My re-remembering  keeps turning up in unlikely places: this time in a diagram I’ve taught for years without ever quite re-remembering what its last circle actually asked of me. I want to walk through it with you the way I’d talk it through with a friend over coffee, not as settled doctrine but as a framework I’m still arguing with.

The Fresh Expressions journey gives us six stages, usually drawn as overlapping circles: listening, loving and serving, building community, exploring discipleship, church taking shape, do it again. It’s a genuinely good framework. I still teach it. But fifteen years inside the Church of Flow, and a decade of a very different practice in Cumbria since, have taught me that even a model built on listening first can quietly slide back toward a homogeneous unit if you’re not careful how you hold each circle, especially the last one.

Remembered plainly, Church of Flow ran from 2004 to 2019 and then it ended. Re-remembered, the ending is the most theologically important thing that happened in the whole fifteen years, and it’s a part of the story I only gestured at when I first wrote about this on the blog.

I led Flow for the first eleven years. When I stepped back in 2015, it didn’t fold. It carried on for four more years, held by other leaders and, crucially, by young people who’d grown up inside it and were now capable of holding something they’d helped build. When it finally closed in 2019, that wasn’t a failure of sustainability. A homogeneous unit doesn’t know how to end; it exists to perpetuate itself, to keep the tribe intact. Deep contextual mission, done properly, builds something that’s genuinely the community’s own, which means it has to be free to become something else, or nothing at all, once its work in that form is done. The young people who were part of Flow didn’t vanish when it closed. Many of them are still connected into the wider church today, still asking the questions Flow first gave them permission to ask.

That’s sobornost again, seen from a different angle: a unity in freedom that doesn’t require the permanence of institutional form to be real. Building community, in the version of the framework I actually hold now, has less to do with gathering people who share an interest, which is a homogeneous unit by another name, and more to do with what I once called TAZ thinking, borrowed from Hakim Bey: a space that forms in the gaps, does its work, and dissolves before it calcifies into an institution.

Have you’ve ever had to let something you built become someone else’s, or watched something you loved end well rather than fail. What did that actually feel like, underneath whatever story you tell about it now?

The part of that practice I’m least tempted to romanticise in the re-remembering is: what it actually costs to be genuinely changed by the people you’re trying to serve, rather than just being kind to them. I want to invite you to hold your own version of the question alongside mine, because I don’t think it’s a question only youth workers or missionaries need to ask.

Here’s a test I’ve used on myself since the Church of Flow years: in any given relationship, could the other person change me, my thinking, my outlook even my theology, in any way that matters, in the next conversation we have? If the honest answer is no, I’m not doing contextual mission. I’m doing outreach. And outreach, however well meant, tends to be a transaction that only runs one way, dressed as friendship.

Remembered plainly, the difference between the two is an easy concept. Re-remembered, it’s a discipline I had to be caught failing at before I understood it.

What I noticed among the skaters, and what most missionaries working inside a homogeneous unit never have to face, is that a shared habitus, Bourdieu’s word for the dispositions a person absorbs from their world so deeply they stop feeling like culture and start feeling like instinct, isn’t something you can study your way into. You either have lived enough of the same life to genuinely share it, or you haven’t, and your openness to being changed is felt by the group as real or as performance. Growing up the way I did left me with a certain posture toward that. But the plain truth is a group, especially in youth work, will always know the difference between someone genuine and someone false, and usually within about ninety seconds. this doesn’t mean you had to have had the same experiences I did but does mean you need the right posture.

So what do you do when you don’t share it, or don’t share all of it? You bring yourself anyway: not the polished missionary self with the theological answers already loaded in, but the actual self, doubts and habitus and all, rubbing up against theirs. That friction isn’t a problem to manage. It’s the whole engine of a genuinely reciprocal relationship, and I first felt it not in a seminar but around a battered table at a weekend that brought young people who’d come up through the project together with management committee volunteers and their families: arguing over pudding and education policy, cleaning up more mess than I want to describe, and calling it, only half in jest, an open sobornostic community meeting around a banqueting table.

