The land isn’t just a backdrop or a view. It’s part of the conversation and a participant in soulful contextual mission. The rise of eco theology and wider understanding of the sense of place makes saying this easier than it was 10 years ago but for many Christians this is still a step too far.

Most people think of truth as a Rock: it’s formed over time, solid, fixed, provable, defendable. Jesus suggests he is the truth and as a person that introduces a different dynamic to the idea of truth, something less fixed, more relational. What if truth is something wider, more dynamic, that happens between you and someone else, what if when Jesus used the landscape, creation, in his teaching it was more than just a setting or a backdrop but part of the conversation. When we approach his teaching and life in this way we don’t just come away better informed but changed and changed in our relationship with the whole wider ecology both in the human and non human context.

I’m not saying some things aren’t fixed. Safeguarding policies should be Rock shaped and non negotiable. The danger is when we mistake the Rock for the whole of the ground.

One way to think about the redemptive power of the cross is to see its shape and embeddedness as pointing to its wider power. It reaches up to reconcile God and us, it reaches out to reconcile us with one another, it meets at the centre reconciling us to ourselves and reaches down into the soil to reconcile the wider creation and earth to the creator. Too often we have reduced the redemptive work and person of Jesus to being about only one part of the reconciling relationship. So rather than entering into the fullness of relationship with Jesus we only enter into a part. We slip back into mistaking the rock for the whole, and narrow truth down to a constituent part instead of finding it in the person.

So when I say contextual mission is about our soul meeting the soul of a place and its people, I’m drawing from this wider reconciling work of the cross and we need to let that wider work sink deeper into who we are and how we operate. When we do it changes how we see place and opens us up to letting place/ earth/ creation become a partner in the mission.

One Mountain Pilgrims walk was planned to get a great view. But the weather had clearly not read the plan. We hiked up Red Scree to a spot with a stunning panorama and got nothing but grey. So we ducked into a sheep fold out of the wind.

Someone in the group said that not seeing anything made them notice everything else. The wind they couldn’t see the source of. The cold on their face. A clear day would have let them skip all of that.

This was a lesson in presence that the cloud and the land taught us.

Something else  happens on nearly every walk. People tell me about a place that matters to them, but they apologise first. “I know this sounds silly, but…” Or “I’m not really a nature person, but…” Then out comes a memory of a tree they climbed as a kid, or a beach, or a spring their gran said never to disturb.

Older Cumbrians do it with folklore too. A hill nobody local would build on. A stone said to move at certain times of year. Then straight away: “but that’s just superstition.”

I’ve stopped letting that slide. Not by telling people they should believe it, but by asking why that bit of memory has survived long enough to be worth telling a stranger on a walk. I’ve come to think superstition is often just theology that lost its institutional backing, not theology that lost its truth.

The church seems to find the ecological relationship mildly embarrassing. We keep the holy well tidy and quietly forget why anyone thought it was worth visiting. We have lost our ability to engage with the soul of the place. Many pioneers over the last few decades have started to rediscover the place of the land and creation in mission. When we recognise that the land gets a vote, then listening to a place is part of listening to its people. You can’t do deep contextual mission in Cumbria, or Croydon, or anywhere, while treating the place as scenery.

I’d love to hear from you in the comments:

– Have you ever caught yourself apologising for a spiritual experience in nature? Why do you think we do that?
– If you’re pioneering somewhere, what would it look like to let that place have a vote in what you do next?

*This post draws on Part Two of my book, The Soul of a Place and Its People: Re-Remembering Contextual Mission, which looks back on ten years of Mountain Pilgrims in Cumbria.*