Church life often longs for order and predictability. Yet the garden outside my window or better still the fells a short drive away are wild and tangled, and reveal another truth. Life flourishes in relationships that are messy, uneven, and interconnected. In reality the mixed ecology church, a community where inherited forms of church exist alongside new, experimental expressions will be similarly messy. But how do these different expressions relate without stifling one another? What patterns might help them grow together, not apart?

Nature offers us five such relational patterns that guide growth and resilience: mutualism, commensalism, parasitism, competition, and cooperation. Each reveals different ways life flourishes through connection, sometimes in surprising and challenging ways. Over the next few weeks, I’ll explore each relationship, drawing from ecology, not just for metaphor’s sake, but as a living guide. Along the way, I’ll try to offer some leadership insights and systems thinking, because growing a mixed ecology church inevitably is also about patterns and structures as well as people.

The five patterns explored will begin with mutualism, where both partners give and receive, flourishing together through reciprocity. Next, commensalism invites us to practice quiet hospitality a kind of support without burden. Parasitism teaches the necessity of boundaries that protect the life of the whole. Competition, uncomfortable as it feels, can spur creativity and clarity. And finally, cooperation invites us into pragmatic alliances that bind us around shared purpose.

What if the church took these relationships seriously and rather than simply sitting with the metaphor of the mixed ecology we started to embody it and see what we can learn from our non human counterparts.