Pioneer ministers from across the country attended the 2011 Breakout gathering and plans are already in the pipeline to build on its success for the 2012 event.
Keynote speaker Jonny Baker, who heads the CMS Pioneer Mission Leadership Training course, drew on the themes of prophetic imagination, ministry and mission. He looked at
the notion of prophets, prophecy and prophetic and what help that might be, if any, in helping understand pioneer ministry and what it means to be a pioneer in the church in this moment we find ourselves in.
Graham Cray, Archbishops' Mission and Fresh Expressions Team Leader, contributed to the gathering with a talk focused on why pioneering matters.
It matters from my point of view because I really do believe that the Gospel is the power of God for everyone who has faith and not just for certain groups that church, as it exists, can get to... the only reason I'm in this business is an absolutely passionate belief that the Gospel transform destinies, transforms lifestyles and will transform communities if you give it half a chance.
He went on to highlight the 'continual surprise' of the Spirit of God and how what we are called to do is to see Christ's body take appropriate local shape. His subsequent challenge was,
The world is changing, what appropriate shape should the church of Jesus Christ take so that it can engage with this context, these people, this complexity, this new set of questions?
He emphasised that this involved 'an envisioning of the whole church' and not fresh expressions of church in isolation.
I don’t think we have yet changed the default setting, we [Fresh Expressions] can no longer be ignored but I think if we went away I know where the default setting would remain. There is more to do.
Breakout – organised with the support of Church Army, Fresh Expressions, the Centre for Pioneer Learning in Cambridge, and the Methodist Church's VentureFX pioneering ministries scheme – was held at High Leigh in Hoddesdon.
RSS
Podcast feed