminishing returns: numbers fell when the course was repeated.
Combinations of difference
Against this background were spontaneous moves to express church in new ways. Goldstein, Hazy and Silberstang (2010, p. 111) note how novelty occurs through the unexpected combination of different elements. They quote Kary Mullis, Nobel Laureate in chemistry: ‘In a sense, I put together elements that were already there, but that is what inventors always do. You can’t make up new elements, usually. The new element, if any, it was the combination, the way they were used.’
Novel combinations characterized many new expressions of church before the Mission-shaped Church report. Groups experimenting with alternative worship joined elements from popular culture, such as multimedia, to worship in combinations not seen before. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Nine O’clock Service (NOS) in Sheffield – a young adults’ congregation that peaked at 600 – put alternative worship firmly on the map. Despite the demise of NOS following allegations of sexual and emotional abuse by its leader, a variety of groups such as Oxford Youth Works and Grace Church in West London continued to bring elements from contemporary culture and the Christian tradition together in innovative forms of worship. In January 2011, www.alternativeworship.org listed 37 groups in the UK that were within the alternative worship ethos.
By 2000 perhaps up to 100 youth and teenage congregations of various kinds had emerged (Moynagh, 2001, p. 110). They included the ‘Soul Survivor’ network of youth churches and Revelation Youth Church in Chichester. Many were combining food, ingredients from contemporary culture, informal interaction and Christian practices in ways that, for the time, were strikingly new. Some were entirely spontaneous and unconnected with groups elsewhere, such as a couple who rented temporarily a vacant vicarage on a council estate, got to know some of the local teenagers (who had never been to church), invited them regularly into their lounge and a year later commented, ‘I suppose we’ve started an emerging church.’ For them lounge, church and unauthorized leadership was an unexpected combination.
Other novel combinations included the founding in 1998 of a separate congregation for people who had been through the Alpha course at Holy Trinity, Margate, uniting the concepts of Alpha and being a congregation for possibly the first time. Under the remit of Urban Expressions, in the late 1990s church plants in London’s East End brought together home, food and worship in a manner that was certainly not new to the Christian tradition, but was not
