How to start a movement (possibly)

Not so long ago a friend said to me ‘what you’ve done Paul, is start a movement’. Which I thought was hilarious. Because it kind of implied I know what I am doing, or that what may (or may not) have emerged from anything I have ‘done’ has had some kind of pre-determined plan or strategy. The thing is that all the plans and strategies I have cooked up in my head and tried to put into practice have not worked (at least in the way I thought they ought to have done). Anything that others think I have done that has ‘worked’ has only made sense in retrospect, and in that sense its success cannot really be attributed to me.

I don’t think I started a movement. I got swept up into one. Indeed if mission is anything it is the movement from God toward the fulfilment of all things, which Jesus called the Kingdom. And we get to participate in it. This Sunday I was asked to preach on Ephesians 3. Turns out it pretty much describes Paul telling the Ephesians how he was one small part of this movement of God through Jesus to the apostles to the Gentiles, the rest of humanity and then all creation. (v 7-11) And he says ‘Although I am the less than the least of all God’s people, this grace (i.e. to preach to the Gentiles) was given to me’ (v8). Playing the part in God’s movement that Paul was called to play seems to Paul like a ridiculous, illogical surprise – a work of utter grace.

And this is the thing with the movement of God’s mission. If we are sitting appropriately human-sized within them we feel constantly humble, inadequate, on the edge of chaos, overwhelmed and disturbed. So as my friend and colleague Jonny Baker once said to me “if you think you’ve got movement sussed you’ve probably just killed it!” Why? Because the movement is always bigger than our attempts to describe them. And they don’t ‘work’ when we think ourselves big enough to control them. When that happens we domesticate them or turn them into institutions.

Nevertheless I think we might be able to understand the dynamic of God’s movement that is mission to suggest some principles it and therefore a posture of leadership within it. My friend who thinks I started a movement asked me to write a side of A4 on how to start a movement. You don’t start a movement – you join in with on – but still here goes…

1. Movements are animated by purpose and values and not by predetermined outcomes.
2. Movements are fuelled by connection – ie by the dynamic created by lots of people oriented toward the same purpose able to talk to one another, encourage one another and learn from one another.
3. Movements are enabled by key people who enable connections to happen – e.g. by facilitating online connections spaces, in person gatherings, by developing relationship with other key people in the network.
4. Leadership of movements is not leadership in the sense we often mean it – think ‘gardener’ rather than ‘manager’ – it’s all about tending to the environment and trying to ensure its healthy and protected from the kind of things that might hinder growth of the movement.
5. Leaders within movements are good storytellers – stories are another thing that fuel movements i.e. good examples of how the purpose and values of the movement are being expressed in one particular context.
6. Leaders within movements are ‘sensemakers’ – they are able to make sense of what is happening and describe it well to others. This is both so those in the movement get a sense of the whole movement and where its going, and also so those outside the movement get a clear picture of what is happening.
7. Leaders within movements advocate for the movement with ‘the powers that be’. I.e. there is always a wider context to any movement that will be a mixture of support and resistance. Movement leaders engage with both, drawing supporters in and engaging with those who resist a movement by advocating for the space for those in the movement to do what they do. (I’ve always gone with the maxim of St Francis that ‘the best critique of the bad is the demonstration of the good’ (or something like that!) ie don’t’ waste too much time trying to convince people, let them see the obvious good of what is being proposed.)
8. The chief agent in any movement of God is the Holy Spirit. So the question is often – ‘how can we ensure we participate with what God is doing?’ and ‘How can we try and ensure we not hindering or domesticating what God is doing?’

Alan Bates – An Unlikely Leader

Like many, even most of us, I watched the ITV docu-drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office. Its been incredible witnessing the impact that drama has made on public opinion, policy and ultimately )one hopes) the lives of those affected. It’s a testimony to the power of good storytelling to change things.

One thing that has not been commented on much though is the leadership of Alan Bates in the whole process. I was so stuck by the incredible way in which this unassuming man doggedly led a campaign that has achieved the impact it has. We still expect our leaders to have status, charisma, power. We still expect them to be magicians – capable of ‘hitting the ground running’, ‘turning things around’, ‘getting results’. There is an irony in this, because all these phrases, and the leadership culture they come from, are part of a corporate managerial culture which has been exposed by this whole scandal. A culture that concentrates power into the hands of a select few people and protects it from the ordinary person by any means.

