 And to talk about fresh expressions, me and Matt, when we were talking about this, he talked about how y'all call it new spaces, sometimes call it microchurch. I just call it fresh expressions so much that I didn't think I could translate it over. My brain would just say fresh expressions. So I'm just gonna call it fresh expressions tonight and just know that that's the same thing we're talking about is these new forms. People that wouldn't come to church Sunday mornings. So I'm gonna just talk a bit about it tonight, going to introduce kind of why fresh expressions are needed, how they are often started, share some stories, share some common example of fresh expressions, all that stuff. And we'll have some time for conversation and you can put questions in the chat box too as things are happening. And we'll just have a good time for the next hour and hopefully you'll walk away with a good picture of what fresh expressions are and how they get started. And hopefully there'll be something in here that's helpful for y'all. So the first question, I just got totally dropped and came back, y'all there? Yeah, we can see you now. Wow, that was weird. It just totally logged out and logged back in. Okay, hopefully that won't happen again. Let me change my internet connection just in case. So I'm gonna freeze for one second. All right, I've moved over to the 5G. Hopefully that won't happen again. Sorry y'all. The Owens internet issues somehow got transferred to me. All right, cool. So definition of a fresh expression. So fresh expressions is a movement that started in the UK in 2004. And it was a movement of new forms of church. And it started as gatherings that connected with people who weren't a part of any other church, but came to these new forms of church. And so fresh expressions, there's a kind of formal definition that I can all share my screen and you can see it. So it's a new form of church for those not connected in any church. So they often meet in places and with folks who they might meet in places out in the public and put in non-traditional places and they might meet in non-traditional ways. And we'll kind of get into more of what fresh expressions look like. But so the reason why fresh expressions has really emerged as a huge part of the church in England. And so it emerged out of the Anglican and the British Methodist Church over there. And now it's catching on really quickly in the United States is because of the rapid decline of church attendance. And something that's interesting about American statistics is we see that people are leaving the church really quickly. So like every year around 700,000 people leave traditional forms of church in the United States. And yet experiences with like mystical experiences have actually increased among the US population. So in 1962, 22% people said they had a personal encounter with God. And in 2009, almost half of Americans said they did. So I think something that's kind of different from the US than the UK is less, it's less about secularization or kind of not believing in God. And it's more about de-institutionalization or de-traditionalization, like leaving the formalized versions of religion. So we end up having a lot of people in the United States that are spiritual but not religious. So something we might call like post-Christian or and the whole idea around it we call post-christendom. So the kind of the world that many of us knew or some of y'all started out in ministry in or some of y'all grew up in where church was kind of the central part of life where like you could ask someone what church you go to, not like, do you go to church? Like that reality has quickly, quickly changed over the past 20, 30 years. And the church has not really kind of known what to do or how to react to that. So that kind of sets the stage for why we need these new spaces, these microchurches, these fresh expressions because we have this group of people in our communities, some statistics I've seen it's around 40 to 60% of people who just will never come to a traditional form of church, whether they have had a bad experience or they just feel like the church is something that they just wouldn't go to. There's just this huge percentage of people in our communities that wouldn't go to a traditional form of church, but they might come to a new form of church. So they might come to a form of church that meets at a pub or a running group that has an opportunity to pray at the beginning and or a hiking group that reflects on scripture while you hike that there's this group of people in our communities that no matter how good the music is, no matter how nice the hair of the worship leader is or how good the preacher is, how good the coffee is, they're still not coming. And so that's what fresh expressions, that's what a new space is about. It's about connecting with folks that aren't gonna come on Sunday mornings and finding out how we can be the church with them. And what's cool about fresh expressions is that, so I led, as Matt said, I currently am the Associate Director of Church Development for the Western North Carolina Conference. And I've been doing that a role full-time for the past two years. But before that, I led a network of fresh expressions in Boone, North Carolina, which is a college town in the mountains in Western North Carolina. And when I was leading that network of fresh expressions, or right before that, I was the Missions Director and our senior pastor asked if I would be interested in starting a campus of Boone UMC in the downtown area of Boone. And as I looked around Boone, I noticed that there was a lot of really great churches, right? There was like high church, high steeple churches with the high liturgy. There was really cool modern worship churches. There was kind of everything in between. And so I just felt like there was something that if we were gonna reach a new group of people, a group of people that wasn't already connected to one of those churches, we'd have to do something pretty differently. And so we started King Street Church, our first group, was just a little group of about a dozen of us. And we ended up meeting at the Boone Saloon and talking about scripture while we sat together on Sunday nights. And so what's cool about fresh expressions is that it's a way for your church to reach out to folks that you haven't been able to connect with before. And so Boone UMC saw King Street Church as a part of Boone UMC, because we're a campus, we're a part of the wider church. And so Boone UMC saw it as an opportunity, saw it as a way of including people into our church family that we never would have been able to include before. And so that was, we call that the blended ecology in fresh expressions. So it's this idea that new forms of church and traditional forms of church aren't in competition with one another, but actually work together really well and they reach different people. And so when we