Category Archives: Faithful Improv

A strange kind of love story

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I’ve been working on a new version of the mixed ecology trellis.. it’s made me think about the personality of institutions and how elements of church relate to one another. one of the ways that plays out is the kind of love hate relationship between movements and institutions. Too often they are are opponents in a zero-sum game. It is an illusion the church returns to with remarkable consistency and one that plays out like the worst type of relational breakdown which repeatedly leaves both sides thinner than they imagine.

The truth is more demanding, and perhaps more beautiful, movements and institutions are not rivals. They are bound together in something closer to a romance. Drawn to one another, frustrated by one another, shaped by one another and, when at their best, quietly committed to one another’s flourishing. But inevitably like any enduring relationship, the question is not whether there is tension, but how that tension plays out.

From the beginning, the attraction is obvious. Movements carry life, energy, imagination, risk, the sense that God might be doing something new. Institutions carry depth, memory, stability, the wisdom of what has been tested and held over time. Each sees in the other something it does not possess, maybe the newness is the spark, maybe the need to held by something bigger.

Missiologists call it model and sodal forms of church. We first see the tension play out in Acts: the wild expansion of the early movement gradually held within emerging structures that allow it to remain coherent. We see it in monastic communities, offering renewal to a drifting church and then, over time, becoming part of the very fabric they once disrupted. We see it in the Reformers, in Wesley, in Pentecostalism: again and again, a movement arises that needs, eventually, the very forms it once resisted. These patterns fit what complexity theorists describe as emergence, self-organization, and co-evolution in adaptive systems.

However as the relationship matures like many human relationships what begins as attraction often turns, quite quickly, into irritation. The differences that once felt complementary begin to feel incompatible. Institutions experience movements as destabilising, unpredictable, unwilling to commit. Movements experience institutions as controlling, slow, overly concerned with preservation.

And so the romance cools into critique. Each begins to speak about the other as other rather than to one another. Each becomes more convinced of its own necessity, and less curious about what the other might offer. Organisational narcissism quietly takes root, which at its worst shows up saying we are not just part of the story we are the answer.

That is exactly the kind of closuring down, systems theory warns about. Open systems stay in exchange with their environment; closed systems protect themselves so tightly that they lose adaptive capacity. In complexity terms, closed systems may look more stable for a season, but they become brittle, less able to learn, less able to respond, and eventually less alive.

The sad thing is that what makes the institutional/movement relationship so vivid is also what can make both so dull. It is not a dispute over style but a revelation about the posture at the heart and an exposure of whether the church (movement or institution) will remain open enough to be changed, to give and receive love.

Edwin Friedman’s systems thinking is useful here, he suggests that “chronic anxiety is systemic” and names what happens when an organisation becomes trapped in self-protective reactivity rather than relationship. In that state, every difference becomes a threat, every challenge becomes a crisis, and every conversation becomes an attempt to manage rather than to learn. The result is closure or shutting the other out disguised as wisdom.

Bowen Family Systems Theory gives another key insight: differentiation is not distance; it is the ability to stay connected while remaining a self. That matters here because the mature relationship between institution and movement is not fusion and not severance. It is the capacity to remain in relationship without collapse, manipulation, or mimicry. I think Relational therapy sharpens this further. In relational approaches, healing depends on mutual influence, not one-way expertise. Change happens when both parties are real to one another, when each is willing to be affected, and when the relationship itself becomes the site of transformation. That is a powerful description of what the church needs between institutions and movements: not just cooperation, but mutuality.

This is where the romance metaphor becomes more than decoration. Healthy relationships are marked by the desire that the other thrives, not merely survives. A real desire that is not sentimental; but that it is the opposite of possession, a passionate desire for the other to become more fully itself, even when that costs you control.

Imagine institutions that truly desire movements to flourish, not as experiments to be contained or used to prop up our own failures, but as vital partners in the church’s future. Imagine movements that genuinely desire institutions to flourish, not as relics to be tolerated, but as carriers of memory, sacrament, and continuity.

