As the United Reformed Church’s first pioneer minister, Janet Sutton is at the forefront of the emerging church movement.

The former minister of Alkrington & Providence URC in Middleton, Greater Manchester, took up her post with South Western synod last October. Currently Bristol-based, she is researching where she should go to “plant” a new church community.

“The whole idea is to reach out to those people who wouldn’t normally go to church but have all these questions about who is God, who is Jesus, what life’s about,” she says.

She has kept her ideas about the kind of community that will emerge deliberately vague, she says, although she envisages a rural area as the most likely setting.

One thing, however, is already clear, she goes on: the new community will not meet in a traditional church building. “It’s almost certainly not going to include a church building,” she says. “It’s more likely to meet in a café, a pub, or a house than a church building.”

“You don’t have to go to a church building to find Christ,” she adds. “Christ is part of everyday life and not constrained to church on a Sunday.”

David Grosch-Miller, moderator of South Western synod, says that the minister’s brief is part theological, part practical.

“We said to her, ‘You go off and do it, and we will deal with all the institutional questions as they come up. There are no constraints,” he explained.

“The church has to find new ways of engaging people with what it means to be a disciple of Jesus in the 21st century,” he added. “Part of our problem is that our understanding of God and our style of worship are all shaped by the institutional church. We need to step outside the institution and take a fresh look at what we have to offer to contemporary culture.”