this weeks post is over on substack here
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The clue is in the title
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who like a little unpredictability… and those who have tried to follow this blog over the past year. This past year since leaving my full time role I’ve had the head space and time to blog regularly and enjoyed the discipline. It’s meant a post a week since May and I’m still going but if you’ve ever found yourself thinking, “Wasn’t there a post… last Tuesday? Or was it Friday? Or did I dream it?” you’re not alone. Until now, Sunday Papers has operated on what can only be described as a “spirit-led but calendar-agnostic” publishing rhythm. Posts have appeared each week just never on the same day each week.
But no more.
In a moment of radical alignment (and possibly after glancing at the actual name of the blog), ive had a breakthrough: Sunday Papers will now be published on… wait for it… Sundays.
Yes, from next week onwards, you can expect fresh writing every Sunday. Predictable. Reliable. Almost suspiciously organised. Like the universe has finally decided to cooperate with its own branding.
So unless you’re a vicar, alongside coffee, newspapers, and whatever else your Sunday looks like pull up a chair and pop over for a read. No more guessing. No more accidental midweek existential surprises (well, at least for as long as I can keep the content fresh).
And if you’d rather not rely on memory alone this is your gentle nudge to subscribe or register.subscribe or register. That way, the words come to you, rather than you wandering the digital wilderness hoping to stumble across them.
So here’s to new rhythms, better habits, and the quiet joy of knowing when something will arrive unlike the Royal Mail.
See you next Sunday.
The Prayer of the In-Betweeners
Way back in the 1990s I wrote a liturgy based on the idea that we were an in-between people. More recently I have discovered more about Bridget of Kildare or St Bridget and I loved how some people see her as someone who inhabited the inbetween spaces. This resonated a lot because of how I have been thinking about the Fresh Expressions strategy and inhabiting the living middle/the ecotone.
So as part of our Leadership Community gathering last week I wrote this reflection/prayer which I called the Prayer of the Inbetween.
God of doorways and crossroads,
of fading embers and kindled flame,
you meet us in the in between spaces,
between the known and the new,
between the gathered church
and the searching world.
We remember Brigid of Kildare,
born on the threshold of a door,
who wove a cross from rushes
and made the ordinary a shelter of grace.
They say that where she walked
through the cold fields of winter,
white snowdrops rose in her footsteps, small lanterns of hope
breaking through frozen ground.
Teach us to walk the in-between places,
between tradition and tomorrow,
between doubt and faith,
between the church doors
and the open road.
let hope rise quietly behind us,
like snowdrops in late winter,
Help us weave signs that point to new life
and notice everyday grace.
Make our hands generous,
our tables wide,
our communities warm as a hearth-fire.
And where we go
in streets, cafés, homes, and thresholds
may your Spirit leave small flowers of grace
growing in the wake of love.
Through Christ,
who walks every road with us.
Amen.
The Universal Suffrage of Creation and Us
There is something embarrassing about our obsession with happiness. We chase it like desperate of addicts but with the optimism of gamblers. We rename it wellbeing, flourishing, fulfilment, but maybe it’s the same. The saying goes “happiness is fleeting” and the weird thing is not that happiness is fleeting but that we continue to search for it as if we could readily achieve it.
Blaise Pascal suggested that this longing is not foolish our search is rooted in something deeper than the memory of fleeting times of happiness. We search for happiness because we once experienced it. Not in fragments or weekend bursts as a whole way of being, an atmosphere pat of our origin story. In his Pensées, he proposes that the human heart carries the trace of a joy it can no longer access. We are not inventing desire. We are remembering it.
But if happiness is so fleeting now why should we continue the search? Why not conclude that happiness is simply a neurological trick, a temporary spike in dopamine that evolution wired into us to keep the species moving?
Pascal refuses that reduction. He says that the very persistence of the search is evidence of something far bigger. We would not hunger for what had never nourished us. We would not ache for a fullness we had never tasted. The restlessness is a clue, and the craving is an echo from the deep.
