Читать книгу Church for Every Context - Michael Moynagh - Страница 69

Amplification happens when news about an innovation spreads, encouraging others to innovate too. This has been important in the story of British fresh expressions. In particular, since 1999, the Church Army’s Sheffield Centre has played a key role in disseminating stories about new types of church through its quarterly publication series, Encounters on the Edge, whose subscription base had grown to 425 by 2011. These publications helped raise awareness in the early 2000s that stirrings were in the undergrowth, and provided an important evidence base for Mission-shaped Church. The work of Stuart Murray, a Baptist and leading researcher on church planting, had a similar effect (2004a, 2004b, 2006).

Mission-shaped Church itself, with its huge sales, was a major amplifier. Though some have seen the report as an attempt to institutionalize and control fresh expressions, its authors intended to describe what was happening, provide a theological defence and encourage the church to give appropriate support, including dismantling institutional blocks (pp. xii–xiii). The report sought not to control, but to permit and facilitate. Greatly helped by being endorsed by the Church of England’s General Synod and then by the British Methodist Conference, it quickly became an authoritative text. It gave legitimacy to people exploring new ways of being church and encouraged others.