Author: The Rev Jo Trickey, Church Advocate, LICC.
The Same God. A Changing World. Fresh Resources for the Frontline.
I was at theological college in my early 20s when I first encountered the work of LICC. Someone recommended one of Mark Greene’s books, and it challenged everything I thought I knew about being a fruitful Christian.
I’d spent my teens reading about the lives of Jackie Pullinger, John Newton, and other wonderful saints. I’d been encouraged to be active in my church, to run the CU at my school, to serve at summer festivals, camps, and church holiday clubs. By some measures I was a great disciple: in love with Jesus, totally devoted to my local church, spending hours in prayer and Bible reading.
But nothing in my discipleship joined the dots between Sunday and Monday, between what I believed and where I actually spent my time. I had no vision for how God could work through me out in his world. Mark’s work started bridging that gap in my mind, but there was much more to come.
What do Degree Courses have to do with the Kingdom of God?
A few years later, I became the student worker at St Saviour’s Guildford, where I found myself working with a wonderful group of students and young adults. They were bright, faith-filled, and on the verge of launching into careers. The question hanging over all of them, both articulated and unprocessed was: how does following Jesus fit into all of this?
Into that context came Fruitfulness on the Frontline, LICC’s flagship course. It outlines six ways we can spot God at work through us in our daily lives, encouraging a bigger, whole-life understanding of our mission as Christians. We did it as a whole church and it was brilliant.
Often for the first time, the students began to see that their degree courses, their part-time jobs, their placement years, their housemate relationships all mattered to God. Those contexts were their ‘frontlines’ - places where the people of God encounter people who don’t yet know him, the frontline of the church as God builds his kingdom through us. God wasn’t waiting for them at the church building or at the CU meeting. He was already present with them in the lecture hall, the communal kitchen, the gym.
What joy! And it wasn’t just the students. All the people I loved and respected who were working in banking, law, schools, businesses, and so on, were doing God’s work too, building his kingdom in the spaces and places where he’d called them. It was and is so exciting to think of all those men and women following his particular call on their lives in the places and tasks of every day.
A Liberating Way to See the World
The key to this fresh perspective was the ‘6Ms of fruitfulness’. the six ways to spot God at work through us. Born out of qualitative research, they are:
- Modelling godly character.
- Making good work.
- Ministering grace and love.
- Moulding culture.
- Being a Mouthpiece for truth and justice.
- Being a Messenger of the gospel.
They gave us a way of celebrating what God was already doing in us all. That language was liberating. It helped us see possibility where we had previously seen only pressure, to see purpose where we had only seen the heaviness of work.
Fruitfulness on the Frontline gave a backbone to our student ministry over the following years and shaped our graduate prep. It included not just practical advice about how to find a church in a new city, but a whole-life discipleship vision: you are being sent, not just leaving. You are called, not just employed.
What happened in that student group in Guildford is not unusual. Fruitfulness on the Frontline has been used by more than 250,000 Christians in over 4,500 churches across the UK and beyond. Church leaders in every tradition have found it a reliable, accessible tool for shifting the imagination of their congregations, from a Sunday-only faith to a whole-life one.
This is a resource that has shaped the DNA of many churches and I’m often asked about it even years after it was launched. In the words of former Urban Saints director Matt Summerfield, ‘It felt possible. Attainable. Essential - for me and for God’s world.’
Keeping Up with a Shifting World
Here’s the thing about good resources, though: they don’t stay good forever. The world moves. Culture shifts. The frontlines your congregation inhabit look different than they did a decade ago. And if our tools for equipping whole-life disciples don’t reflect that, they start to feel like they’re describing a world that no longer quite exists.
In 2026, post-pandemic, post-ChatGPT – the frontline is more complex than ever. How do you model godly character when your colleagues only ever see you on a screen? How do you make good work when the boundary between work and rest has become uncomfortably porous? There are also deeper cultural currents to navigate: questions about the meaning and dignity of work, the rise of AI and automation, the cost-of-living pressures that have made many in our congregations anxious about their financial futures.
None of this is beyond the scope of the gospel. So, our resources for discipleship need to be honest about the landscape. This is why we’re so delighted that LICC is launching a brand-new suite of Fruitfulness on the Frontline resources in the autumn.
Rather than a refresh, it’s a new set of tools for a new moment, designed to work at every level of church life, from the individual going deeper on their own to the whole congregation catching a shared vision, usable as standalone pieces or together as a set.
For churches, there’s a brand-new small group course which doesn’t just invite people to identify the 6Ms in their own lives but gives them space to spot them in each other. (I’ve always found that someone else calling out something good in me is far more of an encouragement than me noticing it in myself!) There are also new service plans, sermon outlines, and supporting videos – ready-made material that can shape a service series without requiring you to build it from scratch.
For individuals, there’s a devotional journey to help embed prayers for our frontlines into our daily practice, and a new podcast series interviewing a range of people on how they see God bringing about fruit in their daily lives. There’s also a newly updated edition of Mark Greene’s much-loved book of the same name, exploring in more depth how God works in and through us in daily life – with new stories, a new introduction, and updated insights for a fast-changing world.
Encourage Me, Encourage You
Together, this suite of resources is designed to help people see the amazing possibilities all around them every day, to encourage them that they’re more fruitful than they might have thought, and prompt them to share that encouragement with others. Experience shows that for many people, this perspective is totally transformative.
Since Fruitfulness on the Frontline first launched in 2014, it’s been a rich, transformative discipleship tool, inspiring the church to see how God is already at work in the everyday – not just the dramatic moments, the obvious acts of service or proclamation, but the quiet faithfulness, the steady grace, the good work done well, that so often goes unnoticed and unnamed.
This new suite brings fresh life to that work, making it not just relevant but genuinely illuminating for groups whose members are spread across home offices and open-plan workplaces, schools and hospitals, studios and call centres, each inhabiting a frontline that the others may rarely see, but can learn to celebrate. It’s for the person in the third pew on the left who has never been told that their Monday morning matters to God.
What this Means for Your Leadership
We hope the new Fruitfulness on the Frontline is a gift to shorten, not increase, your to-do list.
As church leaders, we know better than most that the gathered life of the church is only ever a fraction of the story. We gather for 10 or 12 hours a week, if we’re generous. Our people live the other 110 hours out there in the world. The question is not whether they are disciples in those spaces. The question is whether they are prepared for the mission and ministry they have there.
Fruitfulness on the Frontline gives you tools to put in their hands. Not a programme to manage, but a vision to catch. Not another thing to add to the rota, but a framework that can quietly give people fresh vision for the lives God has given them.
I think about those students who left Guildford and went to work in the West End of London, or in defence in Wales, or teaching dance in Manchester. I don’t know all their stories, but I do know what they caught through this resource. The sense that God was with them in all of it, that they had something to offer, and that the ordinary could become magnificent in the hands of God.
That’s what a good resource can do. It plants a vision that outlasts the sessions.
Reflection Questions for Leaders
- Where is the ‘Sunday-Monday gap’ most visible in your church right now?
- Where are people already being fruitful that you might be overlooking, and how could you celebrate that more intentionally?
- How clearly can people in your congregation articulate their frontline (where they spend most of their week)?