In trying to make sense of my growing sense nd desire for nature connection I wonder what if Pascal was right about happiness but also what if that explains the desire for creation. What if the search for happiness was not just rooted in an abstract idea about our need to return to the creator where we experienced true happiness but also to return to the place we experienced it the creation. The fracture we feel is not just vertical but horizontal it’s as much heavenward as earthward?
Because our longing is not only for transcendence. It is for soil, sea air, trees older than our politics and rocks that stood the test of time. Like well-being we speak too casually about “getting into nature” as if it were a hobby, but the relief we feel is rooted in something deep inside us unfurl when we stand under a warm sun?
It is too easy to sentimentalise this and perhaps we do this as a kind of coping mechanism because if we really sat with it we would have to confront something far deeper. The ache to be in creation is not merely aesthetic preference. It is visceral because runs deep in our souls beneath our consciousness whether we recognise it or not. Even those who rarely step beyond concrete still carry it, surfacing as restlessness, as low-grade anxiety, with the suspicion that life is thinner than it should be.
We are longing not just for creation out there. We are longing for something that is deeply within us, because we are not separate from it. Our bodies are made of what the earth is made of. Our breath is shared air. The iron in our blood was forged in stars. The boundary between “us” and “environment” is far more porous than our philosophies admit. So perhaps when we long for forests and oceans and mountains, we are not craving escape. We are craving integration. We are sensing that we once knew ourselves as part of a living whole. That happiness, the deep, steady, unfractured kind was not a feeling but participation.
If Pascal is right that we search for happiness because we experienced it once as part of communion with God, then perhaps that communion was never disembodied. Perhaps the joy of origin was not a private mystical glow but a harmony, Creator, created and creature in right relation. A real belonging, severed but with the possibility of a way back by being saturated in nature and confronting our loss honestly.
We have become the species that can refuse its own embeddedness. We can pave, extract, dominate, and still imagine ourselves autonomous. We have convinced ourselves that we stand over creation rather than within it. But time and time again our bodies betray us, we burn out we feel the need to numb ourselves. We seek stimulation because we have lost saturation in nature.
In older language, suffrage did not mean ballots and polling stations. It meant prayer. Petition. Intercession. A cry rising on behalf of another. I suspect, a universal suffrage is taking place. Creation itself is petitioning for wholeness. The groaning of forests stripped bare, the warming seas, the displaced creatures, these are not only data points. They are lament. But the suffrage is not one-sided our bodies are petitioning too. But we are looking in the wrong places, endless scrolling, compulsive productivity, hunger for experiences, these are distorted prayers.
The tragedy is not that happiness is fleeting. The tragedy is that we have mistaken the flickers for the fire. The brief highs for the home we lost. And so we keep searching, because somewhere beneath our cynicism we know the search is justified.
The universal suffrage of creation and us is a shared petition and we need to wake up to the fact that just earth strains toward renewal so do we.
The environmental crisis is not merely a technical problem it’s also a theological one. Our exploitation of the earth mirrors our exploitation of ourselves. We treat land as resource, and we treat our souls the same way. We optimise, mine, leverage the land and sea because we are too afraid to to sit, to confront the reality of our longing and so we are destroying the thing that could save us.
To find the happiness we once knew is not to escape from creation but through a perfect immersion in it, held within its love and the love of its Maker.
A posture for change
The Church talks a great deal about change. We have strategies for it, consultations about it, anxiety around it, and occasionally conferences dedicated to it. And tbh I’m a great fan of developing a theory of change for organisations. What we rarely develop, however, is a posture for it.
Posture matters in leadership and culture change science, there is a growing recognition that organisations do not primarily change because they adopt new ideas. They change when their underlying habits, reflexes, and shared assumptions shift. It isn’t the new programme that makes the difference; it’s the new way of seeing.
Theologically, that shouldn’t surprise us. Jesus did not begin with a strategy but with a call. When God speaks to Abram in Book of Genesis 12, there is no five-year plan. There is only movement: “Go.” The people of God are formed not as managers of stability but as those attentive enough to move when called and learn on The Way.
