Sean Stillman, Zac’s Place and the need for fresh expressions

We’ve decided to make a slight tweak to our pattern of podcasts and make Nomad Extra more of an occasional thing (which was actually our original intention). Nick’s gone and got himself a proper 9-5 job, and things are pretty busy for me right now, so rather than being a regular monthly affair, Nomad Extra will appear from time to time when we come across interesting people doing interesting things. The main podcast will continue as normal though, coming out on the 10th of each month (or there abouts).

On this month’s Nomad Extra Nick had a chat with Sean Stillman. Sean is based in Swansea in South Wales, and has been involved in mission among bikers, musicians and artists for a number of years now. This work led to the formation of Zac’s Place, the progress of which you can follow on Sean’s blog.

What really struck me about Sean’s work with Zac’s Place was that it was born out of necessity. It wasn’t some interesting ecclesial experiment, but it emerged out of a real need. Sean had made good connections with the biking community through a kind of chaplaincy role, and people wanted to continue those conversations, but understandably weren’t interested in doing this in a traditional church setting. So Sean started to meet regularly in a local bar, and from that Zac’s Place was born.

I guess in some ways the little community I’m apart of did start as an experiment. We’d been thinking, praying and reading a lot about incarnational mission, and so we thought we’d give it a go and see what would happen. Things have slowly been developing over the last year though, and I’m increasingly seeing a need for a fresh expression of church. Me and Hannah, for example, lead a little group of Christians all of whom have struggled to make much more than a superficial connection with traditional church. Nick and I have formed a film club often leads to great conversations about spirituality, but none of them would ever come to church. And we’ve also made numbers of other connections with people who are curious about spirituality, but who are not at all interested in anything formal or ‘religious’.

So we’re starting to wonder as a group where all this is leading us. Do we just carry on as we are, meeting together as a small community, and developing connections on our street? Or do we start to seriously think about expanding our horizons and forming something that can meet the needs of people over a wider area? At the moment we’re really not sure. But listening to Sean’s story has firmed my resolve to seek God and discern what it is he’s calling us to.

Tim