Paul Bradbury’s recent reflection on moving beyond empire reminds us how deeply Western mission has been entangled with universalising instincts, the drive to export methods, models, or mindsets far beyond where they first belonged. His question, “How might we save the world without conquering it?” pushes us toward a more humble, localised, and participatory understanding of mission. It’s a call that echoes strongly with what I argued in my previous post what works, works because it is contextual.

If empire seeks control of space, then contextual mission seeks communion IN space. In other words, mission faithful to the gospel begins not with scale but with soil. It roots itself in place but years of contextual mission,following the missio dei and the incarnation has taught us place needs to be understood broadly. Contextually shaped mission is about both “communities of place” and “communities of interest”, and in both these, space matters or perhaps more precisely the space between matters.

Space as the Ground of Context

For communities of place, context is pretty straight forward it’s bounded by postcodes, pavements, local histories, and particular faces. Here, “listening to context” means walking the streets, dwelling among, noticing the patterns of belonging and exclusion, paying attention to how the Spirit stirs through daily life. The missional question is spatial: How is God already at work here?

But the same is true for communities of interest those gathered by vocation, affinity, digital connection, or shared passion. These are not disembodied spaces; they are differently embodied. They occupy networked space, an online forum, a workplace, a music scene, a shared narrative world. These spaces, too, have boundaries, cultures, and ecologies of meaning that also require listening, care, and presence.

To be contextual here means learning the topography of these less tangible places the rituals that shape belonging, the language that signals trust, the injustices and hopes that animate people. This too is place work. Contextual mission is not about being “place-based” versus “network-based”; it is about recognising that space and particularly the space in between is the texture of all context.

The Space Between: From Ownership to Participation

Empire’s imagination is to fill space to occupy, to own, to organise territory. Contextual imagination leaves space, space for others to speak, for grace to emerge, for co-creation. This is not the space of empire, this is the space of incarnation: God dwelling, not dominating; participating, not possessing. 

In our current moment, where both geography and culture feel unsettled, perhaps the task is not to create new models of church or even parish, but to nurture new ecologies of space, perhaps even Brave Spaces of Community and Conversation, porous enough to hold the complexity of both rooted neighbourhoods and fluid networks of meaning.

Context is not an afterthought, It isthe space where the gospel takes shape. So maybe the better question isn’t simply “What works?” but “Where does mission dwell?” Because where mission dwells, (whether a community of place or interest)  determines how God’s story is spoken and heard, and when we listen and join in we go to a new place we have been before.