Real love is powerful and real mutual desire might actually change the bankruptcy of the current system. It keeps the relationship open. It reduces the need for defensiveness. It makes learning possible. It lets each side receive from the other without humiliation.

This is why spaces like Fresh Expressions matter so much. They are not simply innovative church initiatives; they are collision spaces. Brave spaces. Places where inherited structures and emerging communities are brought together not to flatten their differences, but to let them speak. In a complex system, that kind of contact is how new patterns emerge.

We also need a dose of reality here because the modern world makes this unavoidable. Organisations, institutions, and movements are all complex adaptive systems, not machines. They evolve through feedback, interdependence, and adaptation, not through top-down certainty. That means the church cannot survive by shutting itself away in closed loops of self-reference,and movements can’t survive by thinking they are the answer, both must remain porous, relational, and open to what it does not yet know.

So the issue is not whether institution and movement can get along by agreeing on everything. The issue is whether they can remain open enough to one another to be changed by one another and love one another enough to mutually flourish even when that means letting go. 

Reframing Discipleship

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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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The nature of truth (1 of 3)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Communion as training

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Faith communities have always been exercise grounds for resistant hope. In the cracks of empire, the early followers of Jesus broke bread and imagined life beyond Caesar’s reach. What if their gathering wasn’t simply a meal, what if it was training? A strengthening of the moral and spiritual fibres of hope that keep us reaching for the unseen alternative, even while our feet are still planted in the old order.

To dream is not to escape. It is to remember that the structures around us are not the whole story or even like a star that dies before it’s light reaches us  the current empire might already be dead. Dreaming of justice, of communion, of the future possible, is both an act of imagination and of resistance. It helps us see that what is, does not have the final word. Hope, then, is not naïve optimism but the slow work of building spiritual muscle memory for what could be.

And perhaps quiet longing of communion, holds us both securely and precariously. Securely, because it ties us to one another in a web of belonging that mirrors the creation. Precariously, because real communion demands vulnerability, and vulnerability always risks loss.

We are both held and stretched at once. The table, the shared dream, these are both anchor and edge. Perhaps that is why hope is never static. It aches, strains, and strengthens in the same breath.

To exercise hope and communion then, is to keep turning toward one another in our shared longing. It is to keep dreaming stubbornly of the alternative hidden beneath the noise of now. It is to live as if the world God loves might yet be remade, one hopeful muscle at a time

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.

Today’s heresy, Tomorrow’s orthodoxy letting the Holy Spirit is ruin our comms plan!

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I’ve always been fascinated by the role language plays in meaning making and for several years my walk of faith has been helped by entering into dialogue with nature through of emerging church space Mountain Pilgrims. Thomas Berry suggests humanity has broken The Great Conversation, the deep, ongoing dialogue between humans, the more-than-human world, and the wider universe.  We talk a lot, but mostly to ourselves and church is no different to any other eco chamber. It has developed a sophisticated internal language but often struggles to hear, let alone respond to, the voices of culture, creation and those at the edges questioning what counts as “orthodox.”

Berry’s concern was not simply about ecology but about language. When only one way of speaking is recognised as valid, everything else gets pushed to the margins.  That resonates with our ecclesial habits. The church has learned to privilege certain kinds of words, authorised, platformed, “sound” and to distrust improvisation, lived experience, and wild metaphors that do not fit existing systems.  I know even writing this several people will comment on how I’ve lost the plot, gone mad and am talking to trees again. The result is a narrowing of conversation and, with it, a shrinking of imagination.

One thing thirty years of mission has taught me is that that like G-d, Language is not a museum piece; it is a living, mutating thing, constant in its movement even when the printed page pretends otherwise.  Berry’s work suggests that meaning arises in the between in relationships, exchanges, frictions rather than in frozen statements detached from place and encounter.  If that is true, then a church that tries to manage its language purely through control (doctrinal, institutional, reputational) ends up disconnecting its words from the world they were meant to serve.