The question for the contemporary Church is not simply, What should we do next?
It is, Who are we becoming so we are ready when we see the missio die and we can join in, either because of opportunities or because of a sense seeing?
In my experience, opportunities for renewal seldom arrive neatly labelled and in most cases they are rarley polite.
They appear as disruption. As complaint, a funding crisis, a new housing development on the edge of town, a lay leader with an inconvenient idea.
From a culture change perspective, these moments function as what systems thinkers call “adaptive challenges.” They cannot be solved by technical adjustment alone. They require new learning a level of power relinquishment and often a shift in identity.
And that is precisely where the Church often hesitates. We are guardians of memory we do do hold story, sacrament, and tradition. But when memory becomes preservation it becomes rooted I fear.
The early church, as described in Acts of the Apostles, was not preserved by its structures rather fuelled by attentiveness. The Spirit disrupts them more often than comforts them. Philip finds himself on a desert road, the whole Peter’s theological framework and worldview is dismantled on a rooftop. Paul’s missionary journeys are redirected mid-course several times
So maybe Change is not primarily structural but spiritual. In organisational language, we speak about “readiness for change.” This is not about capacity alone. It is about trust.
Do people trust one another enough to experiment?
Do they trust leadership enough to risk?
Do they trust God enough to release control?
With trust, even loss can become generative because people don’t fear change they fear loss The risen Christ still bears scars. Change, in the Christian imagination, is rarely clean. It is redemptive precisely because it carries continuity within transformation.
If we want to be ready for the opportunities that will arise then we must cultivate certain postures long before the moment arrives.
1. Curiosity over defensiveness
Cultures that thrive in change ask better questions. Instead of “How do we stop this?” they ask, “What might God be doing here?” Curiosity disarms anxiety. It slows reactivity. It allows discernment.
2. Distributed ownership
Change science consistently demonstrates that transformation sticks when ownership is shared. If readiness depends on a single heroic leader, it is fragile. If it is embedded in the culture of who we are as church and people it is resilient.
3. Experimentation without panic
Healthy systems run small experiments. They prototype. They learn. They iterate. The Church, at her best, has always done this. Monastic movements, Methodist class meetings, fresh expressions of worship, none began as dominant models. They began as responses. But experimentation requires permission to fail. And failure requires a theology spacious enough to absorb it.
4. Interior grounding
No amount of strategic clarity compensates for unexamined fear and even though people have named that much of the current strategy is rooted in institutional anxiety I’m sill not sure the impact has been fully examined.
If leaders are internally anxious, the system absorbs it. If leaders are grounded, in prayer, in community, in a secure sense of belovedness, the system can use uncertainty well even as an asset. Perhaps solitude and attentiveness need to become not luxuries but infrastructure. The leader who knows they are held does not grasp for control.
Despite my activist nature we do not need to chase every opportunity, readiness is not restlessness. To develop a posture for change is not to become reactive or trend-driven rather it is to become attentive. So when the Spirit disturbs our settled patterns our posture sees the opportunity.
Even before opportunity arises formation will shapes the future and the future of the Church is being formed long before it is revealed. In quiet PCC meetings we build trust, we form leaders who choose prayer over panic and congregations who practise curiosity rather than complaint. Let’s grow communities willing to bless what is emerging without clinging to what is fading. Change readiness is not achieved through urgency but cultivated through formation. The question, then, is not whether change will come but whether we will have become the kind of people who can recognise it as gift rather than threat.
Solitude wasn’t a Spiritual Discipline, it was Survival
In the Christian tradition, solitude is often spoken of as a gift or a discipline. Loneliness, by contrast, is usually named as a wound. However in reality the boundary between the two can be blurred, especially when aloneness is not chosen but imposed.
For many people, being alone has never felt safe or spacious. For some, solitude intensifies anxiety, trauma, or a sense of abandonment. That matters, and it needs saying clearly: solitude is not a universal good, and it is not a discipline everyone can or should practise in the same way.
