A letter to the dust

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Dear friends on the way,

I have been rummaging through the digital equivalent of my attic lately, and I found something that stung. Sixteen years ago, I sat down to write out of a sense of profound frustration at the limitations of my own and our ecclesiastical vocabulary. (see HERE) Looking back at that post now, I recognise the voice of someone sensing a widening chasm between the language we were speaking and the life we were actually inhabiting.

We spoke then, as we still do now, with a polished, professional confidence. We talked then and now of mission, renewal, strategy, and “participation in the missio Dei.” Yet, beneath the surface there is the low hum of a quiet, desperate anxiety. We feared then and now that if we stop talking long enough to truly listen, the entire edifice would reveal itself to be less secure than we had imagined.

But as I read my own words from 2010, I realise I was hiding and complict. I was critiquing the “Church” while exempting myself. I was using sophisticated theology to mask a simple, ugly truth: I, too, am seduced by power. I am addicted to the feeling of being “right,” of having a “strategy,” and of belonging to an institution that still matters.

This post has sat in my drafts for months. I needed the blunt, prophetic nudges of two amazing women pioneers one Anglican from the south, one Methodist from the north, to finally pull this into the light. Our conversations about the nature of power forced me to write not just about my own complicity but to call for light to be cast more fully on all our complicity in the fallacy that we are in control.

What I could only dimly perceive sixteen years ago, I can now see with the terrifying clarity of an ending. The unease was apocalyptic in the truest sense: an unveiling. The walls we trusted, our social standing, our institutional weight, our assumed right to be heard, were already beginning to crumble. This became a recurring theme and even a category of posts (walls to dust) and 16 years on have we really changed.

The category arose not because God had abandoned the Church, but because God refuses to be contained by the structures we mistake for faithfulness. But for sixteen years, I have watched us (and I include myself in this “us”) try to reinforce those walls. We have drafted vision documents, commissioned reviews, and rebranded decline as “strategic repositioning.” We have spent a fortune on scaffolding while the foundations were returning to dust.

Consequently, we have failed to ask the most vital question: Is the Spirit actually the one reducing these walls to powder? And if so, why are we so desperate to rebuild them?

There is a profound difference between reform and relinquishment. Reform assumes the architecture is sound but needs a new boiler. Relinquishment recognises that some structures were provisional all along, and instead of taking these temporary cultural accommodations we baptised them as though they were the Gospel itself.

In Susan Howatch’s Starbridge novels, we see this played out in the clerical ego. Whether it’s the “Practical” ambition of Neville Aysgarth or the “Mystical” pride of Jon Darrow, the temptation is always the same: to use God to secure one’s own place in the world. After 10 years serving the Diocese of Carlisle, I have to face the fact that the “middle way” has often been more a “a way of retaining power”, a way of maintaining a seat at the table of the establishment under the guise of “influence.”

Now, as the cultural conditions that sustained that influence dissolve, we oscillate between nostalgia and panic. We act as though the erosion of our social privilege is equivalent to the erosion of God. It is not. What is being exposed is not the weakness of the Gospel, but the fragility of our frameworks and the depth of our own vanity.

For too long, we have operated with industrial metaphors that have shaped our very souls. We speak of “pipelines” of discipleship and “measurable outputs” of growth, as though the Kingdom of God were a production line and the Church its managerial arm. We have trained leaders to optimise systems rather than to discern seasons.

In doing so, we have absorbed a mechanistic imagination that is fundamentally at odds with the organic, interdependent, and cruciform life revealed in Christ. This is not just a strategic error; it is an ecological disaster of the spirit. We have lost the sense that the Church exists within a living, breathing web of relationships, with culture, with place, and with the “more-than-human” creation.

Ecosystems do not survive through self-perpetuation. They survive through mutuality, adaptation, decay, and regeneration. They survive because nothing lives unto itself. If we want to live, we have to learn how to die.

“Remember that you are dust” is not just an Ash Wednesday sentiment; it is a reorientation of the will. It reminds us that we are creatures, not curators of eternity; participants, not proprietors.

The ecological crisis of our planet has made this painfully visible, yet we often respond as though the “environment” were a peripheral ethical concern rather than a theological revelation. The groaning of creation is the drama of redemption. To persist with a spirituality that floats above the soil, detached from the material conditions of life, is to preach a diminished and false gospel.

For the Church, and for me, to undergo an “ecological conversion” means relinquishing the fantasy of control. It means accepting that some of our cherished institutions must die. Not because they were evil, but because their season is over. We must trust that in the ecology of God, nothing offered in faith is wasted, but becomes the compost for future growth.

