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?