Coming to terms with my own childhood these past few years has meant re-remembering not just what I did in fifteen years at Church of Flow, but the position I did it from. And this post is the one where that positioning matters most. I want to be upfront about my own vantage point before I say anything else, and I’d welcome you pushing back on any of it, because this is genuinely still unsettled territory for me.

Three words keep turning up in my reading lately, sometimes treated as synonyms: postcolonial mission, indigenous mission, contextual mission. I don’t think they’re the same thing, and perhaps nowhere do they pull against each other harder than in Britain right now.

I want to introduce them here as what I am: a white, Western, emerging church practitioner watching these conversations from the edge of them rather than the centre. That position shapes what I can see and what I can’t, and re-remembering (including coming to terms with the colonising nature of vey word mission)  has been one of the more uncomfortable parts of writing this series.

Harvey Kwiyani names an important distinction, the difference between hospitality and mutuality. Most churches are genuinely good at welcome: they value the gifts diaspora Christians bring, are glad of the music and the energy. But welcome still leaves the host in control. There’s a place for you at our table, while quietly retaining the right to decide who sits where, what’s served, and when the conversation ends. Mutuality asks something harder: whether leadership actually changes hands, whether diaspora theology is allowed to unsettle a church’s categories rather than simply decorate them.

because of Mountain Pilgrims Ive ben reading around indigenous theology for a a while now, seeking to learn more the earthed ways of connecting many have lost in the west. Many people say the work I do is uk indigenous mission but I am not comfortable with that term, as it’s not mine to claim. The Centre for Missionaries from the Majority World describes its work as serving diaspora Christians and, in their own words, indigenous white British Christians. If indigenous can mean white Anglicans in Wolverhampton one week and Cherokee elders in Oklahoma the next, it isn’t describing one stable thing. It’s describing a claim to belonging, made differently, by different people, in different power relationships. Randy Woodley and the scholars gathered around NAIITS use the indigenous word for something I have no right to borrow for my own practice, however much the word might flatter it: for Woodley it’s a specific relationship to land, colonisation and ancestry. So whilst others (including some indigenous tribal leaders) might call the church of flow indigenous mission, I dont think it is helpful as skater kids in Somerset, whatever else they carry, don’t share enough with the First Nations communities for it to be appropriate. But there is still much to learn. at recent Mountain Pilgrims gathering a friend explained how she was at a gathering where people were as to introduce themselves and explain who were their people. Something many white people in the room found difficult. My journey of the last few years means I delved deep into my peoples history and probably because I come from a farming family feel a deep affinity with the land and place where ever I am. This I think has been part of what has set me up well for contextual mission and emerging church as the tradition I actually stand in, but it isn’t innocent either. It can hide consumerism, church as another product tailored to a niche market, unless it keeps asking who holds the pen in the story being written.

The definition I have been working on for contextual mission is about the posture we hold as we meet soul to soul with people and place. The start point for this has to be understanding where you are coming from. Beyond the ACE stuff I have mentioned and perhaps because of it for me that’s about being a person who crosses spaces and perhaps because the origin of my name is a person passing or crosses Seas and then Moors. So I wrestle from this space and If you stand in a tradition too, I’d be glad to hear how you’ve wrestled with around the term mission what it can or can’t see about itself.

Over the past few years I’ve been coming to terms with my own childhood experiences, and this series is where I’ve started exploring what’s actually been sitting underneath my contextual missional work all along. This first post opens with the difference between two ways of looking back, remembering and re-remembering, and I want to invite you into that conversation with me, not just as something that happened to me, but as a question worth turning on your own story too.

Remembering is the easy one. It’s the version I tell my kids at the dinner table: the chaos, the Dennis the Menace childhood, black and red stripes and an unbothered relationship with boundaries. Remembering only asks one question: what happened. It doesn’t ask what else was happening underneath it at the same time.

Re-remembering asks that second question, and it took me most of my adult life to be willing to ask it. Same childhood, looked at again from inside the years I’ve since spent training as a youth and community worker, sitting with trauma, safeguarding, human development, theology. A working life spent watching what happens to people underneath their behaviour. Looked at that way, a chaotic childhood with no boundaries at all stops being just a funny origin story. Growing up around a father whose drinking made the house unpredictable, and a mother who stayed and loved a broken man, carrying, I’ve since re-remembered, not just his brokenness but the trauma that had made him, reaching back further than either of us. None of that excuses what the chaos cost the people inside it. It just means the story was never only mine to tell as a funny one.

What re-remembering actually gave me, was a recognition that  I did not become a youth worker despite what happened in that house. I became one because of what it taught me early and without my consent: how to stay present inside chaos I couldn’t control, how to read what someone’s behaviour is protecting rather than flinching from the behaviour itself. I needed someone to do exactly that for me, and mostly they couldn’t. That’s the theological claim sitting underneath everything I’ll be writing about in this series: every person carries something sacred that their worst behaviour never manages to erase, and mission that doesn’t start from that belief is just management wearing a collar.

This is the hermeneutic the whole series works with: not new theology arriving from nowhere, but thirty/fourty years of mission practice gone back over with older eyes, asking what else was actually happening underneath the story I told about it at the time. I don’t expect to finish asking it. I’d genuinely like to know what happens if you turn the same question on something in your own past, not the version you’d tell at dinner, but the one underneath it. What was it actually teaching you, without your consent, that you’re only now starting to name?