News and Views

By Melissa Lauber

The first thing you must know about Fresh Expressions is that it’s always about people and proximity – and the unexpected things that God can do.

In February, the 17 members of BWC’s Fresh Expressions Academy were taken on a field excursion to Ocala, Florida, where their host was Michael Beck, a former drug dealer with several felonies and a brutal past. The group’s first stop was lunch at MoJos. 

Before grace, Beck shared that he and the restaurant’s owner, Ron Fernandez, used to be drug dealers at the same time in that city. Fernandez went on to turn his life around, open a chain of eateries and become one of the area’s most philanthropic civic leaders. Beck was ordained a United Methodist pastor and now leads the denomination’s Fresh Expressions initiative.

 He credits the transformation to the fact that “God can paint with ashes.” 

Defining Fresh Expressions

What God has painted in Beck’s life, and in the life of his wife, Jill, was the focus of the BWC’s excursion, led by the Rev. Bill Brown, the Conference Director of Innovative Evangelism.

Fresh Expressions, Brown explained, stem from uniting people’s interests and passions with faith practices to create and cultivate a new kind of Christian community for those outside of the church. Often tethered to existing churches, for resources and support, Fresh Expressions build on spiritual imagination, offer opportunities for lay people to be in ministry, and embrace the gift of grace.

There are Fresh Expression in dog parks and yoga studios, around dinner tables, along park trails, at art studios and comic book shops, on running tracks and pickleball courts – anywhere people gather to share life together. In these settings, Beck said, God is often introduced with the sharing of a brief “Jesus story,” and prayers offered for one another. 

One of the stops along the group’s tour was church in a tattoo parlor. There, three pastors got tattoos, while others shared the stories around their tattoos: of the beauty of a lotus growing out of the mud and murkiness of life, of a hero who found redemption, and of a father’s words of wisdom. One man present shared how he received his tattoo in prison by melting chess pieces, mixing it with shampoo, and using staples as needles.

The tattoos, people in this Fresh Expression have come to realize, are “an outward and visible expression of an inward and invisible grace.” For some, they become sacramental.

Beck, whose arms hold tattoos that tell the story of the life of Christ and several saints, also had a prison tattoo that once said, “Thug Life.” That was the life I chose, I couldn’t change the past, but I could put something on top of it, Beck said. He added a tattoo of a lion and a lamb. “Sometimes, God is a tattoo artist. God has taken that part of my identity and weaved it into a new thing.”

One of the BWC pastors received a tattoo of a passage from 1 Timothy 4:2 “Preach the Word; be prepared.”

Preaching the Gospel in our everyday living is one of the keys of Fresh Expressions, Brown said. “If we weren’t so afraid of the word, we would call it evangelism. We may have broken that word.” Fresh Expressions redeem it.

An Ecology of Compassion and Faith

The BWC group also visited Compassion UMC, which is housed in a United Methodist Church that was closed in 2018. Only months old, it is already a vibrant mission spot in the community, where dinner church is held once a week, and a holistic housing facility for those in recovery is being built in the church’s education space. It is expected to open this summer.

It is led by the Rev. Jill Beck, who explained that the housing and recovery ministry, called Open Arms Village, will include housing, therapy, job skill development, driver’s license and transportation assistance, education, family reunification and recovery services for women. It is, Michael Beck told the BWC group, “the seeds of what we hope. You’re standing in the dream.”

The church’s guiding values of compassion, imagination and adventure shape every detail of the work, Jill Beck said. Instead of starting with worship, Compassion UMC started by talking to the community and discovering what they felt their greatest needs were. Food insecurity was an issue, so were drug overdoses and addiction.

Jill remembers in December, one month after taking on the property, a neighbor called the police because there was a man sleeping out under the cross at the “abandoned church.” Jill responded. It turned out the man was having seizures, and they were able to get him to a hospital. He has since found housing and returns to the community meals at the church, where he cleans and clears tables.

But it was the comment “abandoned church” that struck Jill. “I took it personally,” she said. She is intent on creating a space that is at the epicenter for recovery in the community, alive with Spirit, where everyone feels safe and welcome. And she is succeeding.

“We grew up in the context,” said Beck. We both grew up in Ocala and we’re both in recovery. “We’re leading from the wounds in our soul.”

Transformed and Transforming

Compassion’s sister Fresh Expression is at St. Mark’s UMC, where a similar ecology of recovery ministries started four years ago for men. The housing at Open Arms Village has room for 27 men, there is a house father, and a director of behavioral health, Davieoyn Hopson.

This is an amazing program,” Hopson said. “I get to see miracles every day. I get a front-row seat to miracles.” But this ministry can be taxing and is not for everyone, Hopson admits. It’s about being absolutely genuine. And it’s not about talking; it’s about being. “In this population we serve, it is necessary to be an example.”