Alan Bates’ leadership was counter-cultural in that respect. Perhaps prophetic of the kind of leadership we want to see, the kind of leadership we need, in the dehumanised world of hyper-modernity.

So what are the characteristics of the leadership embodies by Alan Bates in this story:

1. Guided by a deep purpose.

There is a moment in the drama when there is decision to be made about a civil action against the Post Office. It becomes clear that the best-case scenario for each individual sub-postmaster is a pay out (if they win) of something in the region of £22k. For most this is nothing compared to what has been lost, materially and personally. There is a murmur of revolt at the thought of another long fight when the rewards may not outweigh the cost. But then Alan Bates speaks and reminds them they not fighting for money, or for compensation – ultimately they are fighting for the truth. Deeper than any material outcome in this case, is the principle of truth and justice, principles of eternal and lasting value.

Too often we lose sight, if we ever had it, of the deeper purpose of what our leadership is about. The fundamental purpose, deeper than say an annual goal, or a particular target, or a strategic aim, deeper than our personal ambition, or our ambition for our organisation or group, gets lost in the detail. What is what we are doing really about? Why are we putting our energies into this? What is the fundamental and eternal purpose which, even if we failed at this juncture, would still motivate us to keep going?

2. Patience

Patience is not a virtue we value in our culture. Some years ago I saw an advert for a new delivery service which simply said ‘Waiting. Boring.’ Our culture values speed as a moral good. To be busy is to be someone. Our culture encourages us to display our identity and worth to others through a performance of busy-ness.

Alan Bates never seemed to be in a hurry. If he had been he would have given up years ago. His wife refers to him as ‘bloody-minded’ which no doubt is true. But I think deeper than determination, or bloody-mindedness, is a resolute patience, an unwillingness to succumb to the timeframes of our culture and to set his watch perhaps by the historical timescales of social and systemic change. As Martin Luther King said “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Patience in this respect is not just a virtue but a practice that schools us in the timescales of eternity.

3. Non-anxious presence

At the end of the ITV series, many of those who have been wrongly accused of theft and false accounting have their convictions quashed at the Supreme Court. They celebrate their victory outside as the TV cameras capture the moment. Watching from their home in Wales Alan Bates and his wife. ‘You should have been there’ his wife says. ‘No…its not about me’, Mr Bates replies.

This attitude seems to me entirely in line with his leadership all the way through which exhibits a calmness, an unwillingness to resort to anger, a non-anxious presence which provides a still, yet powerful, presence throughout the campaign. The unspoken message of Alan Bates’ disposition throughout the story is one of calm, determination toward the possibility of justice. Mr Bates doesn’t need to make impassioned speeches to motivate people toward that end – he simple models it authentically in his tireless work on behalf the movement and his personal demeanour throughout.  

4. Curating space for the leadership of others.

Whilst the ITV drama was entitled ‘Alan Bates vs The Post Office’, as though one man took on the might of a monster corporation, it becomes very clear just how good Alan Bates was in bringing other people into the campaign and curating the campaign as a movement rather than a one-person crusade. A key moment exemplifies this leadership. Knowing the identities of only 7 of those affected by the scandal, Mr Bates decides to call an open meeting and invite anyone else affected to come. At random he chooses an obscure village in the midlands to hold a meeting, hires the hall and waits to see who will come. When they do come there is not great rousing speech from Bates, no clever strategy launch –  they just sit in a circle and tell their stories. And so a movement grows based on the solidarity of a shared experience of injustice.

Leadership is so often cast as being about personality. About being the kind of extraordinary person who can do heroic things on behalf of others, drawing people together by the sheer force of their charisma, or the genius of their strategy. What Alan Bates reminds us is that sometimes the most extraordinary things happen when someone sticks a pin in a map, or a stake in the ground, and says ‘lets do this together’. Leadership is about creating (and curating) the space for the participation of others, then standing on the edge and letting it happen.

‘A time of uncertainty’ – LLF, doubt and certainty.

I have been at General Synod of the Church of England this week, where the vast majority of the time was given to more discussions around same-sex relationships. I have found myself to be at the centre of a debate which feels like an argument between two sides, but which is I think in reality a conversation across a whole spectrum of opinion. I have sat and listened to impassioned speeches from either ends of this spectrum, at times feeling quite isolated in a position in the middle. But I wonder if actually the space in the middle of this debate is a fruitful space – because it is so often the space we inhabit as human disciples of Jesus – wrestling between our sense of conviction and our doubts and the challenges of living out those convictions in the complexity of the world. This seems to me to be a more realistic theological position to be honest about.

