In an anxious church that’s fearful of the future growth isn’t always a helpful word  to contextual mission. That might sound strange from someone who spent ten years in the Diocese of Carlisle supporting around 120 fresh expressions of church across Cumbria, and watching Network Youth Church grow into one of the UK’s largest youth ministry projects. By any growth measure that decade was a success and I’m proud of it. But I’ve come to think the church’s growth logic and capitalism’s growth logic are to often drawing from the same well, and that it does a quiet kind of violence.

The dry summer of 2026 showed this well. Rivers that had been rewilded or left to run naturally kept the land around them green, while the ones that had been straightened and reordered were surrounded by dustbowls. Nobody who straightened those rivers meant harm, and that’s the point. The violence of endless growth is rarely one dramatic moment. It turns up later, downstream, felt by people who were never in the meeting where the decision was made. In the church it shows up as burned out leaders, spent relationships, and new communities launched because a target needed hitting rather than because anyone local asked for one.

I’m not against growth. Contextual mission grows, sometimes a lot, when a system makes real room for it. Those 120 expressions grew, but on a slower clock than the one we inherited from empire, the one that wants things fast, replicable and visible within a single funding round. When contextual work doesn’t hit that clock it gets questioned, reviewed and sometimes cut, and that costs people. Some paid far more than I did.

Process theology has helped me here. If God works through persuasion rather than coercion, more covenant partner than distant ruler, luring creation towards beauty rather than dictating outcomes from above, then a church modelling itself on that God can’t just issue targets downwards and call the job done. If you’re not keen on process theology thinking of Wesley who talked about the God who is wooing creation and people into grace. Soulful contextual mission calls us to stay in conversation with the people and the place it is trying to serve, open to being changed by them. That’s the difference between a covenant and a contract, and it is much harder to build into a diocesan structure than it is to write in a blog post. I didn’t always manage it myself. More than once I caught myself running someone else’s numbers through my own mouth.

There is an uncomfortable bit for me in this too. At the skatepark in Chard with Church of Flow I was a pioneer on the edge of the outside. In Cumbria I wasn’t. A diocese gave me a job, a title, a budget and a bishop’s backing, so I was working from the edge of the inside. That bought real things, reach, legitimacy and structures that could hold what emerged. But room granted is still room granted by someone with the power to grant it, and power that gives room can take it away. Harvey Kwiyani asks whether an institution’s welcome ever becomes a real handover of power, or whether it stays as hospitality where the people with the budget decide what counts.

The cross says something sharper here. Christ wasn’t given room by an institution generous enough to fund his listening. He supplied the fixed point himself, from his own body, and it’s through outer relationship with Christ in whom we live and breath and have our being that we can engage in contextual mission that has the space to travel from hospitality to mutuality.

In 2025, after a restructure, I was offered a new role and turned it down. With the national push toward worship first planting, the role was not shaped strongly enough the context for me and it needed a different person and approach. I wanted to leave while leaving still felt like a choice. So the question I think the wider church needs to sit with isn’t how do we grow this faithfully, but is growth even the right question to ask of this piece of work, right now, is there something deeper happening at the level of people and place that needs attention? And are we willing, as institutions and not just individuals, to hear the answer if it’s no?