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.