A vital part of the dramatic, transformative work being done in this Fresh Expression is the worship and support of the inherited church, St. Mark’s UMC, which holds three services on Sunday morning – one of which is a “vintage” United Methodist worship service with worshippers who have attended for more than 40 years.

Those worshippers, like Miss Irene who also participates in the mid-week dinner church and Bible study, remember Beck when he was a boy. This was the church where his grandmother brought him, where he was baptized, served as an acolyte, and where at age 10 he began to feel the stirrings of a call to ministry.

He never dreamed he’d come back home, but “desperation, an encounter with Jesus, and a solitary confinement cell,” brought him back to his faith and into recovery. And, he said, quoting pastor Dan Jones, “Jesus saves your soul, but AA saves your ass.”

Biblically, Beck said, “we’re all coming through something. We’re all in recovery.” His experiences have shaped him into the pastor he is today. They’ve also taught him that people’s “compassion response is a measure of holiness.”

A God and a church of unexpected gifts

Both Michael and Jill Beck serve at Compassion and St. Mark’s UMC. What shocks people is that, with all that they accomplish, they are appointed as only quarter-time pastors. They do “side gigs” and have other income streams to support their family.

This appointment gives them the freedom to focus on the essentials. It also makes it essential for laity to step in to lead and do substantial portions of the ministry. Beck calls it “the taco truck test.” If the pastor is hit by a taco truck, will the ministry be able to continue and thrive?

People like Miss Betti assure that it will.

Betti Jefferson-Gadson was addicted to alcohol and drugs for 27 years. At age 21, she was beaten and left for dead. But years later, God sent her a vision that scared her into sobriety, and she eventually began “running for Jesus." 

Claiming a mantel of faith, she decided to put aside mourning and be a blessing. “God sent me back to the same streets I smoked crack on to bring somebody else out,” she said. “I went to bring somebody out of hell. I knew that was hell.”

In 2019, Jefferson-Gadson woke up one morning and felt a call to hold worship and Bible study for husband, her brother and herself in her living room. A Church for Hope was born and began to grow. During the pandemic, she handed out food in her yard to her neighbors in need.

Beck heard her talk about her ministry in a listening session and invited her to use the church for the food giveaway and her worship services. “We’re a small ministry, but we do big things for the Kingdom of God,” she said.

Members of the BWC were able to participate in the food giveaway to the community as cars drove up and were loaded with boxes of donated groceries. The grandmother of two and the great-grandmother of three, Jefferson-Gadson continues to be humble and grateful.

“If I could tell you one thing, she said, “when you see somebody out on the street corner -- the prostitute, homeless, crackhead, or dope dealer – don’t count them out. One day they may be your pastor.”

New stories of faith

Beck delights in Miss Betti’s story. Over the years as a pastor, he has learned that the specifics of ministry – the details of our own lives – create, incarnational moments where God breaks in. Jesus started with the specific, in the small town of Nazareth and with just a handful of fishermen. Eventually, he took the Gospel to the world, but Beck believes God honors the small and personal gestures of faith. “Through the particular,” he said, “we get to the universal.”

Brown agrees. Members of the Fresh Expressions Academy are meeting with Beck in monthly online coaching and learning sessions. At the end of a year, they’ll be creating Fresh Expressions of their own.

But Brown is also excited about lay and clergy people throughout the conference discovering how their interests and passions might be put into a context of faith to create a Fresh Expression. “You’ve been given permission,” he said. “I want to ask people, what’s stopping you, what will your next step be?"

The Conference is available to provide guidance and resources for those with ideas for Next Expressions. Brown encourages those considering it to take the first steps. Don’t worry about outcomes or metrics, he said. “Every number has a name, every name has a story, and every story is important to God.”

The next cohort of the Fresh Expressions Academy for members of the Peninsula-Delaware and Baltimore-Washington Conference is scheduled to begin in August 2024. 

For more:

• Thoughts from the Road: Some ideas from Fresh Expressions Academy member
• Taking the Jesus Story Outside the Church: Witnessing the Michael Beck Method -- An essay by the Rev. Lauren Harris 
• The Potential and Power of our FX Academy Immersion -- An essay by the Rev, Carm Evans
• Fresh Expressions movement redefines church's potential – story on the first meeting of the BWC’s FX Academy
• Fresh Expressions Movement offers hope – a UMNS story on the recent inaugural Fresh Expressions gathering.
• Fresh Expressions UM – A Board of Discipleship Resource 
• Accessing the imagination of God: A video clip with Rev. Michael Beck
• The church as more: A video clip with Angelic Edwards and Carm Evans