Truth that Moves: A Christocentric Synthesis (3 of 3)

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In the last two posts I have traced the solid foundations of the cathedral and wandered through the experimental “Third Spaces” of the pioneers. We have seen the 1960s struggle between the rigid and the radical and explored the pioneer charism of 1990 as an inroad to the tension. Now, we must ask: Where does this leave us?

The deadlock between “Absolute” and “Relative” Truth often feels like a choice between a statue and a cloud. A statue is reliable but dead; a cloud is atmospheric but offers no shelter. As Christians, however, we are called to follow a Person.

For me, the synthesis of these ideas didn’t happen in a library, but through a slow immersion in the culture and finding a way of being christian in a context different to my upbringing.  It was a combination of prayer, spiritual disciplines, engagement with the missio-dei I was discovering on tough places, courage to go to a new place, the insightful guidance of my spiritual director, and the literary explorations of Susan Howatch. Whilst it was practice that had the biggest impact I’m going to draw on Howatch to try and give to words to what I mean.

Howatch’s great achievement was showing that “orthodoxy” isn’t a set of dry rules, but a dynamic. In her novels, the characters who thrive are those who realise that the Logos (the Absolute Word) has become Flesh (the Relative Human). Truth, therefore, is an Event. It is the “Truth that moves.”

I once thought that “knowing the Truth” meant I no longer needed a guide. I was wrong. The more I understood the “mystical” dimensions of faith, the “glimpses” of Reality that Howatch describes and I experienced in mu missional journey, the more I realised I needed a spiritual director to help me anchor those experiences in the “practical” reality of the Church.

A spiritual director acts as a “theological pioneer” alongside you. They help you see that the Spirit isn’t leading us into a new Truth that contradicts the old, but into a deeper Truth that reflects the living, breathing, acting God. This is the heart of Christocentric theology: Truth is not a static object we study, but a relationship we inhabit.

In the Starbridge series, the resolution of conflict often comes when a character stops trying to “control” the Truth and starts to “live” it. This is the synthesis of the Practical and the Mystical, the practice and the theory, the action and reflection. The Practical (The Aysgarth impulse): Reminds us that Truth must be lived out in our ethics, our politics, and our mundane responsibilities. The Mystical (The Darrow impulse): Reminds us that the Truth is always larger than our understanding. It keeps us humble.

For a contemporary faith community, this means that “Truth” is found in the practice of discipleship. We do not learn the Truth so that we can act; we act (follow Christ) so that we may know the Truth. The novels helped me see that faith was about a willingness to sit with the “unsolved” nature of God until the Truth reveals Himself in action. But too many of us stopped here, we failed to apply the same missio dei impulse, the same humility to learn from other into our discipleship programmes and approach. We let the genie out of bottle in mission but placed the top back as people came to faith, so failed to keep walking towards the new places that were opening up.

As we look at the fractures in our “Post-Truth” world, the Church has a unique gift to offer. Not the gift of an “Absolute” used as a weapon, nor a “Relative” that leaves people drifting. We offer the gift of a Relationship. To say “Jesus is the Truth” is to make a claim that invites a lifetime of exploration. Like Nicholas Darrow at the end of Mystical Paths, I have found that the “Truth” is far more complex, dangerous, and beautiful than I ever imagined. It required me to step out of my self-sufficiency, seek the wisdom beyond and embrace the beautiful, messy tensions of the Christ of the gospels and we are called to today. So perhaps the question is not “Can we define the Truth?” but rather: “Are we willing to be redefined by the truth that lives and moves and has its being in Christ and is revealed as we journey with others?”

For Those With Eyes to See: Emergence and the Digital Frontier

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There is a phrase that keeps surfacing in the gospels, quietly insistent, easy to miss. For those who have eyes to see. It isn’t a command or a doctrine, more an invitation; perhaps even a provocation. It assumes that what God is doing is already present, already moving. The question is whether we have learned to look.

The emerging church of the 90s and early 2000s understood this instinctively. At its best it wasn’t a rebranding exercise. It was a genuine attempt to follow the missio dei into places the institutional church had stopped being curious about. Less telling, more questioning. Less performing certainty, more curating encounter. Holding space for something to emerge that nobody had planned.

That posture is what we desperately need to carry into digital spaces now. The default mode of the church online is still the institutional approach ie its the broadcast. The sermon streamed, the programme uploaded. We have taken the inherited model, the one already struggling to hold people’s attention in a building, and digitised it. It is, in the language of the emerging conversation, changing the lighting without asking what the room is actually for.

Digital space is not a neutral delivery mechanism. It is a place; strange, hyperlinked, algorithmically curated, but a place nonetheless. People are grieving and falling in love and losing faith and stumbling towards something they cannot yet name, in comment sections and voice notes and late night search bars. The missio dei does not stop at the church door. It never did. Which means it is already in those spaces, and the question for those with eyes to see is: what does it look like to follow, and how do we join in authentically?

Emergence as a missional posture means resisting the urge to arrive with answers already prepared. It means going in as a curator; someone who believes the Spirit is already present and that our job is not to bring God to a place and more to help people notice that God was never absent and in doing so discover g-d for real.

