Alternative worship is what happens when people create worship for themselves, in a way that fully reflects who they are as people and the culture that they live their everyday lives in.

Because most forms of church have become culturally disconnected from the wider world, alternative worship can seem like a radical break with conventional church practices. It uses the technologies and media of our everyday lives - TV, video, CDs, computers - things that we take for granted in a domestic environment but seldom see in churches. It takes much of its content from the secular world - the music, the language, often the imagery - because it sees the presence of God in these things, and knows that spirituality has to make sense in the context of our secular lives if it is to nourish us and help us be salt and light.

At the same time, alternative worship searches the traditions of the Church for resources that fit the needs of the present. Christianity has rich storehouses of spiritual treasures. Many of these lie neglected or forgotten, but have renewed relevance - others have been exhausted by overuse and need to be rested, or have become irrelevant to the current needs of church and world. Alternative worship tries to interpret tradition faithfully into new contexts - but this may mean changing the form in order to preserve or revivify the meaning.

Alternative worship is not about trendy evangelism. It is not about dressing the Church up in contemporary clothes to appeal to outsiders. It is not about putting on a spectacle in order to get a message across. It is an attempt by the people involved to make worship for themselves that is real, that allows them to bring their whole selves and lives before God, not just the religious parts. That means acknowledging in church that we do go to clubs, argue about politics, watch TV and films, have curious and detailed knowledge of parts of the music world, get stressed about our jobs, shout at the children...and that God is right there with us. So it seems natural to continue the conversation in God's house, without suddenly pretending to be respectable.

But strangely, this makes what goes on more accessible to outsiders - because it's recognisably part of the world they live in, touches the issues they care about, isn't just a religious experience that you have to be an insider to get. Sometimes they start to see where God is in their own lives - and that's often not where religious convention would have us expect.

Alternative worship is deeply concerned for community. Community is a place of honesty, commitment and support, where people grow through relationship. Community is essential to living any kind of authentic Christian life in societies which work against it in fine detail. Community is not clique, but reaches out to others, maybe locally, maybe globally. Whenever we meet as God's people we are aware of those not present who are also God's people. And we are aware of those who do not consider themselves God's people but are, more than they ever think.

Alternative worship is intensely concerned with creativity. Partly this is because reinventing worship requires it; but more because of a belief that creativity is essential to human wholeness and should be offered back to the Creator in worship. Since we are made in the image of a creator God, we are all creative - but life, and often sadly the Church, conspires to tell us that we are not, that we have nothing worth offering. Alternative worship offers people the chance of creative expression in worship. Not just the team making things to be admired by the congregation, but the congregation making things as worship, to be admired by the team.

Alternative worship tries to give people 'tools' for honest encounters with God. 'Tools' might mean prayer, pens and paper, a video loop, something to eat, someone to talk to, Holy Communion, or anything else that can help us to meet God in some way. But the tools used in alternative worship have one important characteristic - they don't lead to predetermined outcomes. That is to say, alternative worship seeks to bring God and the participant together - but not to predetermine what the outcome of the meeting might be. This is essential to protect the genuineness of the encounter.

The implication of all this is that the team who organise the event see themselves as facilitators rather than leaders. Their skills are put to helping everyone present, themselves included, to have an authentic encounter with God. They don't presume to dictate the content of that encounter or where it should lead. They trust that God will deal with people with infinite sensitivity for their situations. The absence of pressure, or concern for specific 'results', encourages openness to God. Amazing encounters may follow.