talk about fresh expressions or new spaces, we're not suggesting that we're gonna replace traditional forms of church because we need traditional forms of church. Traditional forms of church, like I love worshiping on Sunday mornings with my family where my daughter gets to encounter folks, gets to run up to her elderly friend and give them a hug, like there's nothing better than singing hymns together and like being connected to the ancient liturgy that we've carried on for hundreds and hundreds of years. Like the traditional church is important and we need to continue to pour our resources and our energy into making as strong as possible. But we just have to recognize that not everyone will be able to connect with that new, that traditional form of church. And so we also, in addition to traditional forms of church, need new forms of church. And they have the ability to reach people that we wouldn't be able to reach if we only focus on our existing forms of church. So we call that the blended ecology. And what's cool about fresh expressions is that we, especially in the United Methodist Church, so far how it's worked is that we anchor them to a traditional form of church. So King Street Church was anchored to Boone UMC and all of the fresh expressions that I'll share tonight are anchored into fresh expressions or into traditional forms of church. I'm gonna look at this comment real quick. Anthony says, can you talk about the people that you started with? Yeah, so as King Street Church was starting, we, me and a friend that kind of were the ones that got everything started, we started just approaching our friends to invite them to a potluck. And we ended up connecting with people that were interested in talking about faith but not interested in going to church. So we had a few kind of group, I mean, we're in North Carolina, so most folks had some experience with church at some point in their lives, but a lot of them had maybe gone once or twice when they were kids, some of them had gone more. But it was mostly younger folks and folks that had become disconnected from church for several years, if not like really long periods of time. So one of the, and so one of my favorite resources that Fresh Expressions has brought about is called the Fresh Expressions Journey. I'm gonna share my screen for a little while here. So I can show you all some slides here. Catch up. So let me back up one second. Bishop Graham Cray at one of the Fresh Expressions conferences said this quote here and y'all can read it, but basically that what if the image of Jesus and the community around him wasn't just an image of Jesus training disciples to start churches later, but what if that was an image of church itself? So what if the nomadic community of Jesus that moving through the Judean countryside is an ecclesiology, is a way of being church? And so with that image of church, you have the committed, the extra committed kind of at the center of it, but you also have people kind of popping in and questioning what they hear and popping out. And there's just this kind of flowing church that's able to move throughout the countryside. So Fresh Expressions really leans heavily on that. And I was saying that one of my favorite resources that emerged out of the Fresh Expressions Movement in the UK is something called the Fresh Expressions Journey. And it's the six stages that most Fresh Expressions go through. And so this is kind of where a Fresh Expression will differentiate from a traditional kind of church plant. So we're creating a new faith community, but we're doing it in a gradual process. So where a traditional church plant might have like a launch Sunday where it kind of starts with a worship service, right? A Fresh Expression goes through a longer process of listening, of building relationships, building a social community that can then become a spiritual community and then later become a church. And so I'm gonna go through these stages because I think this is the most practical resource within Fresh Expressions. I think it has a lot to teach all of us whether we're starting a new space, whether we're starting a new ministry, I think that the Fresh Expressions Journey is a really powerful resource. And so I'm gonna go through these stages for a little while and just share about each one and share some stories and then we'll keep going from there. But the first stage of the Fresh Expressions Journey, so Fresh Expressions start with a process of listening. They start with a process of listening to our community, listening to our own calling that we're discerning, listening to God, praying, spending time in prayer, asking God who we might reach out to, who we might begin to connect with. So Fresh Expressions take time with this stage. So you might be doing some prayer walks where you walk around a neighborhood, walk around a downtown area of your community, drive around a rural community, trying to just learn some more about your community. You might do some community studying through something like Mission Insight or do some informal interviews with people in your community that aren't going to church, find out what their interests are, find out why they don't go to church. Just this process of listening and trying to understand your community in a deeper way. And some of y'all have lived in your communities your whole lives and you're like, there's nothing new I can learn about my community. But I think when we enter into that process with intentionality and push ourselves to talk to new people to move beyond our comfort zones, there's new things to learn. We've got a Fresh Expression in Western North Carolina that knocked on 1,500 doors. And I know that like how to freak out methodists talk about knocking on doors, right? But they knocked on 1,500 doors and just asked how they could pray for the people that lived in that house, asked them a few other questions about the community and wrote down their answers. And what they discovered was there was a ton of people in their community who had children that were struggling with addiction. And then they also discovered there was a ton of folks who were mourning the loss of a loved one. And so out of that, they had two really solid ideas of a Fresh Expression that they could start. So that's that listening process. And out of, here's another example. Second to the left is Amani. And she was a recent graduate of UNC Greensboro and she studied public health. And when she moved back home after college to Hickory, her family had inherited the house of their, her grandparents, and it was in a downtown area of Hickory where there were some really high rates of preventable diseases. And so she had this idea kind of out of her learning, out of her passions of public health to start a wellness house out of that house. And so she started, she was, that process of listening for her was getting to know that community, but also seeing how her