Sobornost is the word I keep coming back to across this whole series: a unity that isn’t achieved by everyone becoming the same, and isn’t achieved by everyone simply tolerating difference either. It’s what real missional humility actually looks like: not silence, not affirming everything and risking nothing, but bringing your full, stumbling self into a relationship where the other person has just as much power to unsettle you as you have to unsettle them. I’d be curious what your own version of that table looks like, where in your life someone else genuinely has the standing to change you, and whether you’ve actually let them yet.

Originally this was the first of the series exporting contextual mission and opens with a look at HUPs,deep contextual mission, and why proximity isn’t the same as presence……

Between 2004 and 2015 I spent a great deal of my life hanging around a skatepark in the southwest of England. Not doing much, most days. Watching young people drop in, fail, drop in again. Learning the names of tricks I would never land myself. Out of that came the Church of Flow, a Fresh Expression of church and part of the wider StreetSpace work (a part of FYT). I led it for the first eleven years. In 2015 I stepped back, and for four more years it carried on without me, held by other leaders and, crucially, by young people who had grown up inside it and were now capable of carrying something they had helped build. It finally came to a natural end in 2019. At the time it was fun, and a well recognised, a piece ofwork. The community grew, planted others, articles were written, videos were made, groups visited to learn, and the BBC even made a documentary called “does Christianity have a future?”

Those young people are adults now, still connected into the wider church in various ways, still exploring what faith means for them years after the community that first held it stopped meeting. I will come back to why that ending mattered later in this series. For now I want to start with a question the whole fifteen years kept putting to me, one that got sharper again back in June, after reading Francisco Herrera’s piece in the Christian Century on Donald McGavran’s legacy. Herrera, F. (2026) ‘Donald McGavran’s complicated legacy’, Christian Century. Available at: https://www.christiancentury.org/features/donald-mcgavran-s-complicated-legacy (Accessed: 9 July 2026)

McGavran, is the architect of the church growth movement and the man behind the homogeneous unit principle, HUP for short. His observation, drawn from decades in India, was simple and not wrong. People become Christian fastest when the least change of race or clan is involved (McGavran, 1955). His work is around how Churches grow when they let people join alongside others who look, sound and live like them, without asking them to cross a cultural border to do it.

There is something true in that. I have seen it. A skater is far more likely to encounter Jesus among other skaters than in a pew, dressed in someone else’s Sunday best, singing songs written for a different tribe entirely. Alpha, LICC, Youth work, Messy and other approaches whether they admit it or not often thrive most where cultural distance is shortest. Eating a meal together/inviting others to dinner may seem like a ubiquitous cultural norm, but in many communities it’s not.

But where it gets uncomfortable, and where Herrera’s article does something important.He traces how McGavran’s principle, whatever its intentions, gave a theological alibi to segregated churches, letting white congregations recast their exclusion of Black neighbours as faithful evangelism rather than what it actually was (Herrera, 2026). The homogeneous unit stopped being a starting point for mission and became a wall around it. It became a critique and sledgehammer to use against for expressions of church that were emerging that were deeply contextual.**

That is the ghost I want to name. Not McGavran the man, who by most accounts opposed the caste system he encountered in India and pushed for integration in his own denomination. The ghost is HUP thinking dressed up as contextual mission. It is the practice of finding your tribe and staying there, mistaking comfort for calling, and calling it incarnation.

The thing nobody tells you about deep contextual mission, is it looks, from the outside, almost identical to a homogeneous unit. Both involve going to where people already are. Both refuse to make someone cross a cultural border just to meet God. Both build community around shared language, shared life, shared taste, shared wounds.

The difference is not in the starting point. The difference is in the posture.

Vincent Donovan worked this out among the Maasai before I ever picked up any of this thinking myself. In Christianity Rediscovered, the book that first cracked my own thinking open and that I later drew on heavily in my own writing, he refused both extremes on offer to him. He would not impose an already Westernised Christianity onto a people who had their own theology of God already at work among them. But he also refused simply to sit with the Maasai, affirm their existing beliefs, and leave. He went in prepared to be evangelised as much as to evangelise, and let the gospel wrestle honestly with what he found there, without a script (Donovan, 1978).

