Soulspace offers stepping stones to full Christian worship, involving Bible pathways that can lead people to Christ.
Often, but not always, what emerges is a new Christian community alongside and connected to its parent church.
These new communities go under a variety of names – church plants, new worshipping communities, fresh expressions of church, missional communities, new Christian communities and more.
It’s all very confusing!
So here is a simple definition to help you recognize when the Soulspace group has become a new Christian community, whatever its name.
The Soulspace gathering is:
- New. Ideally, it contains mainly people who were not regularly coming to church (over the past two years).
- Christian. People gather with the explicit intention to worship Jesus.
- Community. They meet for worship at least once a month.
An example:
- You have a community meal or some other outreach/community engagement activity. This is not the new Christian community.
- Some of your guests gather around Soulspace, but they are coming for ‘a taste of spirituality’. They enjoy the time to reflect and connect with others. Their prayers, if they pray, are addressed to ‘God as they understand God.’ This is not a new Christian community, but it could be on the way to being one.
- In time, the Soulspace gathering discusses a Bible passage each time they meet, addresses their prayers to the Christian God (‘in the name of Jesus’), and sees themselves as a group with Christ as the focus, even though not everyone would call themselves a Christian. This is a new Christian community.