I’m taking a bit of a posting break to think through some of the Theological ideas behind many of my recent posts and do a bit more work on process v radical theology and contextual mission so will be back in September
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The path is a gritty teacher
The way is calling me to take of my shoes,
not to humble me,
but to keep me honest
about the distance between what i believe
and what I am willing to feel.
So I walk barefoot,
and the dust rises to meet me,
small circles lifting with every step,
hanging a moment in the light
before they fall,
dancing not because they mean to,
but because motion is the only way
dust knows how to pray.
The sole learns before the soul does.
A stone presses its hard truth
into the part of me that touches earth,
and I embrace the grit because some things are only understood from underneath.
I am not walking toward enlightenment.
I am wearing it into the arches of my feet,
the outer path and the inner ache
rubbing against each other
until they become one.
Remember you are dust, someone once said,
and so I seek oneness with this least regarded thing.
Dust whispers catch the light and turn,
we trace a shape across the road
slowly settles together we become part of the path.
The path does not reward the ones who grip it hardest.
so let your hands go loose,
stop carrying the map like a cross
and feel the weight carrying nothing.
There is grace in this dust, this path and in each step,
Let each step rise and settle
Let the path rise and fall
Let the dust dance and rest
until it is a single liturgy and the sole and soul become one.
Speed v depth
I came across a video of Richard Osmond talking about speed of thought v depth of thought, and how he as a public figure could give opinions on things and be listened to because society rewards sped of thought. However he was honest that he has friends who went into academia who offer better options but won’t get heard because in our sound bite society we don’t hang around for those coming at things with depth of thought.
The person who speaks first, projects certainty, and fills silence with fluent answers tends to rise in politics, in business, in pulpits, in boardrooms. We read their confidence as competence. We mistake their speed for intelligence. And research seems to show that in doing so, we consistently hand influence to the wrong people.
Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, spent decades demonstrating that the human brain operates in two modes: fast, intuitive thinking that produces instant, emotionally compelling answers; and slow, deliberate thinking that is harder, messier, and far more likely to get things right. I wonder if Keir Starmer has fallen in part because of this. The tragedy of modern life is that we have constructed nearly every significant institution, democratic debate, media commentary, church leadership, corporate decision-making, around the first mode, while systematically excluding people who operate in the second.
The fast thinker performs well. They give TED talks. They win debates. They preach sermons that fill seats. But research consistently shows that their confidence outstrips their accuracy. Medical experts who were completely certain about diagnoses were wrong forty percent of the time. CFO surveys showed that the most confident financial forecasters had predictions that correlated with actual outcomes at almost zero. High confidence, it turns out, is a feeling, not evidence that the story is true.
Deep thinkers meanwhile tend to hesitate, qualify, and acknowledge complexity. These are intellectual virtues, but they read as weakness in a performance culture. So the deep thinker is passed over. The room moves on. The fast thinker’s answer becomes the decision.
In faith communities this dynamic becomes particularly dangerous. Spiritual authority can be weaponised to insulate fast-thinking leaders from the accountability that might correct them. Charisma gets mistaken for anointing. The very traditions that most commend humility, silence, and patient discernment often still promote the rhetorically gifted.
The answer is not to silence fast thinkers. Speed and intuition have genuine value. The answer is to design better spaces, that slow the room down, and draw out the quieter voice, and that require confident facilitation and well designed process.
Three Ways to Create Spaces Where All Voices Matter
1. Introduce the pause before the vote. Build in period of written reflection before any discussion moves to decision. Asking people to write their response before speaking levels the field dramatically, it gives the deep thinker time to surface their best thinking, and it prevents the fast thinker’s first answer from dictating everyone else’s.
2. Name the dynamic openly. Most groups do not realise they are systematically amplifying certain voices. Facilitators and chairs can change this simply by naming it “we’ve heard from several people quickly; let’s deliberately invite those who haven’t spoken”. Treat silence not as absence of thought but as thought in progress. Cultures that normalise saying “I need more time on this” produce better outcomes than those that treat hesitation as weakness.
3. Separate generation from evaluation. One of the most effective tools in collaborative decision-making is to split the process: first gather all ideas without comment or critique, then evaluate them. This prevents the fast thinker’s loudly stated position from shutting down contributions before they are even made. In faith settings specifically, this means ensuring that discernment processes are not dominated by whoever speaks most authoritatively, but space is structured so that every voice, including the tentative, the marginal, and the slow reaches the table before the group reaches a conclusion.
The wisest person in the room is often the quietest. The question is whether we have built rooms where they can be heard
You don’t want a bike. You want to belong.
