Category Archives: Earthing

Circling prayers forest 1/4

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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 Universal Suffrage of Creation and Us

Posted on by
1

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.

Competition, Can Rivalries Spark Renewal

Posted on by
Reply

The fourth in the series recognises that Competition is a difficult word for the church. In the wild, animals compete for food and territory, and this tension drives adaptation. But in the church, competition often feels like a zero-sum game, who’s in charge, who gets the most members, who has the best worship, more often fuelled by anxiety than faith. That anxiety can choke creativity, turning vibrant missions into mini turf wars.
Most leadership and systems theory tell us that a little healthy tension can actually sharpen identity and purpose. When churches see competition as a sign they’re uniquely called to a specific community rather than a threat, it becomes a motivator for innovation. Differentiation becomes a deliberate act of mission, each expression carving out its niche while still remaining connected to the larger body.

“Healthy organizations are understood not by their sameness but by their capacity to differentiate and adapt.”—Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline.
A good example is church communities that focus on specific demographics, one for families, another for artists, another for students, each pursuing its calling without envy or encroachment. Leaders who nurture this healthy diversity, rather than fear it, foster resilience and growth. It’s about creating a culture where competition spurs mutual encouragement, not jealousy or conflict.

The challenge lies in maintaining clarity amidst tension. Leaders must set clear boundaries of mission, respect differences, and celebrate each community’s unique contribution. And they must do it with humility, acknowledging that competition is a signal to sharpen the focus, not a reason to divide. In the end, competition when set alongside the other ecological discussed in the previous post, can be a crucible for innovation, clarity and sustainability. It reminds us that the church’s strength isn’t uniformity but a diversity of callings that, when held well, strengthen the whole.

Five Ecological Lessons for a Mixed Ecology Church

Posted on by
Reply

Church life often longs for order and predictability. Yet the garden outside my window or better still the fells a short drive away are wild and tangled, and reveal another truth. Life flourishes in relationships that are messy, uneven, and interconnected. In reality the mixed ecology church, a community where inherited forms of church exist alongside new, experimental expressions will be similarly messy. But how do these different expressions relate without stifling one another? What patterns might help them grow together, not apart?

Nature offers us five such relational patterns that guide growth and resilience: mutualism, commensalism, parasitism, competition, and cooperation. Each reveals different ways life flourishes through connection, sometimes in surprising and challenging ways. Over the next few weeks, I’ll explore each relationship, drawing from ecology, not just for metaphor’s sake, but as a living guide. Along the way, I’ll try to offer some leadership insights and systems thinking, because growing a mixed ecology church inevitably is also about patterns and structures as well as people.

The five patterns explored will begin with mutualism, where both partners give and receive, flourishing together through reciprocity. Next, commensalism invites us to practice quiet hospitality a kind of support without burden. Parasitism teaches the necessity of boundaries that protect the life of the whole. Competition, uncomfortable as it feels, can spur creativity and clarity. And finally, cooperation invites us into pragmatic alliances that bind us around shared purpose.

What if the church took these relationships seriously and rather than simply sitting with the metaphor of the mixed ecology we started to embody it and see what we can learn from our non human counterparts.

The death of ideas

Posted on by
Reply

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.

The Catch Limit: Casting Positivity and hope onto the water

Posted on by
Reply

I’m after a new hobby that has space and an outcome, so I found myself musing about fishing as a possibility. As an activist, a lover of river banks, piers, beaches and sea, it felt like a good fit. As someone who’s spent more hours wrestling with books than bait, there I was, speaking with a mate about the possibility of giving fishing a go. His response has lingered: “If I was to guess your next hobby, fishing would never have even made the list.” And I could see his point. Yet what really struck me was the gentle admiration he voiced, not so much for my angling nous, but for my optimism that I might catch more than the permitted two salmon per season.

Two salmon. It’s a paltry number, really. Yet, for me, my instinct and reflex, is to look for the glimmers of possibility where others might see scarcity. I wonder why is it I approach things like this, glass brimming with hope, an assumption of success even when the river is running thin?

Somewhere beneath this buoyant surface is the quiet undertow of whats gone before. The ripples of old stories, the clatter of childhood. I’m no stranger to the terrain of adversity, that stretch of years in my childhood where hardship edged the seasons, and the river of life often flowed murky. The textbooks label these sorts of things “adverse childhood experiences,” and the narratives attach warnings of gloom, fragility, risk. But that reality, that living, breathing, evolving gives me a wonderfully subversive logic.