That is not a homogeneous unit. A homogeneous unit finds the group and rests in it – Proximity.

Deep contextual mission finds the group, moves in, and then refuses to rest – Presence. It stays close enough to belong and awkward enough to still be asking questions nobody in the tribe wants asked, as you see the spirit move. Some of that awkwardness was baked into Flow from the very start. In one of the earliest posts Iwrote about it, I described how the whole thing began with a single question put to a group of skaters. What does it feel like when you skate and ride? And then the riskier follow up: I think that maybe that’s God (Passmore, 2012). I never told them what to think that meant. I just refused to pretend the question wasn’t there. That is the asterisk I have written about elsewhere, belonging with a small mark beside it that says, there is more here than this. Without that asterisk you have simply found a comfortable subculture to plant a franchise in. With it (and I would argue this is the heart of what it means to follow the Missio-dei), you have something genuinely missional, something that can hold a person’s culture with real respect and still refuse to let that culture be the final word on who they are. This is what it really means to join in with the missio-dei, that questions who you are as much as others.

I set out my thinking on this most fully in my first two books, Meet Them Where They’re At(Passmore, 2003) and Here Be Dragons (Passmore, Passmore and Ballantyne, 2013), both of which grew directly out of the detached, on the streets work that became StreetSpace and, eventually, Flow. Meet Them Where They’re At was always meant as half a sentence. The otherhalf, the one that took me another decade to write properly, was and then to refuse to leave them there.

At the skatepark, this looked like years of turning up before it looked like anything you’d recognise as ministry. It looked like never once trying to make the skaters into something they weren’t, while also never pretending that skate culture, with all its glory and all its brutality, was already the kingdom of God fully arrived. It had beauty in it, god was already there, but It had cruelty in it too. Loving the culture did not mean leaving it exactly as I found it, and it certainly did not mean leaving myself at the gate either.

This is the posture I want to spend the rest of this series unpacking. Being alongside and embedded, genuinely, not performatively, while still holding the capacity to challenge. Not to challenge from a safe distance, the way a preacher challenges a congregation he does not actually know. Challenge from inside, the way a friend challenges a friend, because you are close enough that your words land as care rather than as judgement. Indeed elsewhere I have explored the idea of risk (of the relationships formed and time put in) being a key part of the incarnational missiology. Establishing a relational depth that is more akin to friend to friend than to client provider. A different posture but still recognising the issues of power and so held within good safeguarding frameworks.

McGavran’s mistake, or at least the mistake made in his name, was thinking proximity was the finish line. Get people into a church that looks like them, and the job is done. Herrera’s article, for all its complicated feelings toward the man, lands on something I think is right. Real mission cannot stop at discipling a people into comfort. It has to go on to the harder, slower work of forming lives of holiness, justice and faithfulness, together (Herrera, 2026).

That word “together” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. It is the difference between a chaplain to a subculture and a missionary within one. It is the difference between finding your tribe and being changed alongside it, for as long as you are there, and being willing to let it outgrow you when you are not.

In the next post I want to get into what that togetherness actually requires. Because it is not enough to say you’ll challenge a culture from within. You have to earn the right to, and that right is built one honest, reciprocal, faintly terrifying relationship at a time.

**Part of the misconception in this whole area and push back argument this kind of deeper contextual mission which is that all expressions of church should be multi age, diverse family church. Too often this is also a confusion between proximity and presence, rooted in a misconception of the deep discipleship happening in contextual spaces where the depth of connection is calling all the walls to dust, and the faith journey people are going on does unite them with the wider church family, but that’s another post for another day.

If you’ve built or joined something around a shared identity, a hobby, a neighbourhood, a stage of life, how would you tell the difference, honestly, between presence and proximity in it? Between staying because you’re still being changed, and staying because it’s comfortable and the group already agrees with you?

Having introduced Re-remembering as the hermeneutic approach I will use to re-imaging contextual mission I want to introcuse some of the groundwork under neath the series that will follow. Alastair McIntosh tells a story of two young men walking home one night across a Hebridean island, each carrying a barrel of whisky. Passing some old fallen stones, they hear fairy music rising out of the ground. One cannot resist it and runs in to dance. The second, before he crosses over, drives a pin into the door behind him, a fixed point in the world he is leaving, something to find his way back to once the dancing is done. He dances. He comes back. The other man never does.

