Having introduced Re-remembering as the hermeneutic approach I will use to re-imaging contextual mission I want to introcuse some of the groundwork under neath the series that will follow. Alastair McIntosh tells a story of two young men walking home one night across a Hebridean island, each carrying a barrel of whisky. Passing some old fallen stones, they hear fairy music rising out of the ground. One cannot resist it and runs in to dance. The second, before he crosses over, drives a pin into the door behind him, a fixed point in the world he is leaving, something to find his way back to once the dancing is done. He dances. He comes back. The other man never does.

McIntosh takes that story somewhere I had not expected, to the Israeli psychoanalyst Yolanda Gampel, who describes something she calls radioactive identification, the way a violent history, a war, a persecution, seeps invisibly into a person’s inner world across generations, until what happened out there and what is carried in here stop being clear as two different things. My own childhood carries something of that further back than I usually admit, to a grandfather who came home from the trenches carrying what we would now call PTSD, and passed more of it down than he ever meant to.

So I want to offer a re-telling of the fairy story, where instead of sticking the pin to the door it is carried with you into the room handheld against your skin, because the door was never going to be my version of this. A pin in a door only asks something of your memory and your orientation, and you can dance a long way from it before noticing you have wandered too far to see it. The door will not come looking for you. The kind of childhood that makes re-remembering necessary also makes staying with the fairies look like relief rather than temptation.  I left through an actual door at sixteen, and for a while home was my sister’s shed rather than anywhere with a door I could have pinned anything to.

It was ten years on fells and beside becks in Cumbria, learning that the self I was protecting could not be kept safe at a distance, guarded by a marker at the door I would have to relocate later from memory. I learned the pin had to be carried and held against my skin, into whatever weather or dance was actually happening.

Then there is a third re-telling underneath both of those that I think this whole series is reaching for: a pin driven through flesh rather than into a doorframe or held against skin, the nail that fixed Christ in place. Not a marker left behind to be remembered, but a wound that can be touched, a fixed point that calls you and holds you at once.

Within contemporary theology there are a number of creative and sometimes surprising conversations taking place across traditions that once appeared far apart. The place I keep landing, when I ask what actually holds all this together for me, is much older than any of those conversations. It is the language of covenant. Relationship. Partnership with a God who has not stepped back from the world and is not finished with it.*

A covenant is not a contract with a guaranteed outcome, and it is not a leash either. It is a relationship two real parties keep choosing, over time, through failure as much as through faithfulness. Read the Old Testament that way and you get a God who binds himself to an unreliable people rather than simply ruling them, who keeps showing up after they wander, who negotiates, grieves, and stays. That is the God I want as the starting point of this reimagaing, present, active, really there, and signed to the relationship with an iron pin rather than a signature that could later be quietly disowned.

Pete Ward has a phrase for the boldest move inside that partnership  and talks about the first humiliation as the incarnation itself, God taking on flesh and the second humiliation is God handing the mission to the church and letting go, trusting something as flawed and clumsy as an actual congregation with the thing that matters most. You do not hand your life’s work to a stranger. You hand it to a partner, and a partner who could still walk away and simply has not yet is not the same as a partner who has driven something through his own hand to make walking away a different kind of act. That, I think, is the shape of the pin contextual mission keeps circling back to. ,

I like this stuff because it is a theology of an open future. What I had not clocked, until I started writing it, is that it is also a theology of an open past. If God is genuinely still keeping covenant rather than having authored a life and moved on, then the same has to be true, in a smaller and more human register, of a life looked back over. A life is not a closed file. What happened at the skatepark between 2004 and 2019 is not exhausted by what I understood about it while it was happening, any more than the Kingdom of God is exhausted by what is already visible.

That is not a licence to invent. Grace arrives unbidden, within the flow of life as it was actually lived, not conjured to order. I am not free to decide that my childhood means whatever is convenient for the argument I want to make this week. BUT I am entitled to keep asking what else was happening in it, and what else my covenant partner was doing in it that I did not have eyes to see at the time, without either question ever landing on a final, closed answer.

So here is the question I would actually like to sit with you on, rather than hand you an answer to: is there a piece of your own story you have treated as closed, finished, filed away, that might, looked at again with whatever you have learned since, still have something new to say to you?

*in the book that I hope will follow up this series Im also drawing in strands of Process and Radical Theology and the space and place of grace unfolding, as we co-create, what it means to be and grow church.