There’s a TikTok doing the rounds about the rise and fall of Peloton. It’s framed as a business story. But it’s really about something much older and more interesting than that.
Peloton didn’t sell exercise bikes. At its peak it sold the feeling of belonging to something. The instructors built real relationships through social content. Riders became fans. Fans became a community. And that community started to feel like something people didn’t want to miss. They set their alarms early not to burn calories but to be with people they felt they knew.
When the pandemic hit and the world contracted, Peloton exploded. Not because people needed fitness. Because they were starving to be somewhere that felt like theirs.
When it fell apart, people didn’t grieve the product. They grieved each other.
We’re living through a belonging crisis. Loneliness is now a public health emergency. Streets where people don’t know each other’s names. Online spaces that simulate connection while quietly making it worse. People are more reachable than ever and more alone than ever.
And into that, something is possible. Not a programme. Not a platform. Just genuine human presence. The kind of thing that forms around a shared table or a regular walk or a conversation that goes somewhere real. Belonging that costs something because it’s actual.
The missional question Peloton accidentally poses is this: if a company selling fitness equipment can create that depth of community, what does it say about the rest of us who claim to be in the business of human flourishing?
Because here’s the uncomfortable bit. Most churches are not actually offering belonging. They’re offering belonging with an asterisk. Come as you are, yes. But come to our thing, on our terms, at our times, with our language, towards our agenda. The community is real but it is also a means to an end. And people can feel that. They can feel when they are being welcomed and when they are being recruited.
Peloton at its best didn’t feel like that. The instructors weren’t trying to convert anyone. They were just genuinely present, and people came back because of it. When the company started optimising for growth over connection, the spell broke. Users noticed before the share price did.
The challenge for anyone serious about community beyond their own walls is to ask honestly whether the belonging they offer is truly unconditional. Not belonging that leads somewhere else. Not belonging as a pipeline. Just belonging. Full stop. The kind that doesn’t need you to become something other than what you already are in order to stay.
That is much harder than it sounds. And most of us, if we’re honest, haven’t got there yet.
Reframing Discipleship
I’ve recently been asked to speak at a conference on discipleship and the way my brain works means when I’m into a subject I start seeing connections every where. So Im finding myself following two conversations happening in British Christianity right now that belong together but rarely meet.
The first is about how the church speaks into public life,how Christians engage politics, culture, and the fractured common good without either retreating into irrelevance or baptising the spirit of the age. Mark Clavier has written compellingly about this recently, arguing that what the church needs is not better arguments but a more credible common life: communities so genuinely shaped by the gospel that their public witness carries weight because of what they are, not merely what they say.
The second conversation has been quietly unravelling across the edges of the church for thirty years. It began in the alt.worship and Emerging Church movements, continued through Fresh Expressions and pioneer ministry, and asks a harder question: not just how the church speaks to the world, but how the church engages and forms people at all.
My contention is that these conversations have the same root, and until we learn to hold them together in dialogue we will make little real progress.
The Half-Finished Reformation
The Emerging Church movement did something genuinely important. It took culture seriously,not as a threat to be managed, but as the medium through which people actually live, encounter God, and become themselves. It recovered missio dei thinking: the idea that God is already present and active in the world before the church arrives, and that faithful mission begins not with proclamation but with attention. It rediscovered liturgical experimentation, contemplative practice, radical hospitality, and the prophetic edge of the tradition.
But there was a fault line running through it that we have not yet fully named.
In too many cases, culture was taken seriously as a technology for mission,as the means by which the church could become relevant enough to be heard,while the inherited content of discipleship remained largely untouched. The worship changed. The coffee improved. The lighting got darker and the music more atmospheric. But the underlying assumption,that the church holds the truth which it then pours into people,quietly persisted. Missional humility shaped the front door, but not the whole house.
The missio dei was applied to evangelism. It was not, for the most part, applied to formation.
And this matters, because what the missio dei requires is not just that we listen before we speak in the evangelistic encounter. It requires that we be genuinely changed by what we hear,that our theology, our practice, our understanding of God is reformed by what the Spirit is already doing in the lives of those who are not yet, or not yet fully, inside the tradition. The listening is not a tactic. It is an epistemological commitment. It is the belief that truth is not simply possessed by the church and dispensed to others, but that it emerges,partially, provisionally, always requiring further reformation,in the encounter between the tradition and the world.
This is not theological relativism. It is the recovery of a genuinely reforming gospel: semper reformanda, always being reformed.
The Inherited Church’s Own Wound
But this critique is not only for the emerging and fresh expressions stream. The inherited church has its own version of the same problem, and Clavier’s essay names it precisely, even if he stops short of tracing it to this particular root.