This position is to some extent articulated by the language the Bishops used in their latest document before Synod. The prayers of love and faith were consistently referred to as ‘a pastoral provision in a time of uncertainty’. Some call this heresy. Others a classic Anglican fudge. But theologically and ecclesiologically it seems to me to be a rather common position to take, a fair picture of the reality we are in as Christians between the inauguration and fulfilment of the Kingdom.

This was therefore the gist of the speech I ventured to offer this week, which didn’t get given, but is offered here.

“Reflecting on the debate we had in this chamber in February, I went away asking the question: When a community of Christ’s disciples prays, explores Scripture and debates together – and yet comes to place of profound disagreement – what is doctrine? What do we mean by it? Who owns doctrine?’ And on what basis?

One theme of the Bible is of a people for ever succumbing to a tendency to fix the nature of God within their own limited perspective. And of a God who challenges his people to relinquish these fixed perspectives in the light of his revelation. Job in the whirlwind. Ezekiel in the valley of the dry bones. Jonah in the belly of the whale. Jesus with Samaritan woman, with the Syro -Phoenician woman, Jesus on the cross, Paul on the road to Damascus. In each case the poverty of our doctrine is revealed through the revelation of experience. The Spirit continually invites us beyond our certainties into the wildness and uncertainty of the person of God. As John V Taylor said ‘The Holy Spirit has not read the rubrics’

So when we speak of ‘a period of uncertainty’. A space of disagreement. A space somewhere between the apparent certainty of doctrine and the uncertainty of its pastoral implications, I think ‘isn’t that the space we are always in?’ Is it not always the case that there is a space between our articulation of the revelation of God in Christ and our practical expression of that in the midst of the world. Is it not the case the doctrine must always be worked out with fear and trembling. Must always be held between hands that are on the one hand certain and on another doubt. As Leslie Newbigin said ‘Only statements that can be doubted make contact with reality’.

So I for one am grateful for the space the Bishops have offered us to inhabit. It may not be easy. It may not convenient. It may not fit with our timetable or plan. But it is consistent with the experience of God’s people. It is consistent with our task as pilgrim disciples and a pilgrim church, walking haphazardly into the Kingdom of God.

And its appropriate for the context we are in, one not unlike the exile where we have to experiment and learn again how to be the church in a culture at odds with many of our values and assumptions.  Of the exile Walter Brueggemann said that far from being an unmitigated disaster the exile ‘evoked the most daring theological articulation in the Old Testament.’

‘A period of uncertainty’ is the church’s experience of reality. It is only hardened certainties that blind us to that. So we should not be afraid of it. So nor should we seek to hurry through it. Some things are too important to do quickly. But we can and should seek to walk together in it. “

On Sabbath – and the art of living life backwards

I have just returned from a 3-month sabbatical. A sabbatical is intended to be the gift of an extended time of rest and re-creation, usually once every 7 years or so, which is offered within the terms of my role as an ordained minister. I’m hugely aware precious, privileged thing a sabbatical is. Something that the vast majority of people in employment can only dream of. So in that there is perhaps a pressure to ‘make the most of it’

My employer is likewise keen to ensure I ’make the most of it’. Church employers these days recast the sabbatical as something snappy like ‘extended ministerial development leave’. Which leaves you in no doubt what this is about, and puts a certain amount of pressure on you to make sure that that is achieved. I therefore filled out the form from my own CofE Diocese with the plan I had made for how I was going to use these 3 precious months. I felt pretty happy with what I’d come up with and, having gained agreement from my Diocese, set about making arrangements.

However, an unease was growing in me. I began to feel that I was going to be just as busy in sabbatical achieving all my personal development goals as I was during my usual work. I reflected that many of the things I had planned to do, visits here and there to explore ideas with people, were things I might justifiably be doing in my normal working time. What is a sabbatical? Is it just that time where we catch up on all those important/non-urgent things we might do but didn’t have time?

So I ditched the whole thing! (Sorry Bishop!) And, following a conversation with my spiritual director, decided that my sabbatical was fundamentally about walking into the wilderness. It was about letting go of everything and putting myself quite deliberately in a place of desolation and need. Within that space my diary stopped its insistence that I was clearly doing useful and important things by the nature of its clutteredness. Within that space I sought only to attend to what God might offer – how God might lead me through the wilderness and out the other side.