I’ve come to see that within the chapters marked ‘difficulty’ there can be a strange kind of resource. Resilience as muscle memory for hope. When challenges came and physical flight was not an option, it taught me to scan the horizon not for loss, but for what might yet come into view. The fisherman’s prayer, “Maybe this cast,” echoes something deeper, a conviction that each attempt carries the possibility of a different outcome, even when the books and the bylaws would say otherwise.

It’s not always conscious, this tendency to override the limits and reach for the next best outcome. Sometimes it’s just stubborn curiosity, or an overinflated sense of self, often it’s a refusal to let the story be written in advance. Other times, it’s a conscious act of rebellion against the predisposition of pessimism. Where others see the posted sign, two salmon, part of me assumes success and wonders, “Yes, but what if?” There’s a joy in that question, a wild grace in believing the river may yield something more than it’s supposed to.

My friend’s remark that he admired my positivity was meant kindly, and I think it was recognition of something we don’t always name: hope isn’t just naivety, nor is it denial. Sometimes it’s born from the long, gradual work of braving the years where things were sparse and the nets came up empty. Fishing, then, becomes less about the catch than the casting, a test of faith, a hope for life to surface.

There’s an old saying on rivers: one fishes not for fish, but for restoration but for the me outcome, the catch remains important, so I’m not sure if it will make the new hobby list, but I do like the idea that it might be a way to keep practicing that muscle, stretching hope beyond the limits set by authorities and old stories. Because after all, two salmon is the rule. But possibility and hope like water, can never be wholly contained.

The road rises

Posted on by
1

As a youth worker for so many years it always feels like September is a start point of the work year. Although I rarely stuck to the path this September for the first time in maybe over 35 years I don’t have a clear work path for the year ahead. So it seems apt to post this thought I shared via Facebook when I decided it was time to move on.

There’s a line in an old Celtic blessing that lingers in the mind  “May the road rise to meet you.” It’s the kind of phrase you might find on a bookmark pressed between the pages of a book, or spoken at the end of service. It’s gentle, but to let it hum with its real quiet, persistent power demands we recognise that the road rises, you meet it as you step forward. Its solidity is made manifest with each step.
This road is Not the tarmac artery that thrums with the pulse of traffic, but the quieter ones: the footpaths that snake through fields, the cobbles slick with rain, the tracks that vanish into the hush of a morning mist. These are roads that don’t announce themselves. They invite you in, and then, step by step, they reveal themselves as you go.

The trouble with writing is it’s too head oriented, indulge me and stand up and lift your foot to step forward, and imagine as you go to place your foot there is shift and road has physically risen to meet you. I like the embodiment of this exercise, the feeling somehow we step and everything changes, the road is not where you expect it to be, each step feels a little odd but there’s a new oneness to the step.

Most of the time, we don’t really know the road we’re on. The blessing doesn’t say, “May you always know where you’re going.” It doesn’t promise a smooth journey, or even a clear signpost. It simply hopes that the road, whatever road it is will rise to meet you.

So the act of being human is that I will keep walking, and trust that the ground will appear beneath my feet. Sometimes, it’s only in looking back that we see the shape of the road at all. But here’s what I’ve learned: taking each step, especially the ones that lead us away from the familiar, is how we move from what is known into what is possible. The roads we know, the well-trodden lanes of habit and orthodoxy, can be comforting, but they can also become ruts, grooves that keep us circling the same old certainties. There’s a subtle courage in stepping off those paths, in letting go of what we think we know, and trusting that something greater than us is changing the laws of the cosmos so the road can rise to meet me. .

Every journey away from the settled and the safe is a journey towards new practice, new knowledge. It’s how we shed the false skins of received wisdom and find something truer, something deeper, something more alive. The road that rises to meet us is not always the one we expected, but it is always the one that teaches us. It asks us to loosen our grip on the old maps, to trust the compass of curiosity, to let experience be our teacher.
Maybe that’s the gift of the blessing. Not certainty, but discovery. Not a guarantee, but a gentle encouragement to keep moving, even when the way ahead is hidden. It’s a reminder that the road like a mountain is not something we conquer or control, but something we meet, one step, one breath, one heartbeat at a time.

So let’s make a toast to the roads that rise, to the journeys that surprise us, and to the quiet courage it takes to keep walking into the unknown.