He writes that what is needed is not better techniques of political communication but the recovery of the church’s “common life”,its integrity, its distinctiveness, its capacity to form communities that embody something recognisably different from the surrounding culture. He is absolutely right. But the question he invites, and which presses further, is this: what kind of formation produces that kind of community?
If the answer is the existing curriculum,the same confirmation classes, the same Alpha courses, the same preaching-centred model of instruction,then we are asking formation to produce transformation it is structurally incapable of delivering. We are hoping the old pedagogy will produce the new community. It won’t.
Clavier observes that in the assisted dying debate, the bishops who spoke most compellingly did so because of their “long pastoral familiarity with death and dying,their proximity to suffering.” What formed them was not primarily the lecture theatre but the encounter. The living and dying of real people in their pastoral care reformed their theology, their instincts, their way of speaking. That is exactly the point. Presence and attentiveness shaped them.
But our discipleship systems rarely model this. They model transmission: the expert to the novice, the formed to the unformed, the front to the rest. Formation happens at people rather than withthem and from the edges of their experience.
What Luke 5 Teaches Us About Formation
The image I keep returning to is Luke 5. Jesus borrows Simon’s boat. The Son of God, at the beginning of his ministry, is dependent. He does not arrive with a programme. He improvises with what is to hand. When he sends Simon out into the deep, he does not override Simon’s resistance,he holds the tension, and waits for Simon to risk something from his own fragile agency.
The discipleship does not come from the assertion of authority. It comes from the creation of a space in which the other person takes the risk.
And it is worth remembering what immediately precedes this scene: Jesus has already been to his hometown synagogue, announced his manifesto from Isaiah, and nearly been thrown off a cliff for it. Solo expertise, the confident assertion of authorised knowledge, nearly got him killed. What we see at the lakeside is a pivot: slower, collaborative, beginning not with proclamation but with borrowing. The missional posture and the formational posture are, in the end, the same posture.
This is the posture our discipleship has largely lost. We have confused teaching with discipleship. We have mistaken the transmission of content for the formation of persons.
The 2.5 Problem
Here is a number that should trouble us more than it does.
Fresh Expressions research consistently shows that for every person from a church background in a fresh expression of church, approximately 2.5 come from outside the tradition,from the de-churched or the never-churched. These are people who are being formed in faith in communities where the majority of voices are not carrying inherited Christian frameworks. They are, in the fullest sense, disciples-in-formation who are bringing their own encounter with God into the community,an encounter that precedes and often exceeds what we might have expected.
If we take seriously that the Spirit is at work in those people before they arrive,and we must take this seriously if we believe anything about missio dei,then those 2.5 people are not raw material to be formed. They are teachers as well as learners. They carry knowledge about God that the person who has read the Bible a hundred times may not have. The question “what are you noticing?” turns out to be a more theologically charged question than any catechism.
Our discipleship structures are not designed to receive this. They are designed to transmit, not to be reformed by what arrives at the edge.
Orthodoxy as Journey, Not Fortress
This brings us to perhaps the most uncomfortable claim: that a genuinely reforming approach to discipleship means allowing our orthodoxy itself to be reformed,not abandoned, but continually unfolded,through the encounter with those who come from outside.
The Reformation instinct was never simply back to the sources as a conservative retrieval. It was ever being reformed as a permanent posture of the church before the living Word. The tragedy is that most of what passes for formation in inherited church, and much of what was practiced in the emerging church too, treats orthodoxy as a deposit to be transmitted rather than a living tradition to be inhabited and extended.
When orthodoxy becomes a fortress to be defended rather than a journey to be shared, it produces disciples who are anxious rather than rooted, brittle rather than resilient. They can articulate the propositions but they cannot bear the weight of genuine encounter with difference, with doubt, with the person who says I’m not sure I believe, but something is happening in me.
What if that person is not a problem to be solved but a gift to be received?
What if the person whose spirituality has been shaped entirely outside our tradition,who has practised the silence, the justice, the solidarity of Jesus before they could name it,is actually offering us a fuller picture of God than we currently hold?
This is not a call to theological vagueness. It is a call to theological confidence of a different kind: the kind that does not need to control the encounter because it trusts that God is present in it.
The Double Dividend
If this account is right, then the recovery of a genuinely missional, listening-first approach to discipleship does not just address the Fresh Expressions challenge of evangelism and belonging. It addresses exactly the challenge Clavier identifies for the church’s credibility in public life.
