The Rocky Mountain Conference of The United Methodist Church 
Mission & Ministry - July 2015
Annual Leadership Summit in September to focus on Fresh Expressions movement

As many of you may know, we are getting a visit in September from Rev. Graham Horsley, who comes from the British Methodist Church to lead our 2015 Rocky Mountain Conference (RMC) Leadership Summit with an introduction of Fresh Expressions UK. The Leadership Summit is an annual gathering of those who serve on RMC boards and agencies that provides a place and time where the Mission and Ministry of the Rocky Mountain Conference as a whole is connected and coordinated in a life-giving way. We trust that it helps create a better connectionalism between and among Mission and Ministry areas.

Back to Fresh Expressions - Rev. Horsley is the newly appointed Connexional Fresh Expressions Missioner for the Methodist Church. He has 25 years experience leading local churches in a variety of settings, always with an evangelistic edge and often planting new faith communities. He previously served the national church as Director of Evangelism and Church Planting for ten years.

The Fresh Expressions movement Rev. Horsley represents started in the United Kingdom and has started to spread in recent years to the United States. The movement encourages new forms of church for a fast-changing world, working with Christians from a variety of denominations and traditions. It has resulted in hundreds of new faith communities being formed alongside more "traditional" churches. While all fresh expressions are different, there are some guiding principles that tie them all together. Fresh expressions are:
  • Missional - serving those not currently served by any church;
  • Incarnational - listening to people and entering their culture;
  • Discipling - helping people enter more fully into the life of Christ;
  • Ecclesial - forming church.
The work of Fresh Expressions revolves around four aims: renewing vision, gathering news, supporting growth, and developing training. The aim of a fresh expression isn't to provide a stepping stone into an existing church, but to form a new kind of faith community that steps out in its own right.

We are very pleased that Rev. Graham Horsley is coming to share the principles of this movement with us. He says of his work "In Britain we discovered that however well we 'do' traditional church, lots of people will never engage with us. Partly because they have deep (and often uninformed) prejudices against institutional church, partly because they are just 'wired' differently in their spiritual lives. Ten years ago Fresh Expressions was formed by the UK Methodist and Anglican Churches to encourage a new movement that was re-imagining church. Their aim is to complement what has become known as 'inherited church' with new forms of church that will reach people who've never heard the good news of Jesus before and help them to become his disciples in Christian community, and to re-engage with people who've left church."

More information about Fresh Expressions can be found on their UK Website as well as their US Website.

I'd like to extend an invitation to attend the Leadership Summit to anyone who may be interested in learning more about Fresh Expressions. The summit will take place over two days on Friday, September 25, from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. and Saturday, September 26, from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., at St. Luke's United Methodist Church, 8817 S. Broadway, Highlands Ranch, Colorado 80129. Please go to our Leadership Summit webpage for more information. If interested in attending, contact Youngsook Kang at [email protected] or Gibette Encarnacion at [email protected].

We look forward to hearing more from Rev. Horsley come September.  

Friends, have a great summer! 

Peace in Christ,
Youngsook Charlene Kang
Director of Mission and Ministry



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