And yet, for some of us, solitude emerges not as a spiritual ideal but as something learned early out of necessity rather than desire.
Growing up in a context of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), I learnt early how to be alone. Often this was about safety: stepping away from noise, volatility, or emotional unpredictability. Nature became a place of refuge fields, woods, and in particular streams. These were places where my body could settle and my breathing could slow.
At the time, I didn’t have the language of spirituality. But I did have a fragile awareness that there was something more going on than mere escape. Being alone in nature carried a sense of depth, even if I couldn’t name it as prayer. It might have been hope, or longing, or even wishful thinking. But it felt like more than emptiness.
Looking back, I recognise that this awareness resonated so much with my current understanding of the Beloved and a deeply ecological spirituality. Long before belief is articulated, creation bears witness. The Christian tradition has always held that God is not only encountered in words and doctrines, but in presence, stillness, nature and attentiveness.
Loneliness and solitude are not the same
Loneliness is being alone without meaning, without connection, without a sense of being held. It contracts and restricts our sense of self. It corrodes trust. It can be spiritually dangerous, especially when wrapped in religious language that praises endurance but ignores pain.
Solitude, by contrast, is aloneness with attention. It may not always be chosen at first, but it becomes formative when it is accompanied by awareness of G-d, self, others and creation. The difference is not the absence of people, but the presence of a broader more connected relationship. Jesus himself embodies this distinction.
Over time, what began as survival slowly became something more intentional. Solitude developed into a discipline that I recognised from within. It became a place of presence without needing to perform competence, leadership, or certainty.
But still my ACE shape how Solitude now functions. On a good day solitude acts as a :
- resistance to urgency,
- resistance to the pressure to be endlessly available,
- resistance to the belief that my value is measured by visibility or output
- A reminder that God’s work does not depend on my exhaustion.
- A reorientation back to ministry flowing from being held, not from holding everything together.
On a bad day muscle memory takes over and I run for the hills or curl up in a ball beside a stream or focus on a tree….but that’s also ok. Too often however it means a withdrawal from connections that I should be paying attention to and that’s not ok.
I’m aware that my story cannot, and should not, be universalised. For some, solitude needs to be approached gently, or not at all. For others, healing comes first through community, therapy, structure, or safety. The Church does harm when it spiritualises isolation or confuses withdrawal with holiness.
The tentative testimony of my own life, my experiences of needing to be alone, held within nature and accompanied by an early, imperfect sense of “something bigger” became the soil in which a discipline of solitude could grow. What once protected me has become something that now strengthens me.
And perhaps that is one of the quiet redemptions at the heart of Christian formation: that God meets us not only in what we choose, but also in what we survive and patiently teaches us how to dwell there with hope.
Communion as training
Faith communities have always been exercise grounds for resistant hope. In the cracks of empire, the early followers of Jesus broke bread and imagined life beyond Caesar’s reach. What if their gathering wasn’t simply a meal, what if it was training? A strengthening of the moral and spiritual fibres of hope that keep us reaching for the unseen alternative, even while our feet are still planted in the old order.
To dream is not to escape. It is to remember that the structures around us are not the whole story or even like a star that dies before it’s light reaches us the current empire might already be dead. Dreaming of justice, of communion, of the future possible, is both an act of imagination and of resistance. It helps us see that what is, does not have the final word. Hope, then, is not naïve optimism but the slow work of building spiritual muscle memory for what could be.
And perhaps quiet longing of communion, holds us both securely and precariously. Securely, because it ties us to one another in a web of belonging that mirrors the creation. Precariously, because real communion demands vulnerability, and vulnerability always risks loss.
We are both held and stretched at once. The table, the shared dream, these are both anchor and edge. Perhaps that is why hope is never static. It aches, strains, and strengthens in the same breath.