passions and the community's needs kind of met in the middle. And so for her, she started this wellness house where they ended up having conversations around health and also spiritual conversations. The next stage of the Fresh Expressions journey is loving people. It's building relationships. It's finding ways to further invest in the people that we already know, but also pushing ourselves to get to know new people. And this stage is, it's all about kind of getting out of our comfort zones of starting to move into different spaces to spend our time in third places, which are places where people spend their time that's not home or work. So you might start looking in your community for coffee shops or for parks or dog parks or hiking trails, all kinds of things like that. So this is a stage where we're trying to build relationships, invest in people, get to know new people. I think that this stage is important, but it also, it just makes a lot of sense in our current context in the U.S. SIGNA does a loneliness study every year. And in 2019, 51% of Americans were lonely. And in 2018, or no, 2019 it was, it was 51%. Then in 2020, their study was 61%. And then just imagine kind of what it was, that was pre-pandemic that that study came out. So imagine what that was post-pandemic or during the pandemic. And so loneliness is just by definition as a lack of meaningful connections. And so when we focus on building meaningful connections, it's a basis that can connect with a lot of people in our communities. There's a lot of lonely people that are looking for belonging, that are looking for meaningful relationships. And I think theologically it makes a lot of sense. Like we worship a Trinitarian God who is in relationship, the Trinity is perfect relationship. And then in John 15, Jesus in Jesus' prayer, we see that like the Trinitarian God then invites us into that relationship too. And so it just makes a lot of sense to focus when we start a new faith community to focus on relationships. Cause that's what we were created out of. That's who we were created to be, to be in a relationship. And I think that friendship, that relationship is really the building block of church. So it's an important stage, an important part of the process. So then the third stage is building community. So again, kind of going back to that, differentiating this from a traditional church plant, when we build relationships with people out in the community, we're not directly inviting them to a spiritual community yet in a fresh expression. And sometimes we might, but for a lot of fresh expressions, they start with a social community, a social gathering, where it's gathering around an activity, it's gathering around a shared interest. So you might have a running group or you might have a hiking group. You might have a group of friends that goes to the pub and has a drink and talks about life. You might have just a single mom's group that there's a church members that can watch the kids while the single moms can de-stress for a little while. Finding ways to build community, to bring people together and to build connections. A lot of Elaine Heath's quote here where that Christian community is actually the best way, one of the best ways to preach the gospel, to evangelize, that when someone experiences Christian community, it draws people in, there's something unique about it, there's something powerful about it. And so, yeah, out of this community, then we begin to look for opportunities to explore discipleship. And I'm gonna go through some more examples of how fresh expressions went through this after I go through each stage. But so as a social community is being built as it's growing, as you're building relationships within that group, you start to look for opportunities to introduce discipleship, to invite people into it. And what's tricky here is to do it in a way that's not bait and switch or that's not dishonest or manipulative. And so there's several ways that that happens. All of them are about invitation or letting people opt in to a discipleship opportunity. But so you might have a social group that meets once a week or every other week and goes for a run or something. And then out of that group of people that you've connected with, then you have this pool of people that you can invite to another group that might have an element of discipleship. Hey, we're gonna, I know Thursday mornings we're doing our run. On Tuesday morning, if anybody would like to eat breakfast and talk about scripture, we're gonna be doing that. And so some of those people might come over. Some fresh expressions start off with a spiritual element at the very beginning. And then some fresh expressions, it might happen in an even slower process. So you might have that running group and you have one person that asks you about your faith and you start having coffee with that person and talking about faith and slowly add on more. Another way that some fresh expressions will do it is to start both at once. So this is, Owen just said he went to Maggie Valley. This is actually a fresh expression of Maggie Valley, United Methodist in Western North Carolina. And this is called the Smoky Mountain Hiking Community. And the way they do their fresh expression is they have a social hike once a month, one Saturday a month. And then they have a discipleship hike one Saturday a month. And so on the social one, that's one that they invite all their friends to and then they, as they're kind of sharing their vision of what that community is about, they share that on this other hike, they also have one where they talk about faith. And they'll open with a scripture at the trailhead and pray together and then have spiritual conversation as they hike. So there's several ways of doing that transition. And then, so out of, once you start to explore discipleship with a group of people and you have folks that are coming to faith, they start looking for more elements of faith. So again, differentiating from the launch Sunday with a church plant, when you launch your church plant, you usually have kind of every aspect of church planned. So you have your discipleship plan. You have a worship service where you have the sacraments. You have children's discipleship, children's ministry. You have a plan for forgiving, for tithing, all these kinds of things for proclaiming the word for sermons and all that. So with fresh expressions, instead of having all those at the beginning, we slowly add those elements as the group grows together and as the group is ready for more aspects of church. So to break my monotony of talking for a minute, I'm gonna stop sharing my screen for a second. I'm curious what you all see as kind of essential elements of church. What do you guys think? You can throw it in the chat box or you can unmute for a second. Prayer, what else? Communities, something in common, common ground. Yep. Yeah, gathering, proclaiming the good news