A similar concern sits behind recent reflections on how church handles its public voice: the drift from conversation into messaging, from mutuality into management.  When our words exist mainly as outputs, strategies, statements, carefully curated content, we are no longer participating in language as a shared, risky, evolving practice. We have moved from speaking with to speaking at.

The irony is that the Christian tradition, at its best, already knows that meaning is relational. The gospel of John points to Logos not as a static “word” dropped from the sky, but as a dynamic, relational presence through whom all things come into being.

Orthodoxy should be a faithful emerging conversation but too often it is treated as a fixed package, a set of statements that must remain untouched in order to be “true.”  But if God is encountered in history, in bodies, in place, then faithfulness cannot be about freezing language; it has to be about staying in truthful conversation as the world changes. This does not mean anything goes but it does mean that orthodoxy cannot be maintained by shutting down dialogue with those who unsettle us. The temptation is always to label the troubling voices as “unorthodox” so we don’t have to listen. But perhaps the deeper danger is a church that can repeat the right phrases while refusing the great conversation where the Spirit might be speaking in unfamiliar accents.

If orthodoxy is reframed as fidelity-in-movement, then the test of soundness shifts. The questions being asked are more about if this way of speaking or being deepens love of God, neighbour, and creation, or does it protect systems at their expense?  This is a very different conversation from a lot of what I hear and ff the church is to re-enter the great conversation, who or what are are the conversation partners we need need. None of these named below are new, but each reveals how thin our language becomes when separated from encounter.

1. With the more-than-human world

Creation is often reduced to backdrop or resource in church practice, something we “use” or “care for,” but rarely someone we listen to.  Emerging eco-liturgies, “wild church” practices and place-based spirituality are tentative attempts to let rivers, soil, seasons and species become conversation partners rather than illustrations.  What happens to orthodoxy when the groans of creation are treated not as background noise but as part of the community’s discernment?

2. With decolonising and marginal voices

Mission history has trained Western churches to imagine themselves as speakers and others as listeners.  Decolonising work insists that the roles must be reversed, or at least shared: theologies forged in colonised, racialised, and economically marginalised contexts need not only to be “included” but allowed to interrogate and reshape what the centre calls orthodox.

3. With shifting identities and bodies

Conversations around gender, sexuality, neurodiversity and family structures are often handled through statements rather than stories.  People are turned into “issues,” and language is deployed to control rather than to understand. Yet if the body of Christ is genuinely diverse, then these lives and experiences are not detachable from theology; they are part of the place where theology happens.  Staying in conversation here may mean discovering that some of our long-held assumptions were more cultural than Christlike.

4. With digital and symbolic worlds

Digital culture is not simply another channel for church messaging; it is a habitat where new forms of presence, authority and belonging are emerging.  Online communities, memes, gaming, AI, are all forming people’s imaginations long before they meet a sermon. A church that only uses these spaces to broadcast pre-formed content refuses the opportunity to learn a new dialect of human longing and connection.  Conversation here would mean showing up not as brand but as neighbour.

Berry writes of the need for a “new language” that can draw humans back into a mutually enhancing relationship with the rest of the community of life.  That newness is less about inventing clever phrases and more about recovering humility and recognising that our words must once again be accountable to the earth, to history, to those who suffer under our systems.

Perhaps this is where pioneers and locally rooted parishes have role: to keep pointing to the gaps between our official language and the real conversations happening at the edges.  To remind the church that the Spirit has always been ahead of us, out in the wild, teaching new words to those willing to listen.

Re-entering the great conversation will mean losing some of the safety that comes from tightly managed speech. It will also mean discovering that orthodoxy is not a fragile artefact to be defended, but a living stream kept fresh precisely because it flows through new landscapes, picks up new sediments, and keeps finding its way back to the sea and the source.