In practice this looks different to most of what passes for Christian digital presence. Less confident declaration, more well-placed question. Less polished production, more honest invitation to pause. Content that creates space rather than fills it; language that opens rather than closes; an aesthetic that says you are welcome to be uncertain here. The algorithm does not reward stillness, but the missio dei has never been particularly interested in what the metrics reward.

This is what I find myself working towards with The Still App. It’s definitely not a digital church service or a broadcast.  It’s much more a threshold space, available, quiet, unhurried, present for whoever arrives and whatever they bring with them. No tract. No agenda. The theology is worn lightly; the invitation is open but not anxious. A structure spacious enough that something genuine can happen inside it.

The emerging church taught us that you don’t lead people to encounter; you create conditions where encounter becomes possible. I believe that is exactly what digital mission can look like, and The Still App is my attempt to find out.

If you know someone searching, someone who wouldn’t walk into a building but might quietly open an app at the end of a hard day, this was built for them. Share it. Gift it. Think of it less as content and more as a door left open.

We are still learning what that looks like when the space has no walls.

The Still App is available now. You can share it or gift it to a friend HERE

Beyond the “Cool” Church: Pioneering as Theological Reflection (2 of 3)

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In the 1990s, the UK church scene felt like it was holding its breath. The old structures were fraying, and a new movement began to stir. “Alternative Worship” and the “Emerging Church.” To the outsider, it looked like a desperate attempt to be relevant: DJs in the sanctuary and beanbags in the aisles.

But for those of us involved, it felt like a pioneering mission into a new epistemological frontier. We weren’t just changing the music; we were trying to figure out how to be “truth-tellers” in a postmodern culture that had given up on the very idea of Truth.

In the Church of England, speaks of pioneers, as people who “connect with those outside the Church, working alongside them to create fresh expressions of Church in those places. Pioneers are also leaders of innovation, with a gift for seeing what God is doing and responding creatively to it”. I dont think adequacy reflects the Pioneer Charism as it is to focused on practice. For me the contained within the Pioneer Charism is something about not just pushing into new areas of practice but also new ways of thinking and being christian. My own journey into this space was fraught with the same “evangelical-liberal” tension Howatch describes so vividly. I wanted to be faithful to the Gospel (the evangelical impulse) but I couldn’t ignore the complexity of the modern world (the liberal impulse). It wasn’t until I embraced the wider nature of the pioneer charism that I could start to integrate the two and truly start to livie in the fullness of who I was created to be.

It was during this season of “deconstruction” that the need for a spiritual director became undeniable. In Howatch’s Mystical Paths, Nicholas Darrow is a brilliant, charismatic young man who thinks he can handle the spiritual “edges” on his own. He nearly destroys himself in the process. It is only through the guidance of older, wiser “Abbot” figures that he learns to discern the difference between his own ego and the movement of the Spirit.

This mirrored my own experience. To be a “pioneer” is to walk into the fog. Without a director, someone to hold the tension of balance for me, I would have likely drifted into a shallow relativism or retreated into a defensive fundamentalism.

The Emerging Church was an attempt to move from Truth as a proposition to Truth as a language. Drawing on the “cultural-linguistic” model of theology, we began to see that “knowing” the Truth was less like passing a math test and more like learning to speak a mother tongue.

Howatch’s novels capture this perfectly. Her characters don’t find “Truth” by reading a manual; they find it by stumbling through the messy, “Anglican way of being”—participating in the sacraments, engaging in honest (and often painful) confession, and slowly learning the “grammar” of God’s grace.

The overly simplistic critique of the 90s movement was that it became “post-theological”, all style and no substance. This is the danger when pioneering isn’t rooted in theological reflection and connected to the wider charism. However for those of involved it was and still is deeply theological.

If we only innovate in practice (lighting, music, seating) without innovating in our understanding of Truth, we are merely rearranging the deck chairs. The true task of the pioneer and the task of the spiritual director is to look at the specific context (a housing estate, a digital community, a modern office) and ask: “What does the Truth of Christ look like here?”

What the 90s and 00s taught me is that Truth is often more visible from the margins. When you are at the centre of an institution, “Truth” feels like maintenance. But on the edge, you realise that Truth is not something you possess, but something that possesses you.

This brings us back to the Darrow family in Howatch’s saga. They are constantly drawn to the “edges” of psychic experience and social norms. They show us that the way isn’t about having all the answers; it’s about having a structure, (in Anglican terms a liturgy, a director, a community) that allows you to ask the hardest questions, go to new places, the edges of the map without falling off.

In our final post, I will try to synthesize these threads and propose that the resolution to the absolute-relative divide is found not in a “what,” but in a “Who”, the Person of Christ, who is the Truth that moves.

Circling prayer mountain 3/4

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I circle myself with the witness of the mountain,
with the stone that remembers what I have forgotten.

I place my fleeting life against its ancient patience,
my questions into its enduring silence.

