I originally wrote this series as a set of longer blog posts. Then over Greenbelt I was challenged by friends if it should be a new book. So the posts since September have been cut down thoughts that may appear more fully explained in a book. However for this post I want to stick with the original longer version as something shorter cannot do the subject justice. In my first post in this series, The Ghost in the Skatepark, I discussed how the Homogeneous Unit Principle had been hijacked as a hammer against deep contextual mission and how family church as a concept was offered as a corrective to the HUP model and so in turn cast doubt on the validity of deep contextual mission. I want to pick that issue back up now, because I think I can finally answer it properly, and because the answer changes what I believe about the church of flow, mountain pilgrims, and the homeless church, and the old people’s church, and every other narrow, specific, unglamorous congregation that has ever been told it isn’t really church until it looks more mixed.
Stated plainly before I argue for it: a church that emerges out of deep contextual mission can be narrow. It can be one age group, one postcode, one dialect of faith, one kind of person in one kind of room. That narrowness is not a defect to be apologised for or diluted. But it is only legitimate on two conditions, both hard, both costly, and both frequently faked. It must have done the deep work of mutual discipleship, the walls of the missionary and the walls of the community ground down together. And it must be genuinely sobornostic in its relationship to the wider Church, freely and organically united with what is not itself, not merged into it, but bound to it. Get both of those right and a room of skaters or a youth church is a truer sign of the kindom than the mixed family church down the road with the pram service and the youth wing. Get either wrong and no amount of demographic breadth will save you.
So stay with me as lay out my thinking on this. Calling the walls to dust is not a metaphor for a nicer looking room. It is not achieved by seating arrangement. It is a double calling, aimed in two directions at once. It calls the community you enter to come undone. And it calls you, the one entering, to come undone with it. Both walls, yours and theirs, ground down together. That is the vulnerability, and it is not incidental to the way of Christ, it is the way of Christ. Kenosis before it is anything else is a wall falling.
I say this because there is a story we tell now, as a corrective story, and like most corrective stories it has hardened into its own kind of law. We say the cure to society’s ills, and to the HUP, is the multi-age, multi-background, gathered family church. Old and young in the same room. Every kind of person under the same roof. And we call this walls to dust, because look, the walls between the generations are gone.
But a room can be full of difference and still have no dust in it at all.
I’ve heard Rachel Gardner talk of a beautiful church space where a grandmother and a teenager are in the same pew and there is a real presence and relationship, but equally we have all seen that you can have proximity where the walls are still just as high. Calling the walls to dust asks for presence, which is slower and costs more than proximity. This slowness, rooted in relational contextual mission, is the building block for what Rachel and others have achieved in their church. People+Place x Relationship = Space. Presence over proximity asks us to become actually undone by the other. A room can be wonderfully mixed and still be a fortress, every person nodding along inside the same unmoved theology, decorated with a mural of generations pictured standing together, while in reality difference has just gone quiet.
N.T. Wright builds a strong case for the multi-age, multi-background gathered family church, and I don’t want to flatten it. Wright’s case, built especially out of Ephesians, is that the church is meant to be a small working model of God’s new creation, a genuine foretaste of what’s to come. Not a metaphor for unity. An actual, visible, this-morning instance of it. Jew and Gentile in one body, rich and poor at the same table in Corinth, different ethnic groups named together in Colossians, held together by nothing except the death and resurrection of the Messiah. And Wright is emphatic that this unity is not decoration on top of the gospel, it is close to being the gospel’s whole political point. A divided church, held apart along the lines the world already divides along, tells the watching powers that nothing has actually changed. A united one, made of people who by every normal logic should not be sat in the same room, tells the powers their time is up.
