Category Archives: Zzzz … Old Stuff

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 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.

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.

To places we have never been before

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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

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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

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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.

Holy reverence and the Christmas gap

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I love reading about the planting of the sycamore gap saplings. A picture from one planted locally caught my eye as there seemed such a holy reverence in the images. It inspired this which I thought might be apt to post in the randomness of the space between Christmas and new year.

They felled the tree,
and for a moment the gap grew wider
a space by an ancient wall,
an ache in the air.
Yet even in absence,
something holy lingered.
The earth itself began to hum
with all the waiting things.

Now across the land people kneel in winter rain,
hands muddy with faith,
pressing small roots into cold earth.
Each sapling a testament
that what is lost is not forgotten,
that gaps can cradle more than grief.

God is not afraid of empty spaces.
The womb,
the manger,
the gap between promise and fulfilment,
all tremble with the same possibility.
So we wait, we dig
and plant, with hope
breathing reverence into the soil,
trusting light will find a way again.
So places one laid bare with winters frosty hue,
Will teem with laughter, swings and shade for summer’s glow.

Pioneer Breath Prayers

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I really like Cole Arthur Riley’s writing and in particular the Inhale and Exhale breath prayers.  This one stuck me for this current time. I think her work is great but understand it’s an approach to prayer that has been around a long time. In the fx advent series we used the breath prayer approach but it also made me wonder what pioneer breath prayers might look like as I particularly like the balance so played with these as some possibilities.

inhale – possibility is within you

exhale – another world is possible

inhale – the kindom is now

exhale – the kindom is not yet

inhale – we journey to the edge spaces

exhale – we find kinship along the way

inhale – from dust we came

exhale – we call the walls to dust

 

 

 

The death of ideas

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Walking the dog a while back I was taken with the amazing seed heads around and make me think about the scripture “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24). It caught me not just as a verse of hope, but as a pattern that runs deep in how ideas grow.
Since Wallas, described a four-stage model of creativity in his 1926 book The Art of Thought, when we talk about ideas, there are stages that repeat. I particularly like Shannon Hopkins idea of “junk the brain” get all the ideas out fast and furiously to make space for some real out of the box thinking.

One pattern could read along the lines of First is the spark, that flash when the idea is born. Second comes the shaping, when we test and sketch, throw things out to see what sticks, gathering others to work it up. But I think the third stage is stranger, harder and looks suspiciously like death, either in terms of Shannon’s junking all the other ideas or as the third stage of ideation, when the idea no longer belongs to you. When you stop clutching it tightly as your possession and allow it to be buried, entrusted to soil that something new grows. The grain of wheat image is not about efficiency or productivity, it’s about release. It suggests that if we refuse to let go either of the initial ideas or if we insulate and protect our bright spark from change, criticism, or collaboration, it remains alone in its own sterility.

But when we release it, even bury it, something else happens. It may disintegrate in its original form, but in that decomposition potential multiplies. Fruit emerges. The community reshapes it, God breathes on it, and what was once “mine” becomes “ours.” What was a single thought or series dies and seeds a space where movements emerge that belongs to something bigger than we imagined.
In organisational innovation, this feels risky. It is tempting to hold to control structures, to keep ownership, to patent and protect. But ideation as faith practice teaches a different rhythm: hold lightly and let the seed fall. Trust the soil of community and Spirit. The third stage is less about control more about surrender.

I wonder if this is why so many pioneering ideas falter, they never move beyond the hand of the founder. We tend to want the harvest without the letting-go. Yet John’s image is uncompromising: the fruit only comes after the seed dies to its own form.
So perhaps the invitation today is simple but costly. What idea are you still clutching in your hand, afraid to plant? What seed needs releasing into the ground of community, risking loss in order to multiply life? Ideation is not complete until we dare to embrace the third stage, trusting death as the doorway to a new future.