I’ve recently been asked to speak at a conference on discipleship and the way my brain works means when I’m into a subject I start seeing connections every where. So Im finding myself following two conversations happening in British Christianity right now that belong together but rarely meet.

The first is about how the church speaks into public life,how Christians engage politics, culture, and the fractured common good without either retreating into irrelevance or baptising the spirit of the age. Mark Clavier has written compellingly about this recently, arguing that what the church needs is not better arguments but a more credible common life: communities so genuinely shaped by the gospel that their public witness carries weight because of what they are, not merely what they say.

The second conversation has been quietly unravelling across the edges of the church for thirty years. It began in the alt.worship and Emerging Church movements, continued through Fresh Expressions and pioneer ministry, and asks a harder question: not just how the church speaks to the world, but how the church engages and forms people at all.

My contention is that these conversations have the same root, and until we learn to hold them together in dialogue we will make little real progress.

The Half-Finished Reformation

The Emerging Church movement did something genuinely important. It took culture seriously,not as a threat to be managed, but as the medium through which people actually live, encounter God, and become themselves. It recovered missio dei thinking: the idea that God is already present and active in the world before the church arrives, and that faithful mission begins not with proclamation but with attention. It rediscovered liturgical experimentation, contemplative practice, radical hospitality, and the prophetic edge of the tradition.

But there was a fault line running through it that we have not yet fully named.

In too many cases, culture was taken seriously as a technology for mission,as the means by which the church could become relevant enough to be heard,while the inherited content of discipleship remained largely untouched. The worship changed. The coffee improved. The lighting got darker and the music more atmospheric. But the underlying assumption,that the church holds the truth which it then pours into people,quietly persisted. Missional humility shaped the front door, but not the whole house.

The missio dei was applied to evangelism. It was not, for the most part, applied to formation.

And this matters, because what the missio dei requires is not just that we listen before we speak in the evangelistic encounter. It requires that we be genuinely changed by what we hear,that our theology, our practice, our understanding of God is reformed by what the Spirit is already doing in the lives of those who are not yet, or not yet fully, inside the tradition. The listening is not a tactic. It is an epistemological commitment. It is the belief that truth is not simply possessed by the church and dispensed to others, but that it emerges,partially, provisionally, always requiring further reformation,in the encounter between the tradition and the world.

This is not theological relativism. It is the recovery of a genuinely reforming gospel: semper reformanda, always being reformed.

The Inherited Church’s Own Wound

But this critique is not only for the emerging and fresh expressions stream. The inherited church has its own version of the same problem, and Clavier’s essay names it precisely, even if he stops short of tracing it to this particular root.

He writes that what is needed is not better techniques of political communication but the recovery of the church’s “common life”,its integrity, its distinctiveness, its capacity to form communities that embody something recognisably different from the surrounding culture. He is absolutely right. But the question he invites, and which presses further, is this: what kind of formation produces that kind of community?

If the answer is the existing curriculum,the same confirmation classes, the same Alpha courses, the same preaching-centred model of instruction,then we are asking formation to produce transformation it is structurally incapable of delivering. We are hoping the old pedagogy will produce the new community. It won’t.

Clavier observes that in the assisted dying debate, the bishops who spoke most compellingly did so because of their “long pastoral familiarity with death and dying,their proximity to suffering.” What formed them was not primarily the lecture theatre but the encounter. The living and dying of real people in their pastoral care reformed their theology, their instincts, their way of speaking. That is exactly the point. Presence and attentiveness shaped them.

But our discipleship systems rarely model this. They model transmission: the expert to the novice, the formed to the unformed, the front to the rest. Formation happens at people rather than withthem and from the edges of their experience.

What Luke 5 Teaches Us About Formation

The image I keep returning to is Luke 5. Jesus borrows Simon’s boat. The Son of God, at the beginning of his ministry, is dependent. He does not arrive with a programme. He improvises with what is to hand. When he sends Simon out into the deep, he does not override Simon’s resistance,he holds the tension, and waits for Simon to risk something from his own fragile agency.

The discipleship does not come from the assertion of authority. It comes from the creation of a space in which the other person takes the risk.

And it is worth remembering what immediately precedes this scene: Jesus has already been to his hometown synagogue, announced his manifesto from Isaiah, and nearly been thrown off a cliff for it. Solo expertise, the confident assertion of authorised knowledge, nearly got him killed. What we see at the lakeside is a pivot: slower, collaborative, beginning not with proclamation but with borrowing. The missional posture and the formational posture are, in the end, the same posture.

This is the posture our discipleship has largely lost. We have confused teaching with discipleship. We have mistaken the transmission of content for the formation of persons.

The 2.5 Problem

Here is a number that should trouble us more than it does.

Fresh Expressions research consistently shows that for every person from a church background in a fresh expression of church, approximately 2.5 come from outside the tradition,from the de-churched or the never-churched. These are people who are being formed in faith in communities where the majority of voices are not carrying inherited Christian frameworks. They are, in the fullest sense, disciples-in-formation who are bringing their own encounter with God into the community,an encounter that precedes and often exceeds what we might have expected.

If we take seriously that the Spirit is at work in those people before they arrive,and we must take this seriously if we believe anything about missio dei,then those 2.5 people are not raw material to be formed. They are teachers as well as learners. They carry knowledge about God that the person who has read the Bible a hundred times may not have. The question “what are you noticing?” turns out to be a more theologically charged question than any catechism.

Our discipleship structures are not designed to receive this. They are designed to transmit, not to be reformed by what arrives at the edge.

Orthodoxy as Journey, Not Fortress

This brings us to perhaps the most uncomfortable claim: that a genuinely reforming approach to discipleship means allowing our orthodoxy itself to be reformed,not abandoned, but continually unfolded,through the encounter with those who come from outside.