I relinquish the illusion of being the centre,
standing instead before this elder of time.
I release the desire to conquer the summits,
And instead let myself simply be held.

I listen for the response in the weight within my chest,
in the stillness that presses against my urgency,
I feel the deep resonance that rises unbidden,
as if my bones recognise their origin.

Circle me, O Presence,
in this communion of dust and breath.
Teach me to be small enough to belong,
So the memory in the stone awakens the memory in me.

The nature of truth (1 of 3)

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Following on from the last post a letter to the dust 19/4/26 I have been rereading the Howatch novels and which has prompted these three posts.

The air in a cathedral  is never quite still. It carries the scent of damp stone, ancient dust, and the faint, lingering ghost of incense or candle. To stand in the nave of a great cathedral for me can help me feel anchored to something immutable a “Truth” carved in granite. Yet, as the sun shifts through the windows, the light always transforms the space. What was solid becomes ethereal; what was in shadow becomes gold.

For years, I stood in such spaces feeling a profound disconnect. I came to faith late in lay teens and attended an evangelical church rooted  on the “stone” of the absolute, propositional truths of the faith, but I lived in the “light”, a world where everything felt relative, shifting, and subjective. It wasn’t until I stumbled upon the Starbridge novels of Susan Howatch that I began to understand this wasn’t just my private struggle, but possibly something very Anglican.

Historically, Christian theology treated Truth as a static monument. It was Adaequatio rei et intellectus, ie Truth is basically the “perfect match” between the thoughts in your head and the reality of the world around you and could be distilled to an objective reality. In this framework, Truth was a deposit to be defended. It stands outside of time, solid, absolute and unchangeable.

Its where Thomas Aquinas meets Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates,  the world of the Sentences of Peter Lombard and the Summa of Aquinas. But for me, reading Howatch’s portrayal of the mid-20th-century Church of England, I realised that this “absolute” truth often manifested as a rigid moralism. In the character of Neville Aysgarth, we see a man who mastered the “Practical” side of the Church, the administration, the legalism, the outward appearance of Truth, while his inner life remained a fractured landscape. He reflected the “Practical” faith of the establishment: structured, but often calcified.

The Enlightenment moved the seat of Truth from the objective to the subjective. Suddenly, the light was no longer just on the stone; the stone was defined by how the eye saw the light.

As I navigated these waters, Howatch’s novels served as a map for something wider. Faith at its best, refuses to choose between the cold stone of fundamentalism and the vaporous mist of pure subjectivism. It seeks a via media the middle way. However, this middle way is often a place of intense tension and as previously blogged about can be to easily confused or corrupted by power. .

By the 1960s, this reached a breaking point. When John Robinson published Honest to God in 1963, he argued that the “God out there”, the absolute, objective monarch, was no longer a viable category. For many, this was a betrayal. But for me, reading Robinson alongside Howatch’s Mystical Paths, it felt like a permission slip. I realized that my struggle with “Absolute Truth” wasn’t a lack of faith, but a call to look deeper, to find the “Ground of Our Being” rather than a distant deity.

In Howatch’s world, the tension is personified by the “Practical” Aysgarths and the “Mystical” Darrows. The Practical side demands a Truth that is clear, legalistic, and useful for social order. The Mystical side, represented by the visionary Jon Darrow, seeks a Truth that is experiential, haunting, and often dangerous.

I found myself caught between them. I came to faith in the “stone” of the evangelical  tradition, but I craved the “light” of a mystical encounter. The novels helped me name this: I was looking for a faith that could hold the evangelical-liberal tension without snapping. It was through these stories that I first realized I couldn’t navigate this tension alone. I saw in the characters’ lives the desperate, recurring need for a “Father Abbot” figure, a realisation that eventually led me to seek my first spiritual director.

The historical tension leaves us with a challenge: if Absolute Truth feels like a tomb, and Relative Truth feels like a mist, where do we stand? The answer, is found in those moments where the transcendent breaks through the mundane.

In my next post, we will step out of the cathedral and into the “Third Spaces” of the 1990s Emerging Church, exploring how a new generation, and my own younger self, attempted to re-read the Truth in a postmodern world, guided by the wisdom of the “pioneer.” Where I first saw those glimpses of transcendence breaking out of mundane: the flower forcing itself through the pavement that I wrote about when living on an estate and seeking to be present and the words that Jonny Baker put into a song “I have seen the hills a thousand times before but it took someone to point them out to me”

Circling prayer beach 2/4

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I   circle myself with the voice of the tide,
with the knowing that I am shaped by the same pull.

I place my restlessness into the rhythm of the sea,
my longing out to the horizon that will not close.

I relinquish my need to master this moment,
letting each wave undo my certainties.
I ask the waters, not to soothe me,
but to show me what they carry and release.

I listen for the response in the sand between my toes,
in the salt that settles on my skin,
in the ache that rises and falls like the tide,
reminding me I am part to this movement.

Circle me, O Presence,
in the great exchange of coming and going.
Teach me to enter the dialogue of ebb and flow,
until I no longer cling, but simply flow.

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.