Resisting Resolution: Living the Questions of the Way and Along the Way

Posted on by
Reply

I bang on a lot about dualism but how do we practically try and live this out, this post try’s to explore that using the idea of resistance and the need to ask questions OF the way and questions ALONG the way.

Theology, at its most vital, resists the seduction of resolution. It thrives in the fertile soil of paradox, where dualisms dissolve and the sacred reveals itself not as a fixed destination but as a dynamic tension between presence and absence, immanence and transcendence. I’ve played around the edges of some radical theology and wondered what would it look like to reframe theological inquiry through two interwoven strands:

– Questions of the Way, drawing on Peter Rollins’ Church of the Contradiction, Alfred North Whitehead’s process thought, and Thomas Altizer’s death-of-God theology,

– Questions Along the Way, informed by Tripp Fuller’s relational openness, Sophie Strand’s ecological mysticism, and Thomas Jay Oord’s theology of love.

Together I think questions of and along the way, sketch a spirituality that embraces uncertainty as sacred, reimagining wholeness not as a static ideal but as a participatory dance between becoming and letting go.
5 Questions of the Way: Unsettling Dualism Through Paradox
1. What if faith is sustained by doubt, not dissolved by it?
Rollins’ Church of the Contradiction rejects the dualism of belief/unbelief, arguing that faith flourishes when we relinquish certainty. His liturgy of the “Kinder Surprise” (a hollow egg) invites worshippers to confront the absence at Christianity’s core, a God who, in Lacanian terms, is “barred” from full presence. This mirrors Altizer’s claim that the death of God is the event of faith: transcendence collapses into immanence, and the divine is reborn in the act of letting go. Here, faith becomes a practice of holding, not resolving, the tension between God’s absence and presence.
2. Can process theology redeem God from perfection?
Whitehead’s God is not omnipotent but a “fellow sufferer who understands,” evolving through time. This undermines the dualism of Creator/creation, reframing divinity as a persuasive force within, not above, the world’s unfolding. If God is “dipolar”, both eternal and temporal, how does this reshape our vision of holiness? Holiness becomes a collaborative pursuit, not a fixed state.
3. Is divine self-annihilation the heart of Christian love?
Altizer’s radical kenosis, (God’s self-emptying into the world) collapses the transcendent/immanent binary. The cross becomes the ultimate icon of this inversion: God’s death births a sacred world. This provokes a startling question: Does atheism, in its rejection of a detached deity, become Christianity’s fullest expression?
4. How do liturgies of absence heal our addiction to answers?
Rollins’ “pyrotheology” designs rituals to expose the void beneath religious symbols, Such practices disrupt the dualism of sacred/profane, inviting communities to dwell in the anxiety of unresolved questions. Could embracing liturgical instability train us to resist ideological certitude in politics and ethics?
5. Does beauty demand imperfection?
Whitehead’s God lures the world toward harmony, but beauty arises from contrast, order and chaos, novelty and tradition. If God is not a cosmic dictator but a poet coaxing cadence from chaos, how do we reconcile suffering with divine persuasion? The answer lies in releasing the dualism of control/chaos, seeing creativity in constraint.

5 Questions Along the Way: Weaving Immanence and Transcendence
1. Is prayer a collaboration, not a petition?
Tripp Fuller’s open theology reimagines prayer as co-creative dialogue. God, as the “living body of the world,” does not dictate outcomes but participates in the messy improvisation of existence. This erodes the dualism of divine/human agency, framing prayer as a dance of mutual influence.
2. What if decay is sacred?
Sophie Strand’s eco-mysticism finds divinity in decomposition, the mycelium breaking down fallen logs, the carbon cycles of life and death. If God is entangled with ecological processes, how do we ritualize grief for a warming planet? Strand suggests composting despair into activism, seeing rot as resurrection in slow motion.
3. Can love exist without coercion?
Thomas Jay Oord’s kenotic love insists God cannot override free will. This rejects the dualism of power/weakness, proposing that divine strength lies in vulnerability. If love is inherently non-coercive, how does this transform our approach to justice? Perhaps justice becomes less about imposing order and more about nurturing conditions for flourishing.
4. Is uncertainty a spiritual gift?
Fuller and Rollins both frame doubt as a generative force. If the future is truly open, faith becomes a commitment to curiosity. What spiritual practices, silence, communal discernment, paradox meditation might help us embrace “holy not-knowing”?
5. Are churches crucibles for collective becoming?
Rollins’ insurrectionary communities and Fuller’s “Homebrewed Christianity” reimagine church as a lab for experimentation. This resists the dualism of institution/individual, suggesting that spiritual growth happens in the friction of diverse perspectives. How might congregations structure themselves to prioritize questions over answers?