The future Church will not be secured by better branding or more sophisticated leadership pipelines. It will emerge, if at all, from communities willing to be small, local, porous, and attentive to pain. It will be led by women and men who understand that authority in the Kingdom is inseparable from surrender. It will be a Church that measures fruit not in numbers, but in reconciliation, in ecological responsibility, and in justice enacted from the ground up, certainly not merely proclaimed from the House of Lords.

Sixteen years on, I am less convinced that the Church needs “rescuing” and more convinced that we need releasing form our addition to power and control and so be

  • Released from the burden of pretending the church or we are the centre of gravity.

  • Released from the anxiety that equates contraction with failure.

  • Released from the toxic need to be “useful” to the state.

What is required of us is not more frantic activity, and alignment of the existing active with the true nature of servanthood and courageous relinquishment. If the walls fall to dust, let them fall. The God who formed humanity from dust has never required masonry to accomplish divine purposes. Our task is not to preserve every structure we have inherited, but to discern what the Spirit is animating in this season and to align ourselves with that movement, however unsettling it may be for our careers or our egos. The question is not whether we can rebuild what has been lost, but whether we are willing to be re-formed by the One who makes all things new. Starting with me.

Grace and peace on the journey,

Richard

Circling prayers forest 1/4

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As I seek to develop the eco thinking of the last few posts around, I’ve been playing with rewriting some circling prayers that try to pick-up the themes I’ve been exploring.

Forest Circling Prayer

I circle myself with the remembering of the forest,
with the truth that I am not separate from this green breath.
I place my body among the bodies of trees,
my breath among the shared air of leaf and lung.

I relinquish my monologue at the edge of the canopy,
letting my noise fall like deadwood to the floor.
I ask not with words alone but with attention
what have you seen, O ancient ones?

I listen for the reply in the slowing of my pulse,
in the quiet recognition rising from my bones,
that I too am ringed with memory,
that something in me remembers how to belong.

Circle me, O Presence,
not above me but within this living conversation.
Teach me to stand here as kin, not observer,
until deep calls to deep and we re known.

What I’m learning from the rocks

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On the day the day the rock was rolled away here’s what I’m learning from the stones. In the previous post, on the universal suffrage of creation and us. I explored the idea that our ache for the wild isn’t just an aesthetic preference, it’s a memory and deeply inbuilt into our being. We are not separate from the soil, stone and the stars; we are a part of a living whole, and our restlessness and desire for the wild is the symptom of a severed communion.

But if we are to move towards “participation” as a way of being, we have to change the way we speak, be, and listen shifting our approach to enter into dialogue. When we stand before an ancient oak or a rock, we are standing before witnesses. They operate within a different kind of time, and a different kind of memory written in rings that differentiate years of drought, seasons of fire, the slow, patient accumulation of carbon. Rocks remembers the weather of a centuries or more, a deeper stillness that predates our languages and our empires. These trees, rocks and soil is not a backdrop for a play we watch like an audience but something more, something deeper and something connected. If we want to find our way back to the integration Pascal hinted at, we have to stop treating these beings as scenery and instead enter into dialogue that may start with words but a dialogue that also moves beyond where deep calls to deep.

My experiences with Mountain Pilgrims and hanging out with people seeking a deeper connection have led me to tentatively experiment with different ways to connect. Trying to describe this dialogue with a non-human world sounds like madness, pantheism or like I have lost the plot. But what Ive been reaching for in this dialogue is essentially an exchange of presence and I’m starting to find the words to share what I’m discovering. Here’s what I’ve found to be important so far:

  1. Relinquishing the Monologue: Most of our “nature walks” are actually monologues. We carry our podcasts, our internal to-do lists, and our human-centric anxieties into the woods. To be in dialogue, we must first connect. We have to let all that recede, recognise we are made of soil and share the air so real connected presence can emerge.
  2. Asking the Questions of the Land: Instead of asking, “What can this place do for my mental health today?” we might ask, “What has this tree seen?” or “What is this rock holding?” This isn’t about literal voices in our heads; it’s about a shift in attention. It is a holy curiosity that acknowledges the “otherness” of creation.
  3. The Response in the Body: Because our bodies are made of the same materials as the earth, we need to be open to the big book of creation speaking to us through sensation and connections.
  4. Deep to Deep: The way your breath slows under a canopy, the “knowing” that comes when you sit still long enough for the birds to forget you are there, these are the responses. Going deep enough so the memory of the trees begins to resonate with the memory in your own cells.

In the “Universal Suffrage of Creation,” every leaf and stone has a vote. They are petitioning for our return, not as masters, but as kin.

When we engage in dialogue with a specific tree or a familiar outcrop of rock, we begin to “thicken” the world. The concrete and the digital screens that thin out our reality start to lose their grip. We begin to see that we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses that have been waiting for us to stop talking and start participating.

The way back to the Creator is not a disembodied leap into the heavens. It is a slow, grounding conversation with the things the Beloved has made.

The clue is in the title

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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