and offering, yep. I feel like having a missional focus, whatever the mission is. Yeah, mission, being kind of outwardly focused. Theology, yep, worship, yeah. Attending to the means of grace. There's a good Methodist answer. Nice, yep. Yeah, so in a fresh expression then, we look to find how we can incorporate those. So you might have like my group at the Boone Saloon, it started with spiritual conversation. We were able to incorporate scripture, but it took a while to then incorporate prayer. And then we were meeting on Sunday night. And so it was a, the pub was open, we were right there. So it wasn't like there was an opportunity to have like worship music. So we had to explore, okay, how can this group add worship to what we're doing? And so for some fresh expressions, that means kind of broadening our definition of worship to beyond music or offering kind of an alternative gathering every once in a while where music can be incorporated. But yeah, so it takes creativity, the offering that Owen mentioned. I think that's a really important part of being a disciple is tithing, is being generous with the money that God's given us. But for people that are on the edge of church, like you start asking them to give towards, give money to a church, like they're out the door as fast as they can get out, right? And so we have to get creative with that. One of the fresh expressions I'll show you in a second, they do an offering, but they do it for a mission. So they take an offering for drilling wells and they drill wells with the money that comes in. And that's a way of building that into their community, but also of not kind of scaring away people that would be turned off by giving towards towards a church building or a pastor's salary. So you find creative ways to incorporate these important aspects. I've got the, share my screen again. Got the, I'll be a good methodist too and pull up the book of discipline paragraphs here. These are just a couple of things that I see in the book of discipline when it talks about what makes something church. So like sacraments is another thing to find out how to be creative. This is a lay led fresh expression which a lot of fresh expressions are. This is where you would tap into that kind of anchor relationship with your traditional form of church and asking your pastor to visit on occasion to maybe lead the sacraments or to lead a baptism if you have someone come to faith, all that kind of stuff. So a example is actually this is the one that I was talking about that drills wells together. So this is a fresh expression that just celebrated their 15th year of existing and they, it's called the river of life. And it is a fresh expression in Bryson City, North Carolina, which is, and it gathers at the Nanny Hill Outdoor Center which is this kind of paddling mecca in Western North Carolina where Olympic canoeers and kayakers are trained and raised. And this is really cool little village for paddlers. And Wainer the pastor was actually an Olympic canoeer in the 96 Olympics. And he created this fresh expression. He used to work at the Nanny Hill Outdoor Center as a paddle guide. And out of those relationships started this fresh expression. And now they've gotten to a point where it's a full picture of church. But it didn't happen right away, right? It took this process. But now they have proclamation of the word. They have, they gather together for worship and they tithe even if it's towards mission still but they have these elements of church that they've slowly added. And it's a new, it's still a fresh way of being the church but it's a full picture of church what we'll call a mature expression of church. And then the last stage of a fresh expressions journey is that one fresh expression can become multiple fresh expressions. So they're doing it again. So, and you might start multiple at once too. This is a example of a fresh expression in Virginia out of a pretty small Baptist church. And they started four fresh expressions at once. And they've got their Sunday morning congregation and then they've started a fresh expressions team which is four people. Each person leads a fresh expression and each of them help with the other ones. And so they've started four fresh expressions with King Street Church where the fresh expression network that I led. We got up to five, six fresh expressions at once. We tried a whole bunch of other ones too that started and kind of fizzled out. But so we had a gathering at Sunday night at the pub. By the time I left, we had a gathering Sunday night at the pub. We were at the homeless shelter on Monday night. We were at the county jail on Wednesday mornings. We had a morning devotion at the coffee shop near the homeless shelter every weekday morning where we were reading scripture together. And then we started a poetry group that last year that I was there. So you see that kind of once you start one fresh expression, it can quickly become multiple. Yeah, Matt said, I mentioned the book. Here's my one shameless plug. I like this fresh expressions journey so much that I wrote a book about it. And so I'll throw the pre-order link here in the chat box. And then I promise I won't plug it anymore. It actually releases on September 1st. So it's coming up very quickly. And I'm real excited about it. I think it turned out really good. But there's a chapter on each of those stages in the book. Lots of stories, lots of tips on how to live out each of those. So check that out. So I wanted us to share a few stories, a few more stories of some fresh expressions. And then we can have some time for questions. So this is one of my favorite fresh expressions here. This is Sorted, which is a youth skater church in Bradford, UK. And the guy in the upper left is the leader of that. Andy, he's a layperson and his wife is a clergy person. But he started this fresh expression in his hometown when he came back after going to school. He noticed there's a lot of youth hanging around in the community, kind of up to no good. A lot of drug use among younger kids. And so he also saw there was a lot of kids skateboarding and he likes to skateboard. So he wondered, could he create a faith community out of skateboarding? And so how they did this was they had a Friday night youth skate where they just had a bunch of food and a place for kids to skate. And they just met for a while, just doing that. They had some adults there that were kind of supervising, making sure it was a safe environment. But beyond that, they weren't proselytizing or anything like that. But then out of those relationships that they built, kids started saying, hey, why are you guys doing this? Or what's this about? And they're saying, well, like we're interested in starting a faith community with y'all. If any of y'all are interested, we're Christians, like Andy would pray with folks if they wanted to pray. And out of that, there was a smaller group that was interested