Mark Russell urges a Break out into mission

15 Apr 2009

Church Army's Chief Executive Mark Russell spoke boldly of his vision for mission and the church at the Breakout Conference, at Ridley Hall in Cambridge, just prior to Easter.

The audience included members of Church Army, the Methodist Church, Salvation Army, Ordained Pioneers, and those either training for Ordained Pioneer Ministry or considering it. Russell said he was inspired by their "yearning to get to the de-churched and the non-churched … to take the Christian Gospel to places it hasn’t yet been to."

Russell praised the delegates for attending the conference precisely because they recognise the urgency of the situation: "the church is one generation away from extinction … the church needs to plant new churches relevant to the culture they find themselves in." He also reflected on the fact that that the church sometimes makes the training of pioneers sound like a new initiative, when Church Army - for one - has been training pioneers for 127 years!

He highlighted Church Army's new Foundation Degree in Evangelism, which has been designed as a model of learning to train Evangelists even as they are pioneering a new project. Russell gave examples of Church Army Evangelists working in poor, and often violent urban areas, amongst asylum seekers, the homeless community, and the hundreds of broken and hopeless people crammed together on housing estates.

He also expressed, once again, his genuine fear that people believe they are creating a Fresh Expression of church simply because they have started a coffee morning, or have added a Messy Church to their weekly rota of events.

Recognising the fact that he is middle class and white, he warned of the dangers of being drawn to 'pioneering' Fresh Expressions that catered too much for established churches, rather than the people they should be trying to reach. And he outlined three real needs to be considered if the church was to truly 'break out' and take mission to the masses: to "get theology right"; to inspire true "leadership", and to pay very careful attention to the "location" of pioneering ministries (and the cultures of the communities therein).

Russell concluded with a vision: that the term 'Fresh Expressions' would be redundant within 20 years, because church planting and fresh expressions would become part of the "very DNA of the church."