The Reformation instinct was never simply back to the sources as a conservative retrieval. It was ever being reformed as a permanent posture of the church before the living Word. The tragedy is that most of what passes for formation in inherited church, and much of what was practiced in the emerging church too, treats orthodoxy as a deposit to be transmitted rather than a living tradition to be inhabited and extended.

When orthodoxy becomes a fortress to be defended rather than a journey to be shared, it produces disciples who are anxious rather than rooted, brittle rather than resilient. They can articulate the propositions but they cannot bear the weight of genuine encounter with difference, with doubt, with the person who says I’m not sure I believe, but something is happening in me.

What if that person is not a problem to be solved but a gift to be received?

What if the person whose spirituality has been shaped entirely outside our tradition,who has practised the silence, the justice, the solidarity of Jesus before they could name it,is actually offering us a fuller picture of God than we currently hold?

This is not a call to theological vagueness. It is a call to theological confidence of a different kind: the kind that does not need to control the encounter because it trusts that God is present in it.

The Double Dividend

If this account is right, then the recovery of a genuinely missional, listening-first approach to discipleship does not just address the Fresh Expressions challenge of evangelism and belonging. It addresses exactly the challenge Clavier identifies for the church’s credibility in public life.

The communities Clavier hopes for,communities of genuine trust, mutual obligation, and practiced virtue; communities that embody something recognisably different from the hyper-individualism of consumer culture,are not produced by better theological education alone. They are produced by communities that have learned to be genuinely changed by one another. That have learned to receive the knowledge and experience of the newest, least-formed member as a gift. That practice the epistemological humility which is finally just another name for love.

A church that has learned to listen first in its formation will also listen first in its engagement with the world. The humility is not a tactic. It is a character. And character is formed, or it is not formed at all.

The church’s crisis of public credibility and the church’s crisis of formational imagination are the same crisis. We have protected our position,in culture, in doctrine, in the pedagogical arrangement of the room,rather than trusting the reforming power of the gospel to do its work through genuine encounter.

What Would This Look Like?

A few possibilities, across both streams.

But first, a prior commitment that shapes all of them. The Emerging Church was right to take culture seriously. Its error was treating culture primarily as a technology,a delivery mechanism for mission, a way of lowering the threshold so that the real content could get through. What it did not fully follow through was the more radical claim: that culture is sacred. Not because everything in it is good, but because it is the medium in which image-bearers of God are already living, already seeking, already partially receiving what God is giving. Every person who comes into a process of discipleship arrives bearing the imago dei,already marked by God, already in some way responsive to the divine, already shaped by the Spirit’s work in the life, relationships, and culture that formed them long before the church arrived. If we believe this, then culture is not the obstacle to be overcome before formation can begin. It is the place where formation has already begun. Our task is not to replace it but to receive it,to ask what God has already been doing in this person, in this community, in this cultural moment,and to let that question reform us as much as it opens them.

With that commitment in place, some practical directions:

In inherited church: preaching and teaching that genuinely positions itself as invitation rather than instruction,that makes space for congregational encounter with the text, that asks “what are you noticing?” rather than “here is what this means.” This isn’t a lowering of theological ambition; it is the recognition that the imago dei in the person in the pew means they are already a bearer of insight, not merely a recipient of it. Not the abandonment of theological depth, but its recovery in relational and participatory form.

In fresh expressions and pioneer communities: an explicit commitment that the people who arrive from outside the tradition are not just the object of mission but agents of ongoing revelation. Their culture,however unfamiliar to us,carries the sacred weight of lives in which God has been present. Formation structures that are built to receive and be reformed by their insight do not simply make the newcomer feel welcome; they honour the imago dei they carry and take seriously the Spirit who got there before us. The 50-year fresh expressions that have lasted have done so precisely because they kept learning from those at the edge.

In theological education and ordination training: a pedagogy that models what it teaches. If we want leaders who can hold genuine encounter with the other, we need formation processes that do not merely transmit the tradition but demonstrate what it looks like to be changed by it. This means training that takes cultural context not as background noise but as theological data,that asks what God is already doing in the culture of those being served, and expects that question to shape the minister, not just the ministry.

In public engagement: a recognition that the church’s witness in the political sphere will only be as credible as the quality of formation that produces it. The bishops who speak with authority are those who have been formed by pastoral presence and genuine encounter,with suffering, with difference, with the sacred weight of other people’s lives in cultures not their own. That formation cannot be manufactured after the fact. It has to be built into the ordinary life of the community, from the beginning, by communities that have learned to see the imago dei in those they are most tempted to speak past.

Conclusion: The Empty Hand

Jesus in the wilderness refuses three shortcuts: to provide, to perform, to possess. He chooses the empty hand.

The church’s temptation,in its public witness, in its engagement with culture, in its approach to formation,is the same three shortcuts. To have all the answers. To perform expertise. To possess the truth.

The recovery we need is not a new programme. It is a posture. The posture of the one who borrows a boat before they preach. Who waits for the other to risk something. Who is genuinely surprised by what emerges from the deep.

The newest, most uncertain voice in the room might be the one who knows which way the Spirit is moving.

We have built our discipleship to transmit what we know. We need to rebuild it to receive what we do not yet know,confident, finally, that the God who is already in the world ahead of us is more than capable of meeting us there.

Semper reformanda. Always being reformed.

That is not a concession to the spirit of the age. It is the oldest claim of the gospel.

Comments and responses welcome. This piece draws on conversations in the Fresh Expressions and Emerging Church traditions, and engages with recent writing by Mark Clavier (Well-Tempered) HERE and Andrew Jones (Tall Skinny Kiwi). HERE