Samenvatting

Urban Expression seeks to plant exciting, grass-roots, transformative ways of being church in inner city neighbourhoods. In doing this they work from a set of values, one of which describes faith as a journey. This essay looks at how this value is worked out in three English Urban Expression churches, focussing especially on the point in people’s faith journey when they become involved in a church. Chapter 1 seeks to define what ‘faith journey’ means and why it is a helpful image to describe faith. In doing this the theme is linked to postmodernity and post-Christendom as well as Van der Meulen’s pastoral model of the men of Emmaus and Ganzevoort and Visser’s hermeneutical narrative approach to pastoral care.

Field research among church leaders and regular church members shows that the main factor in becoming part of a church is the welcome and support given by other people. The possibility to ask questions and hear different opinions are highly valued. It also suggests that in order to help people move forward on their faith journey Urban Expression teams need to continue to journey themselves and need to be skilled in leading dialogue and handling conflicts. Developing local leadership is a challenge faced by the researched churches and Urban Expression wide, further research into how to go about this would be helpful.