One of the books we’re reading just now is this one, on Fresh Expressions in the Sacramental Tradition. As its title suggests, and as Brian McLaren comments in a typical sound-bite, ‘the road to the future goes through the past’.
We’ll comment on the book and its contents once we’ve finished reading it, and had a chance to talk about it. But the question of whether fresh expressions of church are really as fresh as we all think came to our attention with the recent death of the Revd Bill Shergold. He’s not typically hailed as one of the heroes of either fresh expressions or emerging church, and quite likely most readers of this blog will be wondering who exactly he was and why we should be bothered to mark his passing. After all, he was 89 when he died last month. And he trained as a priest at Mirfield, a high church college if ever there was one. And his most significant ministry was at the Eton Mission in London, with close connections with the posh school that gave it its name. So you might think he would be about the last person to have pioneered anything remotely missional, let alone truly creative. And you’d be wrong. He was the founder of the 59 Club, a bikers community, which he started when he realized that here was a way of connecting faith with what at the time (the 1950s) was a growing recreational trend among young men in particular. To read the story of how and why he did this, in his own words, go here. He clearly thought he was just doing what came naturally, given his calling as a parish priest, and his efforts were not blessed with all the trendy terminology that seems an essential part of the emerging, emergent, fresh expressions scene today. Which we all probably need to be reminded of: that there have always been mavericks and pioneers who saw missional openings in unlikely places and who stepped outside of the box in order to see where God might be at work. Bill Shergold was one of them. And at a time when Christians were far less tolerant of the non-traditional than they are today. But then, he did, as a newspaper headline of the time says, wear ‘leathers under his cassock’ – which, obviously, means that he wore a cassock over his leathers. When so many are preferring to dispose of cassocks and other bits of tradition, we might have something to learn from him.