That is a serious claim and I still don’t want to soften it. But I want to be honest about something I wasn’t honest about last time: not every one of Wright’s examples sits at the same level. Corinth is the hard case for what I’m about to argue, because Paul’s rebuke there, over the rich and poor humiliating each other at the Lord’s table, is about one room, one Sunday, one meal. I’m not going to pretend that away. Some of the walls that have to come down do come down in the same room, on the same day, between people who would rather not be sat together. I hold that. It just isn’t the whole picture, and Ephesians, the letter Wright leans on hardest, was never written to one room in the first place.
Ephesians almost certainly wasn’t sent to a single congregation. The earliest manuscripts don’t even have “in Ephesus” in the first verse. It did the rounds, read aloud in one house-church after another across a network of towns, Wright argues the context of the Ephesus area was mixed, multicultural and diverse and this would be repeated in the house churches of the area. Romans 16 gives us the local church the same shape from Rome itself: Paul greeting what looks like four or five separate household churches, a Jewish one here, Gentile ones there, still recognisably themselves, but held together across the city by relationship rather than by a shared address. So here we see two approaches churches emerging form the contextual mission at the time, one that reflects the multicultural, diverse of Espesus with a diverse church, and one that reflects the albeit multicultural multi ethnic yet segmented society of Rome.
S when Wright’s own theological formula names the church as “the sign to the powers,” the church doing the signifying is both wide (Ephesus) and narrower (Rome). This is Wright’s river, read the other way round. The wider Church, capital C, is the mystery that holds the skater congregation and the mums group and the cathedral evensong in one body without demanding any single room contain the whole of it. The diversity is catholic. It is not just congregational. The walls each of us has to lose are the ones inside ourselves, the fixed certainties, not the demographic line at the door. What binds us is the one table not one room.
Andrew Walls, in his essay “The Ephesian Moment,” reads this same letter and this same history and gives it a name I now think does more work than Wright’s river: the indigenizing principle and the pilgrim principle, held together. The indigenizing principle is God taking a specific people, in a specific place, and meeting them there, so specifically that the church that results looks unmistakably like them and nobody else. The pilgrim principle is that same church refusing to stay an island, staying in the road, in relationship with every other church that has come into being differently, elsewhere. Walls’ own conclusion is the one I’d nail to the door of this whole debate: none of us reaches Christ’s completeness on our own. We need each other’s vision to correct, enlarge and focus our own. Only together are we complete in Christ. Each culture-specific church, each specific room, is as necessary to the body as the multicultural family church, and without one another we are incomplete in. That is not a compromise position between narrow church and broad church. It is the actual shape of the thing, named properly, and it is why I no longer think “walls to dust” needs a mixed room to mean what it means.
Vincent Donovan did not go to the Maasai to build one church that contained every kind of person inside it. He let a genuinely Maasai church come into being, rooted, specific, unmistakably itself, and then trusted something larger to hold it in communion with every other church, elsewhere, becoming itself in its own way. The new church was not asked to be diverse inside its own walls. It was asked to be united with the wider Church. United is the key word here because it’s the second condition, and it’s the one that actually makes a narrow church answerable rather than just excused. We would all be poorer without the story of the narrow Masai church and the missiological it gets to teach us.
I’ve written elsewhere about sobornost, and I want to bring it in here because I think it’s the missing hinge in this whole argument. Sobornost is the Russian word for a spiritual community of many people, freely and jointly living, held together not by structure or by a shared demographic but by the combination of freedom and unity around a common love of the same absolute values, the fellowship of the Spirit, held by the ontological bond of God’s love rather than by agreement, uniformity, or a shared front door. A sobornostic community is oriented to practice before doctrine, to dialogue before decree, to journey before arrival. It stays porous at its edges. It doesn’t demand that everyone who enters ends up thinking identically before they’re allowed to belong.
That is the condition Donovan’s Maasai church had to meet to be legitimately united with the wider Church, and it’s the condition every narrow church born out of deep contextual mission has to meet too. Not a demographic quota. A sobornostic bond: freely given, freely received, held by love rather than by control, in genuine two-way relationship with churches that look nothing like it. A room of skaters doesn’t have to have a grandmother in the front row. it does however owe the wider Body an openness that lets that Body correct it, enlarge it, be changed by it and in turn change the wider body. The way Walls describes this that every culture-specific church needs every other one to reach completeness. Without that bond, a narrow church is just a clubhouse with a cross on the wall. With it, it’s a tributary, doing exactly what a tributary is meant to do, running fast and clear and specific, joining a river it was never asked or expected to become on its own.
