Abstract
In 2001 Steve Taylor, the founding leader of Graceway Church, a form of emerging church based in the outskirts of Auckland, New Zealand, studied as part of his doctoral dissertation how eleven alternative worship communities in the UK were responding to cultural change. Eleven years later, Taylor revisited his work to find that only five of the original eleven were still running. In that time a lot had changed in the alternative worship scene in the UK, most significantly the establishment of the Fresh Expressions organization and the publication of the influential report Mission-Shaped Church (Church of England, 2004), both of which came with archiepiscopal support from Rowan Williams. Until recently, Taylor was the principal of the Knox Centre for Ministry and Leadership in Dunedin, New Zealand. He is now the director of Angel Wings, an organization that resources the church in creative ministry and mission. This book is the culmination of that research and is a first—a longitudinal study of these communities, which he calls “first expressions” (5).
The book is divided into four parts. In part 1 he draws on Janet Soskice’s anthropological eschatology of kinship as articulated in The Kindness of God (2007). She highlights a birthing, body-ing forth, and telos of humanity centered on Christ. Taylor takes these metaphors and develops them in relation to culture, church, and innovation in the light of his empirical study. He returns to these metaphors throughout the book.
Part 2 is particularly engaging, as Taylor draws out learning from his eleven research locations in relation to ecclesiology and sustainability, splitting them into those that are still going (tried) and those that have ceased (tried and died). From the Philippian church (planted by Paul but now having ceased), he develops a “woven ecclesiology” (90–91), which emphasizes the value to the wider church of those that have ceased, thus reframing the question of sustainability in fresh expressions of church away from the questions of longevity, numbers, and finance.
In part 3 Taylor focuses on the development of the Fresh Expressions organization, which, coming after the first expressions examples he cited, both draws on them and resources them with the aim of encouraging more first and fresh expressions experiments. In this regard Fresh Expressions is a first expression on an organizational level. He examines the organization in relation to Rowan Williams’s ecclesiology, leadership models, and historic mission movements that have shaped the British church.
Part 4 highlights the themes of authenticity, ambient witness, creativity, sacramentality, and governance, all of which have arisen from his empirical research, explored through the credal framework of the church being one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. Ambient witness is not directive but creative and challenges paradigms of our secular age. There is a huge amount of deep missiological thinking in here, concluding that innovation is what makes church “church,” enabling it to remain faithful to this credal structure (232).
This book is particularly interesting to those studying new Christian communities such as Taylor’s five fresh expressions for its unique contribution regarding sustainability and about the resourcing structure of the Fresh Expressions organization. Taylor also offers a valuable addition to theologies of innovation.