Monthly Archives: May 2026

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.

Circling prayer mountain 3/4

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I circle myself with the witness of the mountain,
with the stone that remembers what I have forgotten.

I place my fleeting life against its ancient patience,
my questions into its enduring silence.

I relinquish the illusion of being the centre,
standing instead before this elder of time.
I release the desire to conquer the summits,
And instead let myself simply be held.

I listen for the response in the weight within my chest,
in the stillness that presses against my urgency,
I feel the deep resonance that rises unbidden,
as if my bones recognise their origin.

Circle me, O Presence,
in this communion of dust and breath.
Teach me to be small enough to belong,
So the memory in the stone awakens the memory in me.

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”