And this is where the multi-generational family church version of the argument quietly comes apart on its own terms, not because mixed rooms are wrong, but because a room can look like Wright’s sign to the powers and fail to be one. A great many of the churches holding themselves up as the cure for homogeneity, have not called a single wall to dust, and have not built a sobornostic bond either. Everyone under that roof may look different, but too often they were let in only once they agreed to one fixed account of truth, one closed system, one settled answer to every real question. Newcomers are absorbed as much as welcomed, assimilated, not really allowed to change anything, and not really free to leave the relationship and remain in it differently, which is the actual test of sobornost. The walls stay up. People just stop noticing, because there’s a mural on them of generations pictured standing together.
Truth is not, in itself, the enemy here, and I don’t want to be misheard as saying it is. But truth held as a wall rather than a gift starts to need an outsider, an other, an enemy, someone who is not us whose difference proves our rightness. That is othering wearing the clothes of conviction, and it has no dust in it, whatever the room looks like on a Sunday morning. It is not the way of Jesus, who kept crossing into Samaritan towns and tax collectors’ houses, letting his own certainties take the hit each time he did. His walls came down before anyone else’s did. That was the miracle. Not his doctrine. His posture.
So here is where I think I land, more resolved after a summer of reading and reflecting on the last 30 years rather than left hanging this time. Deep contextual mission, even when it looks narrow, even when it is one age group in one postcode speaking one dialect of faith, can produce a truer discipleship, and a truer sign to the powers, than the diverse family church, provided it does two things the diverse family church too often skips. It keeps calling walls to dust internally, the community’s and the missionary’s own, both undone by the other, because that mutual grinding down is the actual site of formation. And it stays sobornostically, pilgrim-ly, bound to what it is not, freely, in relationship, correctable, held by love rather than by agreement, trusting, as Donovan trusted and as Walls names properly, that the wide Church does not need any single room to hold the whole feast, only every room to stay in the road with every other one.
Church of Flow was never an island to itself. The StreetSpace skate days were part of that call, a party where everyone comes together from the different spaces in the wider community, the foretaste Wright talks about, but a kindom one, not a congregational one. That, I think, is the actual walls to dust, not proximity dressed up as diversity, but a narrow room, fully itself, fully undone, fully free, staying fully bound to everyone who isn’t in it.
References
Donovan, V.J. (1978) Christianity Rediscovered: An Epistle from the Masai. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.
Passmore, R. (2011) ‘Open Sodal Sobornostic Communities’, Sunday Papers, 22 September. Available at: https://www.sundaypapers.org.uk/?p=2966 (Accessed: 25 August 2026).
Passmore, R. (2012) ‘The Unfolding Missionary Apologetic – Sobornost’, Sunday Papers, 31 October. Available at: http://www.sundaypapers.org.uk/?p=3125 (Accessed: 25 August 2026).
Passmore, R. (n.d.) ‘The Ghost in the Skatepark’, Sunday Papers. Available at: https://www.sundaypapers.org.uk/?p=4473(Accessed: 25 August 2026).
Walls, A.F. (2002) The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission and Appropriation of Faith. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.
Wright, N.T. (2017) ‘Sign and Means of New Creation: Public Worship and the Creative Reading of Scripture’, NTWrightPage, 30 January. Available at: https://ntwrightpage.com/2017/01/30/sign-and-means-of-new-creation-public-worship-and-the-creative-reading-of-scripture/ (Accessed: 25 August 2026).
Wright, N.T. (2025) The Vision of Ephesians: The Task of the Church and the Glory of God. London: SPCK.