The root of sabbatical is of course Sabbath. A sabbatical is an extended Sabbath. It is a rest from the agenda of work. And from the personal agenda and agency of work. Let’s face it, those of us who minister as a profession like to think we are doing the Lord’s work, but how much are we really just doing our own? I guess part of the gift of Sabbath (and it is primarily a gift in creation) is in finding out the extent to which we have made ourselves little gods and put our own agendas in place of God’s. Sabbath is about reacquainting ourselves with the ‘God who is God’.

But I think this extended Sabbath has been for me an invitation in a deep truth that God is the God of time. Modernity wrested time out of the sacred and put it to work. Clocks moved from the monastery to the marketplace. Time moved from a being a creature to a commodity. The accelerated nature of the modern world has made our diaries/digital planners etc. the keepers of time. And so life is lived forward within a fierce framework of time laid out for us by our agenda and schedules, and the agenda and schedules of others. Common to both is a underlaying value in the precious resource of time, which must be spent wisely. Time must be made to count. We must measure our days. Time must not be wasted.

There were times during my sabbatical when I felt guilty about my lack of agenda, my lack of plan. A deep sense I was wasting time. But into the wilderness a path began to emerge. Encounters with people. Invitations to stay at places and meet people I would not have done otherwise. Connections were made and themes emerged from conversations and experiences which could only have done so in such an unplanned space. Providence took the lead. Incidences of ‘serendipity’ became common. And as I emerged from the wilderness I looked back. I spent a morning prayerfully reflecting on all that had happened. I tried to describe its richness and gift – to give shape and form to my experience. All of this was gift. Surprise. Grace. And I found myself asking, what if we lived more or our lives backwards? What if life was less planned and more ‘found’? What would a diary look like that trusted in the God of time? That trusted the fruit of our ministry as not so much in making things happen, but giving space for the kind of happenings that are the life of God?

In the fullness of time

It’s a cold, blandly overcast day and I stop, as I sometimes do, on the road out toward the wilds off Cranborne Chase in the east of Dorset, and wander around the site of Knowlton Church. For years I saw this hollowed out ruin set back from the road and ignored it. Now I can hardly stop myself for paying another visit. It’s late February and the verges and woodland clearings are streaked with flashes of snowdrops. The world is tilting into life again. The whirl and pull of stars and planets drawing life from the ground. Yet the ground feels dead. Cold, damp, lifeless. It remains a gift of faith to see the landscape green and productive once again.

I step inside the ring of fencing that marks this place as different, as protected space from cattle, the tractor and the plough. Within this protective orbit lie the rings of Knowlton. Two banks of mounded earth with entrances east and west circling a wide central space, in the middle of which stands the ruin of a church. The rings are thought to have been constructed around 2500BC and were probably for ceremonial use. Walking through the banks I am pulled to the centre and to the church. A Norman church stood here, was remodelled in the 14^th century, before falling into disuse in the 17th century. It has all the familiar proportions and shape of any number of similar churches nearby. But time has not been kind. The tower and nave stand open to the sky. The east window has been cleaved and chewed, its shape and form lost to the attrition of the elements.

Entering the church through the arch of the old south door there is a tower to my left and the familiar shape of a sanctuary to my right. At the bottom of the tower someone has left a single rose and two red votive candles. There has been no official worship here for perhaps 400 years. Yet ‘buildings have a ministry’ of sorts. Perhaps a significant one, unseen, unheralded. Thin places in the landscape of time in which the significance of our lives and that others can be placed.

From the tower base I turn, look down the open nave to the vacant altar space and beyond the shattered window, to the Neolithic entrance out eastwards. There, two yew trees, those ancient, sacred trees, stand sentry. They draw me, as they always do. For they are no longer passed by as markers at the edge of things. No longer are they a gateway to the focus of the church. They are now an altar in themselves. Within the calm, deep green space at their base these trees now host a sacred space. Coloured streamers hang from the branches, candles and messages have been placed at their base. There are small soft toys, stones with prayers scrawled on them, flowers and other artefacts tucked into smooth hollows of the yew bark. I have been coming to Knowlton on and off for over 5 years and this place of worship has been renewed each time. It is a living focus for the desires of people in an age quietly rejecting the assumptions of the modern materialist world, to seek the spiritual. The future is meeting the past, and the past the future in the shade of these centuries’ old trees.