The communities Clavier hopes for,communities of genuine trust, mutual obligation, and practiced virtue; communities that embody something recognisably different from the hyper-individualism of consumer culture,are not produced by better theological education alone. They are produced by communities that have learned to be genuinely changed by one another. That have learned to receive the knowledge and experience of the newest, least-formed member as a gift. That practice the epistemological humility which is finally just another name for love.
A church that has learned to listen first in its formation will also listen first in its engagement with the world. The humility is not a tactic. It is a character. And character is formed, or it is not formed at all.
The church’s crisis of public credibility and the church’s crisis of formational imagination are the same crisis. We have protected our position,in culture, in doctrine, in the pedagogical arrangement of the room,rather than trusting the reforming power of the gospel to do its work through genuine encounter.
What Would This Look Like?
A few possibilities, across both streams.
But first, a prior commitment that shapes all of them. The Emerging Church was right to take culture seriously. Its error was treating culture primarily as a technology,a delivery mechanism for mission, a way of lowering the threshold so that the real content could get through. What it did not fully follow through was the more radical claim: that culture is sacred. Not because everything in it is good, but because it is the medium in which image-bearers of God are already living, already seeking, already partially receiving what God is giving. Every person who comes into a process of discipleship arrives bearing the imago dei,already marked by God, already in some way responsive to the divine, already shaped by the Spirit’s work in the life, relationships, and culture that formed them long before the church arrived. If we believe this, then culture is not the obstacle to be overcome before formation can begin. It is the place where formation has already begun. Our task is not to replace it but to receive it,to ask what God has already been doing in this person, in this community, in this cultural moment,and to let that question reform us as much as it opens them.
With that commitment in place, some practical directions:
In inherited church: preaching and teaching that genuinely positions itself as invitation rather than instruction,that makes space for congregational encounter with the text, that asks “what are you noticing?” rather than “here is what this means.” This isn’t a lowering of theological ambition; it is the recognition that the imago dei in the person in the pew means they are already a bearer of insight, not merely a recipient of it. Not the abandonment of theological depth, but its recovery in relational and participatory form.
In fresh expressions and pioneer communities: an explicit commitment that the people who arrive from outside the tradition are not just the object of mission but agents of ongoing revelation. Their culture,however unfamiliar to us,carries the sacred weight of lives in which God has been present. Formation structures that are built to receive and be reformed by their insight do not simply make the newcomer feel welcome; they honour the imago dei they carry and take seriously the Spirit who got there before us. The 50-year fresh expressions that have lasted have done so precisely because they kept learning from those at the edge.
In theological education and ordination training: a pedagogy that models what it teaches. If we want leaders who can hold genuine encounter with the other, we need formation processes that do not merely transmit the tradition but demonstrate what it looks like to be changed by it. This means training that takes cultural context not as background noise but as theological data,that asks what God is already doing in the culture of those being served, and expects that question to shape the minister, not just the ministry.
In public engagement: a recognition that the church’s witness in the political sphere will only be as credible as the quality of formation that produces it. The bishops who speak with authority are those who have been formed by pastoral presence and genuine encounter,with suffering, with difference, with the sacred weight of other people’s lives in cultures not their own. That formation cannot be manufactured after the fact. It has to be built into the ordinary life of the community, from the beginning, by communities that have learned to see the imago dei in those they are most tempted to speak past.
Conclusion: The Empty Hand
Jesus in the wilderness refuses three shortcuts: to provide, to perform, to possess. He chooses the empty hand.
The church’s temptation,in its public witness, in its engagement with culture, in its approach to formation,is the same three shortcuts. To have all the answers. To perform expertise. To possess the truth.
The recovery we need is not a new programme. It is a posture. The posture of the one who borrows a boat before they preach. Who waits for the other to risk something. Who is genuinely surprised by what emerges from the deep.
The newest, most uncertain voice in the room might be the one who knows which way the Spirit is moving.
We have built our discipleship to transmit what we know. We need to rebuild it to receive what we do not yet know,confident, finally, that the God who is already in the world ahead of us is more than capable of meeting us there.
Semper reformanda. Always being reformed.
That is not a concession to the spirit of the age. It is the oldest claim of the gospel.
Comments and responses welcome. This piece draws on conversations in the Fresh Expressions and Emerging Church traditions, and engages with recent writing by Mark Clavier (Well-Tempered) HERE and Andrew Jones (Tall Skinny Kiwi). HERE
Truth that Moves: A Christocentric Synthesis (3 of 3)
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?”
Beyond the “Cool” Church: Pioneering as Theological Reflection (2 of 3)
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.
The nature of truth (1 of 3)
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”
What I’m learning from the rocks
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
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.