in talking about Jesus. And so on Wednesdays, they would have a Jesus story and skate. So it was cool was the Friday night, big skate kept going on. It might have like 50, 60 kids at it. And then on Wednesday night, they'd have this Jesus story and skate. And it might only be a dozen kids or 15 kids, but it was 15 kids that weren't going to any other church. And out of that, a whole faith community formed. So he actually tried to bring some of those kids to a Sunday morning worship. And the kids were just bored out of their minds, had no idea what was going on. And they said, can we just do church together? And he was like, yeah, yeah, I guess we can. And so out of that, this really beautiful church happened. And they got all the way through the Fresh Expressions journey and got to actually starting another campus of sorted across city. And what was really cool about when they started the second one was it was youth that had grown up into young adults who started the second one. Really cool, Fresh Expression. Here in Western North Carolina, we've got a Fresh Expression at Snow Hill Unite Methodist. And they were active in, they had this produce ministry where they grew produce and gave it away. And they would give it away at the local flea market. And at the flea market, they were building relationships with the flea market folks. And they found out that the property where the flea market was being hosted had gotten bought up and was gonna be developed. And the flea market didn't have a place to go. And so they said, well, our church is like two miles down the road, we got a big parking lot. Why don't y'all come over to our parking lot and have it there. We won't even charge you for your booths to rent a space in the parking lot. So folks in the flea market were like, heck yeah, that sounds great. They got to keep a little bit more of their profits and the flea market carried on. And out of that, out of those relationships, they started a breakfast church, kind of like a dinner church in their fellowship hall for part of the time when the flea market was happening. And so people could go in there and experience church inside the fellowship hall and then go back outside. But it wasn't required. You certainly didn't need to go in there, but folks did, and folks that were a part of the flea market community and weren't a part of church before that found a faith community. So it was pretty cool stuff. I'm gonna talk a little bit more about dinner church here in a minute, but this is one sub-bilingual dinner church in Charlotte. And what's cool about this one was it emerged out of two ministries that were already existing out of the church. They had a youth soccer league with Hispanic youth and have a Hispanic pastor who leads that and they built a ton of relationships through that. And then they also had community garden ministry with their neighbors. And so out of those two ministries, they had this huge pool of people to invite to come to a dinner church when they started one. And so they created this really cool bilingual dinner church where they would have the pastor of the church was bilingual. So you preach English for a minute and then Spanish for a minute and go back and forth and then would sing together both languages at once. And that was pretty cool too. So that's a dinner church. Here's another cool one. If you Google Moshing with Methodists, you can read about this one. It's a United Methodist pastor named Francisco who when he started at his first appointment, he was really passionate about punk rock music and hardcore punk, I guess is what you call it. It's kind of like heavy metal, that kind of genre. But so when he was growing up, he experienced this and he was in high school experiences really awful tragedy and lost a member of his family. And out of that, he just like looking for healing and found some healing in his church and in his faith but also found healing in punk rock shows and hardcore punk shows where there's this kind of like communal expression of emotion. And so this was an important part of his personal life of holding both his faith and hardcore punk together. And so he sought to see if he could live into both of those in his first appointment as a pastor. And so when he moved to his church in, I think it was Santa Clara, something like that in California, he found out there's a thriving punk community there but that there wasn't a safe venue. There was a lot of kind of smaller unsafe venues where these shows were happening. And so he asked his church if they'd be willing to help rent a space out and make it into a venue. And the church said, yeah. And so on Saturday nights, they had scenes like this at their church venue and then on Sunday mornings, they had hand bells. So I just love the juxtaposition of hardcore punk and hand bells. It's just a perfect picture of that blended ecology I was talking about. If you can see way up front here is Angelica Regalado-Siesa. She is a Moravian minister in Winston-Salem and she's one of my friends. And she started a fresh expression. Yeah, she started a faith community of a fresh expression with immigrants in Winston-Salem and it is based around kind of education. So they do ESL classes, they do SSL classes for folks from Latin America who speak dialects and don't speak Spanish very well. They do computer classes. This is a computer class graduation for Hispanic mothers that they've connected with. So they do computer classes, they got tablets donated for each of the participants. But they also have faith community. So they have a Monday night Bible study. Each of their gatherings begins with a short devotion that Angelica leads. And she's built this really cool faith community around that. And this one is a memory cafe out of Trinity United Methodist in Gastonia. And this is a gathering for folks with Alzheimer's and dementia and their caretakers to come to. So it's a social gathering where that's safe and designed for folks who are experiencing Alzheimer's and dementia and people can come to that and experience they'll do games and trivia and sing songs and share a meal together. And out of that, they're hoping to start a worship service here towards those families too. So I mentioned a few of these, but within Fresh Expressions, and this is my last slide before we can ask questions and talk. I've seen some good questions in the chat box. But so out of the wider kind of Fresh Expressions model, there are some replicable ones. So some forms of Fresh Expression that are a little bit easier to copy and paste. You still have to contextualize them to your community to the people that you're connecting with, but there are some more kind of replicable models. So Dinner Church is one and Dinner Church is just simply a church that gathers around a meal. So they all look a little different. Some Dinner Churches will incorporate communion into it and some of them are smaller that meet in