Common to the identity of many of these emerging-church projects that began in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, is their development with very little central planning on behalf of the established denominations. They occurred as the initiative of particular groups wanting to start new contextual church experiments, and are therefore very "bottom up." Murray says that these churches began in a spontaneous way, with informal relationships formed between otherwise independent groups and that many became churches as a development from their initial more modest beginnings.