Some theological stuff we like...

Who we are at ENC is based on who God is, expressed both in God as Trinity and in the Incarnation.

The Trinity                      

Mining the rich seam of theological reflection on the Trinity gives us incredible insights into how God wants us to be. The Trinity speaks of encounter, community, obedience and mission at the heart of God.  These are four elements we have outlined repeatedly at enc with the mnemonic High, Wide, Deep and Long.  We want to build a church with God’s help that is high, wide, deep and long.  That is, we aim for:

High Voltage Worship  In worship we encounter God through the tangible presence of his Spirit.  Through music, prayer, creative arts, story, action and silence and the use of our bodies, minds and spirits we encounter God’s empowering presence and give him our praise and love.  We foster all kinds of creativity, from words and music to image and action.  So far this has involved training musicians, reading poetry, writing lyrics, making banners, making films and dance.  We also like to give space for the gifts of the Spirit to be exercised.

Wide Angle Community  We work hard at being an inclusive and interdependent community, building up relationships through networks of friendships.  Our community is non-boundary and non-geographical.  Our aim is for our gatherings of all sizes to have ‘blurred edges’ so it is easy for people to join us whoever they are.  We have had a number of parties to express these aims, our most recent one drawing 200 people, nearly half of whom are not used to church.  In January we are starting regular meals for welcoming newcomers, twenty at a time.  We are also developing Network groups which gather around an activity (going to a café, sport, bible study…) which aim to draw in those on the fringe.

Deep End Discipleship  At the heart of the Trinity is also the obedience of the Son to the Father.  Our concern has been to make disciples, who live their lives as Jesus would if he were them and to counter drift and passivity amongst Christians.  We have set up 4mation groups, groups of four who meet for an hour a week, helping one another to engage in spiritual disciplines and to be alert to God’s activity in everyday life.  We taught about spiritual formation in September  (and will do so again soon) and have at least 13 groups going at the moment.  We have good teaching programmes for Sundays which have included teaching through passages of Scripture, vision and values, and life issues.  We have also taught well-attended courses on discipleship and gift identification, and have had weekend conferences focusing on worship and prayer ministry.

Long Arm Outreach  The Father sends the Son to enter our world and rescue us and sends the Spirit to give us life.  We want to be a church that exists by mission.  At ENC we have sought to get involved in evangelism and social action as part of the mission of God.  We have held two Life Courses for adults and one for children, where we have seen people come (or come back) to Christ and be filled with the Spirit, grow in understanding and hear God’s voice.  We also oversaw one of the ‘Life on the Beach’ events on Cathedral Green (and will do so again in 2006) where about 60 from ENC chatted with onlookers.  Social action is at the planning stage only, but we hope to include mentoring of teenagers and help for single mums and the elderly.  Some are also involved in prison ministry, both at Dartmoor and Exeter prisons, running Alpha courses and InnerChange, and visiting prisoners.  We also want to learn more what it means to be a community for those just out of prison. 

The other memorable saying we use often is that we want to be strong at the core and blurred at the edges.  On the one hand, we don’t want simply to count Christians in our church, but also we want to weigh them!  Are they growing quickly to become more like Jesus?  But also we want to be a welcoming place for people who are wondering whether there’s a spiritual dimension to life and for those who haven’t been to church in a while.

The Incarnation              

The principle of incarnation has always been at the heart of Anglican theology and mission strategy; to be with people where and how they are.  Jesus both lovingly identified with the culture, but also took a costly counter-cultural stance within it.  St Paul shaped his mission by the context, speaking very differently and using very different starting points in, say, Antioch and Athens. The context for the church in the West continues to change rapidly.  We are attempting to introduce people to Christ who are spiritual and  secular, ethical and consumerist, militantly tolerant, hedonistic, addictive, fractured,  and suspicious of authority and control and who are all worth dying for.  As a society we also like authenticity, community, irony, irreverence, eclecticism; we ‘listen with our eyes and think with our feelings’ (as Ravi Zacharias puts it).

We want to be the kind of church which is incarnated in our culture and which engages with people as they are, and so we aim to shape ourselves to be accessible to the culture as it is as well as living out a counter-cultural gospel.  We aim that worship will be experiential and creative, emphasising a transformational encounter with the living God.  We want to equip people to be disciples in their weekday contexts.  We model vulnerability and being non-judgemental in our relationships.  We aim to be non-religious, emotionally real and relaxed. 

We are also developing both ‘come to us’ and ‘go to them’ strategies. Part of our ‘Come to us’ strategy is running courses which introduce the spiritual life - the Life Course and Alpha. 

Our ‘Go to them’ strategy is at the thinking and praying stage and will mean significant change to our life together.  As the Mission-Shaped Church report states – a network church is defined by whom it is for (p63).  In the future we want to develop distinct networks within the overall Exeter Network Church .  For example, we would like to have a Young Families Network.  This could involve a number of ‘blurred edge’ activities such as after-school clubs, Life Courses, Parenting Courses and toddler groups on school or other neutral property.  Those activities would feed into a Young Families celebration at an appropriate time in the week.  Through relationships and major festivals such as Christmas, we would expect many to make the journey from club and course, to celebration, and from unbelief to faith.

Other possible networks are youth, 18-25's, seniors, the workplace and sport/leisure.  These would all be distinct networks and would be the primary place that individual Christians would express their faith and spiritual life and expend their energy.  At the same time we would aim to resource each network from the centre, providing teaching, prayer and support across the networks in order to help Christians to grow.