To exercise hope and communion then, is to keep turning toward one another in our shared longing. It is to keep dreaming stubbornly of the alternative hidden beneath the noise of now. It is to live as if the world God loves might yet be remade, one hopeful muscle at a time
To places we have never been before
Paul Bradbury’s recent reflection on moving beyond empire reminds us how deeply Western mission has been entangled with universalising instincts, the drive to export methods, models, or mindsets far beyond where they first belonged. His question, “How might we save the world without conquering it?” pushes us toward a more humble, localised, and participatory understanding of mission. It’s a call that echoes strongly with what I argued in my previous post what works, works because it is contextual.
If empire seeks control of space, then contextual mission seeks communion IN space. In other words, mission faithful to the gospel begins not with scale but with soil. It roots itself in place but years of contextual mission,following the missio dei and the incarnation has taught us place needs to be understood broadly. Contextually shaped mission is about both “communities of place” and “communities of interest”, and in both these, space matters or perhaps more precisely the space between matters.
Space as the Ground of Context
For communities of place, context is pretty straight forward it’s bounded by postcodes, pavements, local histories, and particular faces. Here, “listening to context” means walking the streets, dwelling among, noticing the patterns of belonging and exclusion, paying attention to how the Spirit stirs through daily life. The missional question is spatial: How is God already at work here?
But the same is true for communities of interest those gathered by vocation, affinity, digital connection, or shared passion. These are not disembodied spaces; they are differently embodied. They occupy networked space, an online forum, a workplace, a music scene, a shared narrative world. These spaces, too, have boundaries, cultures, and ecologies of meaning that also require listening, care, and presence.
To be contextual here means learning the topography of these less tangible places the rituals that shape belonging, the language that signals trust, the injustices and hopes that animate people. This too is place work. Contextual mission is not about being “place-based” versus “network-based”; it is about recognising that space and particularly the space in between is the texture of all context.
The Space Between: From Ownership to Participation
Empire’s imagination is to fill space to occupy, to own, to organise territory. Contextual imagination leaves space, space for others to speak, for grace to emerge, for co-creation. This is not the space of empire, this is the space of incarnation: God dwelling, not dominating; participating, not possessing.
In our current moment, where both geography and culture feel unsettled, perhaps the task is not to create new models of church or even parish, but to nurture new ecologies of space, perhaps even Brave Spaces of Community and Conversation, porous enough to hold the complexity of both rooted neighbourhoods and fluid networks of meaning.
Context is not an afterthought, It isthe space where the gospel takes shape. So maybe the better question isn’t simply “What works?” but “Where does mission dwell?” Because where mission dwells, (whether a community of place or interest) determines how God’s story is spoken and heard, and when we listen and join in we go to a new place we have been before.
Why What Works, Works: Contextual Mission and the Shape of Faithful Innovation
We know, at least intuitively, that some things work in mission and some don’t. We can point to Bubble Church, Messy Church, particular church plants, fresh expressions that have taken root and borne fruit. The temptation is to move too quickly from that observation to replication: this works, therefore let’s do more of it. But that instinct, while understandable, misses the deeper truth. What works, works because at its heart is contextual mission.
The truth is to be effective it has to be about contextual mission. A basic understanding of systems evens backs this up for Worship First church planting models. This is something I have reflected on before using the Cynefin framework. In the bottom right-hand corner of Cynefin, the simple domain, we are dealing with contexts where cause and effect can readily understood, so worship first large scale plants can work, because you know the soil (context) they need to be planted in. Ie Resource Churches is areas with high student numbers, where the employees suit the context. You cannot impose a solution from elsewhere and expect predictable results in the Complicated Zone, here you need contextual adaption eg worship first church plants in a market town may need a families worker instead of a student worker. Then in the Complex and Chaotic Zones context comes even more to the fore, you probe, sense, and respond. You listen. You pay attention. You act humbly and experimentally and so Listening or Community Church planting, at its best, lives precisely here.
This all works not because any of it follows a universal template, but because it all begins with a level contextual awareness. The plant knows where it is, who it is among, and what the Spirit might already be doing there. That attentiveness to context is not incidental; it is the very reason fruitfulness becomes possible.
