CT: You’ve been in talks with Fresh Expressions leader Bishop Graham Cray for a while. What’s led up to this decision to enter into a more formal partnership with each other?

Andy: Part of it has been a growing connection between the prayer rooms we started and the communities that have developed and their links with the more established traditions of church – some quite monastic traditions alongside quite rigid and more conventional church situations. We started thinking about how our communities can bless and develop something within my own denominational tradition.

But we’ve also had a number of people who felt a call to get ordained, myself included, and that’s something we’ve been struggling with, having to go train elsewhere. We’ve been looking at ways of developing these communities so that there’s a language and permission, as it were, to sit within established denominations. How can we connect communities that are growing from prayer rooms with the established church denominations and in a way that gives back into where they started?

CT: It’s seems like 24/7 has really captured the imagination of young Christians. Why do you think that is?

Andy: We initially wondered whether there was an ‘extreme sport for prayer’ element in staying up in the night! There’s obviously a vibe and a feel to it that connects with young people. The young people I know resonate with the idea of connecting their faith with the real world they live in and the world around them and that’s been an emphasis of 24/7. We’re not shutting ourselves away in a prayer room. It’s prayer to go out, it’s prayer that connects.

My background was in youth work and 24/7 was the first time I really began to see young people engage in prayer in a corporate way and an individual way and with real depth. I think the church prayer meeting was somewhere young people didn’t often know what to do with or how to connect with. 24/7 is very much in their language with our mission to just go for stuff and try stuff.

But it is still all-age because we have younger children through to the elderly involved. Young people are a strong part of it but it’s still wider than that.

CT: Church pastors often complain that they can get people to sign up to community outreach or other projects but struggle to get people interested in prayer. Do you think that with this new partnership, 24/7 can play a part in getting prayer into the lifeblood of fresh expressions of church?

Andy: I hope so and that is something that Bishop Graham Cray has expressed as well. Any church or mission planting doesn’t start with us but with what God’s doing and the prayer room provides a place where that can be discovered.

Quite a lot of the mission and the communities that have come out of prayer rooms aren’t because someone had a brilliant idea but more because in praying they gained a sense of what God’s doing and they sought to join in. That dynamic is a really important part of the Fresh Expressions mentality as well. There is a sense that God is doing this and not us, so we need to continually pray in all the spaces in developing a fresh expression.

What’s also important for us is encouraging young people to be involved in this too. What would a fresh expression look like that involves them? How can we develop young leaders?

Prayer plays a part in that. It’s in the prayer room that we’ve gained a sense of vision about what God is doing. There probably isn’t much about 24/7 that didn’t start in a prayer room. I think we’re bringing that dynamic very strongly into this partnership and Fresh Expressions shares that idea and so from our point of view it feels like a very good fit.


CT: You mentioned previously that you want 24/7 to help the church grow into a mixed economy of church. What’s your vision for the future face of the church in the UK?

Andy: I’ve been involved in church ministry for nearly 20 years and what I’ve hit on is that there are a lot of excluded young people. It’s very difficult for some people to find a home within church as it looks right now. Our culture is fragmenting and we can’t expect to meet all the needs with one form and style of church.

I’m very much in support of a mixed economy or mixed ecology of church, all connecting and growing and supporting each other together. Some of them are small, some are large, some of them look like what you see on a Sunday in most towns, some of those may not.

But my vision is a church that fits. With the Fresh Expressions community we are developing in Reading, Reconcile, it’s about finding the people who don’t feel they can fit with where church is right now but have a hunger for God. We want to provide a home for them.

There are other people running skate parks, new monastic communities, messy churches , family based churches and churches on housing estates. A church that fits has got to be the future.

With the global nature of 24/7, we’ve noticed that here in the UK we don’t tend to think like missionaries. We still think the church is a part of the culture here. It is but we still need to learn more of a missional mindset, of coming in and saying how do we communicate the Gospel in a way that hearers will understand just like if you went to another nation or an unreached people group.

We’re in that perspective now and so personally I’m reading a lot of books on missiology about people who’ve gone to translate the Gospel into different cultures and contexts and I am applying that back into Reading and London and the UK.



CT: Some people are given to predicting doom for the future of the church in Britain but with 24/7’s connection with young people does it look different from where you’re standing?

Andy: It’s still a big challenge! When people come into a boiler room for the first time they are looking for something, they’re just not quite sure what they’re looking for, and for whatever reason church as it is right now hasn’t communicated to that.

There is a hunger, there are a lot of spiritual seekers. A leisure centre around the corner from us holds a mind, body and spirit fair regularly and they are searching for something.

So it’s about how we again communicate to that in a way that clearly sticks to what we believe whilst connecting with the things people are asking about. It is still a challenge for us to connect the people who are searching with the good news that we have.

People connect with the idea of prayer. It’s a language that people understand. At 24/7 it is encouraging and it is a different perspective but it is still very, very difficult.


CT: Do you think connecting involves breaking down people’s stereotypes of the church because 24/7 doesn’t fit the traditional mould at all?

Andy: Absolutely. We get a lot of surprise and interest just by being different and that is a big deal. I can only speak from experience but I think there are some stereotypes of the church that people like, like care for the poor and its commitment to the community.

With my training in the Anglican Church and our fresh expression in Reading, I’ve realised that there is a place for the established, traditional, sacramental church within communities whether it’s for baptising babies or marriages or just knowing where you can go in a crisis. People do value that.

But there are other things that don’t work and breaking some of those stereotypes while holding onto the good elements of it is the balance that we need to find.

That’s why I’m encouraged about this partnership with Fresh Expressions, because it is about doing fresh things within traditional denominations. I feel excited about coming from 24/7, which has grown up alongside the church to be able to bring some stuff back in to bless and encourage it and stand with people looking to do something different within the church that I’m part of.



CT: You’ve started a new 24/7 training course, Roots. What’s that about?

Andy: Training within the 24/7 movement has been an interesting journey because in our explosive growth at the start we released people sometimes without the time and opportunity to train and equip them. So a lot of the training was done as we went along because we were still learning ourselves.

The idea behind Roots is that training and learning is embedded within local communities and that what we are learning, we are learning together. It’s not just a thing you do and then stop. We want to be lifelong learners. Roots is about giving the opportunity for people to bed in next to communities that are already on a learning process and that’s different from a year out or a particular course or scheme. It has more roots - hence the name.


CT: Do you think Fresh Expressions is going to change or impact on what you are doing or is it just one of many different things going on?

Andy: We’re still trying to work out quite what this partnership will mean in practice! But in the short term we’ve got five irons in the fire. One is how can we bless Fresh Expressions in terms of prayer and a lifestyle of prayer? How we can engage with young people – and Fresh Expressions is about to start a whole round table research process on engaging with young people and we’re going to be a part of that.

There is also the training and development of leaders. One of the dynamics of Fresh Expressions is that you have ordained pioneers, whether Methodist or Anglican, but how do you equip people who aren’t ordained to lead and develop and pioneer these communities and, within our own training, how can we engage people with the idea of Fresh Expressions and the pioneering a fresh expression of church within their local context? We will audit what’s already going on and then work on getting people together and providing a sense of connection.

We’re finding that with people who are starting a 24/7 community or fresh expression, one of the things they have in common is that it’s quite a lonely and difficult job. You can often be doing it on your own with not many people and it’s hard at the start. So how can we provide support for people who are doing this sort of thing? The part 24/7 plays in that is in connecting people up. It’s going to be an exciting year.