Dialogue: Bishop Graham Cray

09 Aug 2010

Bishop Graham Cray heads up the Fresh Expressions team in the UK and visited Christchurch last month as the keynote speaker for the Fresh Mission conference. Spanky Moore caught up with him to see what Fresh Expressions is all about.



Nowadays, ‘mission’ is a slippery term that seems to mean anything to anyone. What do you think the church needs to rediscover?

Oh, without a doubt, that mission is the activity of God. Mission is seeing what God is doing and joining in. If there’s one aspect that we’re thin on, it’s safeguarding the integrity of creation. But I don’t for one moment think that means we all should become environmental activists instead of leading people to live in faith with Jesus. We lead people to live in faith with Jesus knowing that in him they are restored to the proper stewardship of creation that they were made to have and do it right. There’s nothing so green as evangelism.

You’ve said that we’ve got to stop thinking of evangelism and discipleship as two different things. What do you mean by that?
I mean that any call to become a follower of Jesus Christ and receive his salvation actually does involve both of those things. It’s impossible to live the way of Jesus without having received forgiveness and entered into all that baptism means. At the same time, the purpose of life is not birth. Birth is the beginning of life, and that life in Christian terms is meant to be the whole of life, every dimension of life, life-long: being a follower of Jesus. And that’s not an optional extra; it’s not super-Christianity – it just goes with the territory.

You head up the Fresh Expressions team in the UK, and you’ve had big success over a short period of time. What exactly is a fresh expression?
A ‘fresh expression’ is shorthand for a Fresh Expression of Church. A fresh expression is the planting of a new congregation of church, often being a new congregation of an existing church. A fresh expression is totally designed to reach people who are not being reached by existing churches, and in such a way that it will stay appropriate to the culture that it’s trying to reach. So, it’s a church to reach the places that the current church doesn’t.

So, what’s the best way for a parish in our diocese to help birth a ‘fresh expression’?
It begins with a lot of prayerful listening. The two most common mistakes are that people don’t listen to God about their context and just clone something that seems to work somewhere else – or they start putting on a worship service that they hope other people will like, rather than doing the longer haul of building real relationships. So, start by listening to God. Prayerfully listen to the community and identify what it is you might do and where.