McIntosh takes that story somewhere I had not expected, to the Israeli psychoanalyst Yolanda Gampel, who describes something she calls radioactive identification, the way a violent history, a war, a persecution, seeps invisibly into a person’s inner world across generations, until what happened out there and what is carried in here stop being clear as two different things. My own childhood carries something of that further back than I usually admit, to a grandfather who came home from the trenches carrying what we would now call PTSD, and passed more of it down than he ever meant to.

So I want to offer a re-telling of the fairy story, where instead of sticking the pin to the door it is carried with you into the room handheld against your skin, because the door was never going to be my version of this. A pin in a door only asks something of your memory and your orientation, and you can dance a long way from it before noticing you have wandered too far to see it. The door will not come looking for you. The kind of childhood that makes re-remembering necessary also makes staying with the fairies look like relief rather than temptation.  I left through an actual door at sixteen, and for a while home was my sister’s shed rather than anywhere with a door I could have pinned anything to.

It was ten years on fells and beside becks in Cumbria, learning that the self I was protecting could not be kept safe at a distance, guarded by a marker at the door I would have to relocate later from memory. I learned the pin had to be carried and held against my skin, into whatever weather or dance was actually happening.

Then there is a third re-telling underneath both of those that I think this whole series is reaching for: a pin driven through flesh rather than into a doorframe or held against skin, the nail that fixed Christ in place. Not a marker left behind to be remembered, but a wound that can be touched, a fixed point that calls you and holds you at once.

Within contemporary theology there are a number of creative and sometimes surprising conversations taking place across traditions that once appeared far apart. The place I keep landing, when I ask what actually holds all this together for me, is much older than any of those conversations. It is the language of covenant. Relationship. Partnership with a God who has not stepped back from the world and is not finished with it.*

A covenant is not a contract with a guaranteed outcome, and it is not a leash either. It is a relationship two real parties keep choosing, over time, through failure as much as through faithfulness. Read the Old Testament that way and you get a God who binds himself to an unreliable people rather than simply ruling them, who keeps showing up after they wander, who negotiates, grieves, and stays. That is the God I want as the starting point of this reimagaing, present, active, really there, and signed to the relationship with an iron pin rather than a signature that could later be quietly disowned.

Pete Ward has a phrase for the boldest move inside that partnership  and talks about the first humiliation as the incarnation itself, God taking on flesh and the second humiliation is God handing the mission to the church and letting go, trusting something as flawed and clumsy as an actual congregation with the thing that matters most. You do not hand your life’s work to a stranger. You hand it to a partner, and a partner who could still walk away and simply has not yet is not the same as a partner who has driven something through his own hand to make walking away a different kind of act. That, I think, is the shape of the pin contextual mission keeps circling back to. ,

I like this stuff because it is a theology of an open future. What I had not clocked, until I started writing it, is that it is also a theology of an open past. If God is genuinely still keeping covenant rather than having authored a life and moved on, then the same has to be true, in a smaller and more human register, of a life looked back over. A life is not a closed file. What happened at the skatepark between 2004 and 2019 is not exhausted by what I understood about it while it was happening, any more than the Kingdom of God is exhausted by what is already visible.

That is not a licence to invent. Grace arrives unbidden, within the flow of life as it was actually lived, not conjured to order. I am not free to decide that my childhood means whatever is convenient for the argument I want to make this week. BUT I am entitled to keep asking what else was happening in it, and what else my covenant partner was doing in it that I did not have eyes to see at the time, without either question ever landing on a final, closed answer.

So here is the question I would actually like to sit with you on, rather than hand you an answer to: is there a piece of your own story you have treated as closed, finished, filed away, that might, looked at again with whatever you have learned since, still have something new to say to you?

*in the book that I hope will follow up this series Im also drawing in strands of Process and Radical Theology and the space and place of grace unfolding, as we co-create, what it means to be and grow church.