a home or meet in a restaurant. Some of them are larger that meet in a fellowship hall of a church or a larger community space like a volunteer fire department, sometimes have rooms for rent, stuff like that in rural areas. But this is a shared meal and then elements of church. So there might be a short message that's geared towards folks that are not connected to church. So like usually around Jesus' stories, there might be communal praying. So taking prayer requests, praying together, sometimes instead of a message, so do like table conversations where there's like questions that you talk about as a table, lots of different ways to do Dinner Church. Another really common one is pub theology, which are gatherings at pubs. There's also beer and hymns. Just any kind of gathering that meets in a place like that really takes a big kind of edge off of folks that have a stigma around church, leading King Street Church, which met at Boone Saloon. I had so many conversations with people that were like, yeah, I wouldn't go to church, but a church that meets in a pub, like I might try that out. So it's a really popular way. Pubtheology.com actually has some really cool resources too. Another one that's really popular in other countries and starting to gain traction in the US is called Messy Church. And it's a fresh expression geared towards, it's intergenerational, especially geared towards families with children. And you'll come into like either the fellowship hall or a public space again, and there's like three to five craft stations around the room where there's a table leader at each and the family goes around it together and does these crafts. And there's a theme for the night and after you do crafts, there's a short message and then you share a meal. And so it might be an Easter theme or it might be forgiveness or anything like that. There's a lot of these kind of pre-made plans that you can access Messy Church USA, those trainings around that too. So really cool gathering that. Yeah, if you look at the statistics for fresh expressions in the UK, a huge percentage of them are Messy Church. And they're discipling a ton of post-Christian people through that. There's fresh expressions that gather around recovery, fresh expressions that gather around outdoor activities like hiking, kayaking, paddle boardings, another popular one lately. I've seen a lot of there's running clubs, all kinds of different things like this, gamers, gathering around social justice issues. One interesting one that I've seen lately is Climate Cafe. So like there's a lot of climate anxiety right now with a lot of the natural disasters that have been occurring. So this is a climate cafe, just a place for people to process their feelings about climate change. And out of that, you can build new relationships. I think that one would be a really cool one, especially for like Gen Z folks, like climate change is huge in younger generations. Single mom groups. There's another one called Who Let the Dads Out, which is in the UK where it's dad's playgroup, where dads bring their kids together and have fun together. So all kinds of cool ideas like that. But yeah, so that is my spiel. What questions emerge for y'all? What haven't I covered that you would like to know about? You can ask me hard ones. I'm not scared. You can push back on something. So ask away. The biggest question that I have that I've seen is all these things that you're talking about, I've seen churches do it. And when they're coming out of a traditional church or a standing church, a lot of times it's looked at as a ministry and not like a new worship service. How would you explain that that it's actually a whole new worship instead of just a ministry extension of the church? Because that kind of bleeds into my second question of funding. I wish we could do all these things, but they do have to be funded. And in fact, last night I was talking with some people and they were talking about if they could give to something and know what it's going towards, like a specific money they would give to that, which I think is pretty common for people my age and younger, like they wouldn't give to a specific cause. But eventually like somebody has to pay the pastor or somebody has to pay for the materials those kind of things. So how do you move from a specific mission to a broader sense of tithing for a bigger cause or do these churches or expressions not do that and they just stick with mission? Yeah. All right, so part one, how do you get folks to see that that is more than a ministry? So I think you have to live into it first, right? Like so you have to have that intention for it to be church with the people you're gathering, right? So a ministry like a soccer league or something that you have at your church, that's not a French expression until you intend for it to become a faith community. It would be a ministry of the church if it just remains a soccer league and there's nothing wrong with that. But say you do want it to become a worshiping community or you found that the people you've connected with there like you build relationships with them and they're still not coming on Sunday mornings, right? I hear that a lot with like churches with preschools or churches with Boy Scouts or churches with all kinds of these outreaches where like, hey, we built the relationships and we invite them to come on Sunday mornings and they don't come like, what's up with that? And so out of those existing ministries, if you're experiencing that, then you can say, okay, what would it look like to form a faith community with the people from that group, whether it's moving that gathering into a faith community or inviting those people to form a faith community with you. There's that intention there. And then I think for your church folks who are saying, no, that's just a ministry that's not a faith community, then you would have to kind of paint that picture of like, hey, there's just this group of people in our community that aren't gonna come on Sunday mornings, but we have the ability to be the church with them in this place where they are comfortable gathering in this way that they are comfortable gathering. So kind of painting that picture for your church folks. And I found empathy being really helpful for that. So like, we had people that loved King Street Church. Like I had a little old ladies that would give me big hugs and be like, I'm so glad you're doing what you're doing on King Street. And I'd be like, really? Like why? You know, we're like drinking beer and talking about scripture, right? And they would say, it's because I have a grandson that isn't going to church. I know he's not gonna come to Boone UMC, but he might go to something like King Street Church, like keep doing what you're doing. So I think that empathy can be really helpful too. And then part two about the financing. I think that one, a lot of fresh expressions are lay led and