Perhaps the conclusion is that  Wholeness is found in Dynamic Tension, To resist resolution is to participate in the pulsing heart of Christian faith, a tradition rooted in the scandal of a God who is both transcendent and immanent, crucified and risen, fully divine and fully human. The Incarnation, Trinity, and Eucharist all encode this nondual logic: wholeness emerges not from erasing tension but from holding it reverently.
Julian of Norwich’s “All shall be well” is not a naively optimistic slogan but a radical affirmation that wellness resides in the struggle itself. When we release the dualistic urge to resolve the questions of the Way and along the Way, we encounter a God who is neither “up there” nor “down here” but in the relational flow between. This is the dynamic fullness Paul described as “Christ in you, the hope of glory” a hope that thrives precisely where certainty ends.
In the end, resisting resolution is an act of trust: that the tension between transcendence and immanence is not a problem to solve but a mystery to inhabit. As Whitehead wrote, “The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.” To live the questions, then, is to participate in the divine art of weaving wholeness from paradox.

the violence of endless growth

Posted on by
Reply

Pretty much every year since moving Cumbria we have had snow in winter and noticeable season (albeit with a lot of rain), its a place where the rhythms of the land and the needs of our communities are so present. One thing that troubles me is how easily we absorb the logic of the systems of world around us, especially the relentless drive for endless growth, rather than the logic rootedness of place. In so we are complict in a kind of violence to ourselves, to others, to creation, and to the very systems we are part of.

Endless growth is not neutral, yet the capitalist system is built on the myth that endless economic growth is both necessary and beneficial. But when you look closely, this drive for perpetual expansion is about profit, not people or planet. It’s about extracting more, consuming more, and externalising the costs whether that’s pollution, exploitation, or the destruction of habitats and communities. The result is a world where the rich get richer, the poor and the planet suffers, and everyone is trapped on a treadmill, running faster but never really getting anywhere.

When we stop looking up and out, internalise the logic of growth, we start to measure our worth by productivity, by accumulation, by what we can consume or achieve. We become exhausted, anxious, and disconnected from the deeper rhythms of life. We sacrifice rest, relationships, and even our health on the altar of “more.” We do violence to ourselves, a slow erosion of joy, meaning, and peace.

Capitalism’s endless growth depends on exploitation. It treats workers, communities, and even whole nations as resources to be used up and discarded. The pursuit of profit means that people are paid less than they deserve, forced into precarious work, or displaced from their homes and land. The system is set up so that a few benefit at the expense of the many. As we buy into this we do violence to others; structural, systemic, and often invisible, but no less real.

The environmental cost of endless growth is devastating and it is plain to see in the wether patterns and ecology. Forests are cleared, rivers poisoned, species driven to extinction, and the climate disrupted. Capitalism’s need for continuous expansion leads to resource depletion and ecological collapse. We are literally killing the world that sustains us and calling it “progress.” we are complicit in violence to creation.

We are not separate from the systems we live in and these do not need to be violent. When we participate in the logic of endless growth, we perpetuate cycles and systems of harm. Our churches, our communities, and our institutions can become complicit prioritising numbers, budgets, and buildings over people, relationships, and the common good. This is violence to the systems we are part of, a corruption of what was designed and ordained  good and so it distorts our values and undermines our mission.

What if, instead of chasing endless growth, we embraced a different rhythm? What if we valued sustainability, justice, and care for one another and the earth? What if our churches became places of rest, resistance, and renewal, where we learn to live differently, to share what we have, and to challenge the violence of the status quo?

At its best in Cumbria the new ways of being church, gathering around campfires, sharing meals, listening deeply, and learning to trust something beyond ourselves, offer an alternative. We’re trying to let go of the need to fix everything, to control outcomes, or to measure our worth by what we produce. Instead, they’re learning to be present, to accompany one another, and to let our gifts emerge organically.

As we gather around the table, the campfire, or the Sunday papers, let’s flex the muscle of hope dare to imagine and live into that different future.