At the heart of the things that work in mission is not a model but a posture: listening to the Missio Dei and the context.
Take Bubble Church as an example. One could argue quite clearly that Bubble Church works because it is contextual mission. It is not magic, nor is it universally transferable. It works because local vicars and clergy have listened carefully to their context, often noticing young families on the fringes of church life, parents seeking connection, children needing space to be themselves, and have identified Bubble Church as a resource that fits. The model is then brought in not as a franchise, but as a contextual response. The same can be said of Messy Church. Its effectiveness lies not in crayons and craft tables per se, but in the way it emerged from listening: to families, to patterns of time poverty, to the desire for intergenerational belonging that does not rely on cultural fluency with inherited church. Messy Church is context-first mission that happened to crystallise into a recognisable form.
Even in church planting circles that talk about being “worship first,” the same dynamic is at play, whether or not it is always acknowledged. Worship-first plants do not appear randomly (or if they do they tend to fail). They are often planted into areas with high student populations, or significant numbers of young adults, or cultures where music and gathering carry particular social weight. The decision to centre worship is might itself be more the result of contextual listening than many assume.
This is why fresh expressions remain so important. Fresh expressions are not primarily about novelty, nor about ecclesial experimentation for its own sake. They are about starting with context. They are about taking seriously the conviction that there is no such thing as a generic mission field, and therefore no such thing as a one-size-fits-all church.
I have argued that mission takes place within complex, adaptive systems, that culture is semiotic. Therefore, Churches, neighbourhoods, cultures, and networks are not machines to be engineered but living systems to be engaged. Within that framing, More recently I have suggested that faithful mission involves thinking carefully about how we scale: not just out, but deep and up as well.
Scaling out: replicating a model in new places, can be fruitful, but only when accompanied by contextual discernment. Scaling deep is about embedding practices, values, and theological depth within a particular place, allowing mission to become part of the local ecology rather than an imported programme. Scaling up involves influencing wider systems, structures, and cultures, enabling learning and resources to flow without flattening difference.
The common thread running through all of this is about taking context seriously. The danger comes when we adopt a consumerist logic: identifying a successful model and attempting to roll it out indiscriminately. Scaling Bubble Church simply because Bubble Church “works” risks misunderstanding why it worked in the first place. Without the right context, without listening, without local ownership, the model becomes hollow. It may look right, but it will lack life and longevity.
At the heart of all good mission is context. Not context as a box to be ticked in a planning document, but context as a theological commitment: the belief that God has taken the particular (be that place or interest) seriously enough to become incarnate, and therefore we must do the same. Contextual mission is not a strategy; it is a way of seeing.
If we want to be faithful rather than fashionable, fruitful rather than frantic, then the task before us is not to find the next thing that works and copy it. It is to cultivate communities that know how to listen to God, to place, to people and have the courage to respond in ways that may look very different from one context to another. That, ultimately, is why what works, works.
A pause in poetry
For the last few years some friends have invited us to Burns Night and to bring a poem. I came across some words of a friend of friend of mime who was speaking to a women’s group and said “poetry is not an inspiration we have enough pressure around us without adding to that”. That poetry was more distillation of noise which made me think about pauses.
So I thought I’d try something more aligned with that rather than my usual style but aas seems usual hope still creeps in at the end.
Exhalation for Burns Night
Tonight we raise the glass, not in grandeur,
but in gratitude for breath itself.
The poet’s gift is not the torrent of words
but the pause after
that quiet reckoning
when the room shimmers in a moments silence
Robert knew it,
The yeast of life fermenting knows it,
The plough of soil turned to the light knows it
The mouse in winters nest knows it
Tonight we stand in that same field,
For a moment distilled from noise….
steeped in the grace of a pause.
Perhaps even a holy pause reflected in the whisky’s surface,
a quiet tremor in the chest as the warm Spirit flows into our soul.
An inhalation that silences the world’s chatter,
And breathes back a quiet hope that things will change for the better.