really cheap, you know? Like, and so sometimes it's not even an issue, but I do think like if the fresh expression is costing money, like I think it definitely is okay to begin to ask for support from folks that are coming and you might do by doing it on a one-on-one basis with people that you know, aren't gonna respond really poorly as opposed to like passing a plate around the table at the pub or something, you know? Like you might say like, hey, John, you've been coming for three years, like you're growing in your Christian faith. Would you consider like supporting this faith community in with your finances in some kind of way? You know, so there's kind of creative ways of doing that because yeah, I think you're right that once a community is spending money, it should contribute to itself. So I'd love to hear more a little bit more about the integrating of discipleship component because there's a number of the applications that we've gotten that has been one of the weaker parts of it. And I feel like that is the reason we're doing these and the other question I have that we've kind of struggled with is interior, like inside marketing, meaning to our churches and seeking to promote what we call new spaces. We chose new spaces because we're like, no, we're just not, the fresh expressions doesn't capture it. We wanted new faces and new spaces. And so we went with that. But then I had some people like, hey, come look at our parlor. We just remodeled. It's our new space. And I was like, and then a lot of lacking the discipleship. And so now we're like exploring, do we wanna rebrand and relaunch as micro churches? And so kind of those two, and part of the rebrand of micro churches is because the discipleship component has been not the strongest. And maybe it's okay that it's not the strongest. And so I like to hear kind of more about that. Yeah, let me share another slide here. This has been really helpful for me in kind of conceptualizing discipleship in a fresh expression. This is from Everts and Shops Pathway to Jesus. So they interviewed 1,000 post-Christian young people from Southern California who had converted to Christianity and the process that they went through to become a Christian. And if you see it, it's a slow process, right? So it takes building trust with a Christian. Like people outside of the church have a lot of reason to distrust Christians. They've been burned. They've seen some crazy stuff on TV, read stuff on the internet about Christians. And they're like, like it takes a while to just build some trust around that. And then there's this period of curiosity where like, whoa, this Jesus guy, he was cool. Like he like was like making church people angry and like people want to kill him. Like, what's up with this guy? And so there's this period of curiosity and then a period of kind of personal connection to it. Like, okay, like maybe there is something to following Jesus, to being a disciple of Jesus. And then there's that kind of conversion process that happens like, okay, like I understand like, I want to put my faith in Jesus and to follow Jesus. And so I think that like recognizing that discipleship for post-Christian people is a slow process. It can help you conceptualize a discipleship. It's almost like, you know, like the discipleship pathways we have in traditional forms of church where it's like, you kind of map out how discipleship is gonna happen when someone comes on Sunday morning, how you're gonna build them into a deeper discipleship. So it's kind of like that, but thinking about it in a fresh expression. So how are you creating conversations where you can stir that curiosity about Jesus? How are you creating like that social community is a place where people can build trust with Christians, right? You can earn that trust back from folks who mistrust Christians. And then, yeah, often discipleship starts with some kind of simple faith conversation around often around Jesus' stories or a super relatable topic. So like at the Boone Saloon, we would just have some kind of topic that would relate to everyone at the table. So it might be, you know, something like forgiveness or it could be something like loneliness or we could process something that happened in the news the week before. I remember we had a really powerful conversation after one of the police shootings that happened and we were able to process that and connected to scripture. And we had conversations, just really relatable conversations where we incorporated a piece of scripture into it. And as we shared around the table, the people that were Christian were able to share a perspective based in the Christian faith, right? Like I would even like share stuff like because they knew I was a Methodist minister. I would share like quotes from the book of discipline sometimes like, and these were people that like were not church people but it was a safe place for everybody to share their own perspective. And so the Christian perspective was safe to share too, right? Cause we weren't saying like this is what you have to believe. This is what we believe as a group. Like it was, no, it was like, it was, hey, here's how I view this. How do you view it? And then we have this conversation. And out of that, out of those conversations we had this woman, one of the women who came to faith out of King Street Church. This is kind of similar to that pathway that I put up but she was spiritual but not religious when we met her. She told me that she would pray like she would go on these hikes and like talk to a God but she didn't really know what God she was praying to or God she was talking to. And she came to King Street Church when one of her friends invited her and she liked it. She kept coming back every week. She was super committed. And after maybe like six months, eight months she said, hey, I think the God that I've been praying to is the God that we're reading about when we talk, have these scripture conversations. I was like, well, that's cool. And she said, but I don't see why I need Jesus. Like I think Jesus is really cool. I want to emulate Jesus but I don't think I need him to kind of get to God. I don't get that. And I was like, okay, cool. Like maybe it'll make sense at some point, maybe not, but just keep coming. Like we'll talk about it more. And a year after that, she was reading the passion story in John during Holy Week and she said that the shame of Christ, of being beaten, of being hung on the cross. Like it just like hit her like a ton of bricks. And all of a sudden she realized why she needed Jesus. And I said, well, you know, you're a Christian now, right? And she was like, heck no. But yeah, so she had gone through that process. It took like a year and a half, two years to move from the beginning of that process to conversion and is still wrestling with stuff. So I think that's, I guess my best stab at creating a picture of what discipleship looks like. Thanks, that