Its hard not to look back at the church from this viewpoint and not see it as peripheral, irrelevant even, its walls disappearing slowly into the soil, its place at the centre dislodged. The edge might be the centre now. Though what it is the centre of no-one is really quite sure. But where history, social change and human endeavour built a church that clearly placed Christianity as the world view of the land, making a solid centre of a porous circle, the centre hasn’t held. Spiritually we are galaxy of possibilities a ‘nova effect’[1] of searchings and questings into the wilds of the spiritual universe. Our buildings still inhabit the land, there are still flowers placed in the stillness of their sacred spaces, but on nearby trees the spirituality of secular Britain flutters in the breeze.

I come to Knowlton now as a kind of spiritual discipline. I come to pray for the church in the county of my birth, the county in which I have now spent the majority of my life. I come to pray in the context of the spiritual reality of our age. And I come to pray in the context of time, deep time. Prayers shaped in a place full of the relics of a pre-Christian past and the reality of a post-Christendom future. And I come to Knowlton to pray and to put my own human endeavours in the perspective of the fulness of time. Allowing the long turbulent view of history to refine my hopes and dreams for the church.

There are two reflections that walking and praying through the history of Knowlton bring to my ministry and to my thoughts on the place of the church. Firstly that church exists in liminality.  Time is the milieu of the church. The experience of the people of God is an experience of pilgrimage, of always being between one time and one place and another, always leaving and always arriving. Always leaving the past and finding in its future the way to live hopefully in the present. The church is always walking, ‘walking backwards into the future’[2] perhaps. Deeply mindful and honouring of the wisdom and tradition of the past.  And yet walking in the power of the Spirit that comes, as it were, from the future, from the end of the journey, inviting us to step confidentially and imaginatively in that direction. So the invitation to the church is to a be a people of the tent not the temple. Places like Knowlton and painful but important reminders that temples are a risk, or a misadventure in time.  Temples are an attempt to ignore the arrow of time, to staunch the dynamic flow of history. And they place at risk that call to follow the Spirit into a world that has tilted once more around its temporary axis and where the gravity at work on people’s lives is drawing them away not toward what was once perceived to be the centre.

Secondly, and as a consequence of the first, the church, in the forms in which it takes, must always be regarded provisionally. We cannot take for granted that the form of the church that has nurtured us has some kind of sacred right to do the same for all time. The church has expressed its core truth and purpose in all manner of forms in time and place, in cultures and contexts since the day of Pentecost, each form emerging from that creative conversation that takes place between Scripture, tradition and the uniqueness of a cultural context. That is the nature of the church. These things we call churches ‘emerge from the interaction of their cultural assumptions, the special historical inheritances and their understanding of God’s revelation through Scripture’ [3]. Places like Knowlton in a sense help us attend to the implicit variety of the church as it responds to the flow of time in a given place. ‘Go back 600 years,’ argues Rowan William, ‘you’d have monasteries of different kinds. You’d have enclosed orders. You’d have friars, the preaching orders. You’d have local guild churches and parish churches and chantry chapels and cathedrals and minsters, not just the parish church. And we’ve airbrushed that variety out of the picture.”[4] They warn us against crystallising the church into any one form or expression. They keep us humble and yet hopeful. For where God by his Spirit has brought new expression to the form of the church he will do so again.

Knowlton, and places like it, also help me pray in the patient spirit of the early church. I am reminded, in this frantic, accelerating world, that the arc of God’s grace is long and bends toward the Kingdom. Slowly. And not only slowly, but mysteriously. There are few straight lines in the geometry of the church’s history. This is the nature of story. A story we inhabit has patient witnesses to the person of Jesus, who died and rose again, in place and time. A story we inhabit passionately but patiently, confident that God will fulfil his purposes ‘in the fullness of time.’

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[1] A  term borrowed from Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. Taylor uses the term to…..Taylor, A Secular Age. For a shorter, ore accessible and highly readable take on Taylor’s work see Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular.

[2] A phrase used by Archbishop Justin Welby in a joint Presidential address to the General Synod the Church of England in July 2021. https://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/speaking-writing/speeches/general-synod-joint-presidential-address-archbishops

[3] Duerksen and Dyrness, Seeking Church – Emerging Witnesses to the Kingdom, ix.

