FRESH EXPRESSIONS, mixed economy, resource church, inherited church, café, hybrid, blended, pioneer, messy — in recent years we have grown used to a rash of new terms for what we used to call simply “church”. But what holds them together? How can they integrate and live together positively and without threat?
Well, here is another term that we are hearing more often these days: mixed ecology. This is a hopeful vision of a variety of modes of church living together in creative collaboration, each in their own way offering a style of church for people with different approaches to the questions and opportunities of faith.
Ed Olsworth-Peter’s book draws on his wide experience of pioneering, innovating, and planting churches, and teaching and advising on missionary ecclesiology. The result is a helpful and eirenic picture of various models of church working together in generous interdependence.
The author’s controlling metaphor is of a healthy ecology of expressions of church, but he offers image after image to bring home the benefits of this picture of fruitful diversity. Jealousy and suspicion (under careful Christian disguise) have often characterised the arrival of a new form of church in a traditional parish. With unfailing positivity, this book pushes beyond those unfortunate responses and explores the benefits.
One of the strengths of the book lies in the conversation partners whom the author quotes directly and who reinforce the argument from their different experiences. There are plenty of diagrams to add spice to the descriptive text, and constant examples enable the reader to put flesh on the theory.
To be thoroughgoing in the use of the ecological metaphor, the author inevitably employs a distinctive vocabulary for church life and leaves behind more recognisable theological language, although early in the book we are offered five theological themes: reconciliation, community, difference, creation, and self-giving.
Some readers might also find the number of lists rather tiring. Three founding principles: recognition, resource, and resilience. Six stages of the mixed ecology journey: noticing, offering, gathering, connecting, collaborating, and co-creating. Three postures of inhabitation: abiding, innovating, and enabling. And so on.
Nevertheless, the various images and metaphors that the author deploys give considerable scope for the imagination. I value the fruit-salad image of collaboration, the forest as an image of diversity, the seven sacred spaces of church life, the schemas and life commandments (scripts?) of a church’s personality, and the nature reserve as an image of the process of shaping and delivering a mixed ecology church. I cherish phrases such as “the gift of not fitting in” and “bees represent the people who cross-pollinate ideas.”
There is much here to stimulate and guide creative thinking in the sometimes confusing diversity of church life in Britain today. Above all, Olsworth-Peter is positive about this diversity, offering tools and ways of thinking to help practitioners envisage and enact healthy and collaborative ecosystems of church. His writing is not about avoiding problems and arguments, but about creating a positive environment for the good news of Jesus Christ to be heard by the greatest number of people in multiple ways and diverse contexts.
This is a book about being connected in a living ecosystem called church. It should help many pioneers and church leaders to think wisely and well.
The Rt Revd John Pritchard is a former Bishop of Oxford.
Mixed Ecology: Inhabiting an integrated Church
Ed Olsworth-Peter
SPCK £19.99
(978-0-281-08937-6)
Church Times Bookshop £17.99