was helpful. Someone asked in the chat box early, Anthony asked how long this process take. So it just depends. I think the fresh expressions that I've seen that end up really connecting with people outside of the church, take their time in those early stages. So it's like months, perhaps even a year of building relationships, some of them longer. And when you move too quickly and move towards a faith community too quickly, often you'll get folks that are already connected to a church. So I had that conversation a lot where someone's like, hey, we started this cool, fresh expression, but the only people coming are church people. Why aren't unchurched people coming? And when we talk about it, it ends up being they didn't spend enough time in the first couple of stages. There's a question from Tom about a death, fresh expression. So what's your advice on how to approach an existing interest group? Tom, do you have any kind of existing relationships with the local deaf community? Yes, thank you. I think you answered some of my question as you were talking. I might have jumped the gun a little bit there, but yes, I've had a long association with the deaf community in Dallas. We've had something called Death Saturday Night Live where we've had a worship that shared, rotated among deaf ministries in the Dallas, Fort Worth area, about three or four times a year and we're taking turns hosting a meal and a worship and fellowship time, that sort of thing. But the challenge that I've had is trying to start or build or grow the community. And I feel like I keep hitting against a line of resistance and trying to find some ways to connect. Recently, I've been reaching out to a deaf couple who have two hearing children and sent them invitations to Christmas, sent them invitations to Easter, sent them invitations to Vacation Bible School and it's kind of like, yeah, but then they don't show. And I just recently said to the mother that I just feel like we want to serve you. I mean, our deaf ministry like to serve your family and that just changed kind of perspective of, well, just forget about trying to make them come but try to meet where their needs are. So it's one of those things I'm just being very patient about. And I think that kind of resistance or standoffishness is replicated in other deaf families. Yeah, so I mean, I think if you, you know, talked to those connections that you already have and ask them like, what would be something that would be helpful for y'all or what would be something that you guys would come to that we could help host or and build kind of community around that and just see if some of those conversations about faith come up. But yeah, or the hiking group, hey, I saw this really cool hiking group. Would y'all want to start one of these or something like that? So I'm happy to chat more too about that and help you process that I can put my email address in the chat box. Matt, I know that we were aiming for 8.15 so I wanna make sure that I turn it back over to you. Yeah, awesome. I appreciate it. And yeah, I think it's so inspiring just hearing the different stories and seeing the different ways that this has happened and how it's in a lot of ways like it's not rocket scientist. It's like, go be present in the community, love people, build relationships and if you do that, you're gonna find yourself having opportunities to share the gospel. Maybe in creative, non-traditional ways but we gotta get out of that mindset of like, we talk a lot in our cohort about developing a theology of guesting instead of hosting and I think that's, that's kind of the key there is, it's okay to go be the guest, to listen and build those relationships. So yeah, thank you so much. Really appreciate your time and investment in the North Texas Conference and I think with that, I will close us in a quick prayer. All right. Jesus, I just thank you for this chance for us to connect on a Thursday night over Zoom from all different places in the country really and grateful for technology even though we've been living through such trying times and I just ask that those who've been here God would be inspired and that those who've been here and who have had a chance to listen would feel just a sense of hope that God, you're calling every one of us to make an impact in our community. So fill us with faith and hope and courage to do this work and just creative ideas to get out and listen to our neighborhood and our communities and find ways to bring just to bear witness to the gospel in the midst of the people you've called us to and in Jesus' name we pray. Amen. One other quick thing before you get off we are going to, as Luke mentioned his book comes out in September and so probably starting in October we are going to make available to the whole conference if you all wanna be in a cohort that reads through Luke's book together we'll get some copies of the book and have that opportunity to just sort of over probably like over a 16 week period we'll meet every other week and just talk about sort of people's ideas what they're wanting to start how to do it and kind of process the book together. So if you want to do that in the chat there Jessica has put a form, a Google form and you can register now and then we'll have your information so that when we get ready to start that cohort we can reach out to you all and get that set up. So if you're wanting to do that I'll probably the one leading us through the book and more than anything really just what we wanna do is create a community of folks who are trying new things that just wanna be in community together talk about what's working, what's not working share ideas and collaborate on different ideas and go through the book while we do it. So if you're interested in that feel free to go to that form and that'll also be on our website eventually and in social media so you'll see it out there too. So anyways, Luke, thank you so much I appreciate you my friend. Oh yeah, it was great to be with you all I hope to get to see all again maybe I can pop in on your book group one time. Yeah, for sure. Thanks, Luke. Thanks, man. I also wanna put in a plug on September 9th at 9.30 a.m. we're gonna have a Zoom about doing income generating ministries. And so go ahead and put that on your calendar and we'll be looking for that information. Hey, Dr. Ross. One other thing is that this Saturday from nine to noon we're having a Laity event as the church left the building. Now what? It might be good for some of y'all to attend that as well. It'll be a perfect dessert to the scrumptious meal that we just had this evening. Yes, sir. Yeah, Jason Moore will be here and he's gonna be really talking about equipping your Laity to engage people in this new season of online ministry and small groups like we're talking about here. So that'd be another great opportunity. Thanks, Don. You're very welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me.