[4] Rowan Williams quoted in Taylor, First Expressions – Innovation and the Mission of God.

Diluting Distinctiveness?

Is the distinctive vocation of pioneer ministry being diluted? Are (in particular) ordained pioneer ministers (OPMs) being pressed into more traditional roles out of financial necessity? I had a hunch from conversations with some of that it was. And with a key support and advocacy role for pioneer ministry within the CofE (National Pioneer Development Officer) having been cut, my concern is that there is little attention being given to this.

So I set about doing a little bit of research. I invited ordained pioneers to fill in a Google form and got 31 responses. Here is an edited version of a fuller report on the data I received, including quotes from some of those who responded. If you would like the full report please do email me at the address below.

Domestication of the gift of pioneering?

From the responses I received there is some evidence that OPMs are unable to fulfil their hopes of pursuing pioneer ministry full time beyond their curacy. Whilst over half of those who responded hoped to find a fulltime pioneer role after curacy, in the end only about a third succeeded. A number ended up in incumbent or associate parish roles, others in pioneer enabling roles with their Diocese.

There is a financial reality, intensified post-Covid, that might lead people to conclude that actually a third of OPM curates finding a full-time pioneer role isn’t bad. But what is concerning is the degree to which people who have been selected, trained and deployed as pioneers find themselves with little or no option other than doing a traditional parish role. Are we in danger of allowing the critical vocation of pioneering, which needs to operate in a different kind of space in relationship with the inherited church, to be domesticated by the parish system?

The curacy – post curacy hurdle

Finding a role after curacy is really tricky. Lots of respondents spoke of frustration with their Diocese and with an inability to enable the kind of roles that might enable their vocation to continue to be expressed.

“A large proportion of the pioneers I have supported or coached over the years have ended up in non-pioneering roles…they have been exceptionally good and effective leaders, and there have been no stipended pioneer roles available in the area they felt called to. But it has been in my view a lamentable and neglectful stewardship of their distinctive gifts.”

“the CofE and some dioceses still have no idea in how to place ordained pioneers beyond curacy.  I feel that I have to forge a path for myself otherwise I [will] get swallowed into parish ministry”

Diocesan culture

The degree to which the culture of Dioceses was supportive and enabling of pioneering continues to vary widely. There were indications that in some Dioceses the ecclesiology that had been described in Mission Shaped Church and which resulted in the creation of a OPM track has been sidelined.

“My diocese does not understand pioneers and keeps changing the goal posts – my curacy looks nothing like what was promised”

“the posts that are occasionally dreamed up …don’t leave space for a pioneer to do the work of discerning what is emerging in the context, or for the pioneer themselves to discern which context God is calling them to focus on/engage with. There have begun to be exceptions to this in Dioceses who have appointed edgy enough pioneers to key strategic roles, but these are exceptions rather than the norm.”

“In an informal interview I was told that the [Diocesan] leadership team were not in agreement with the ecclesiology of fresh expressions…I found it puzzling – especially given the official acceptance of the Mission Shaped Church report.”

Inherited/pioneer friction

The paradigm of pioneer ministry continues to exist in often painful tension with the inherited system of the parish. Do ordained pioneers experience this tension most strongly? Their ordained status making it that much harder to resist the constant call from the centre for time and energy?

“It seems particularly difficult for ordained pioneers to have longer term pioneer opportunities especially when the system has been created for traditional incumbencies.”

“The disconnect between parish expectations within a hierarchical culture and my vocation for engaged relational, responsive ground-up pioneering grew wider and more confrontational through the years”

“My experience of being an ordained pioneer in the CofE is one of being continually pulled into the centre because I have leadership skills, and then kicked back out to the edge when I say things that are uncomfortable for the centre to hear.”

Good Practice

Nevertheless it was heartening to hear positive experience where Dioceses have enabled pioneers to develop their vocation, and where creativity and courage to make space for pioneers has happened. It can be done!

“I was encouraged to develop as a pioneer through training placement and curacy and am now really fortunate to be appointed to this role which is fully pioneering, though part of a parish staff team.”

“I was asked by the Head of Mission for the diocese to apply for a pioneer estate lead role to take me beyond curacy because of my history and experience in this area –  so I did feel enabled to a degree.”

“[My] Diocese allowed me to stay in the same post for training placement and curacy which gave a 7-yr stint for pioneering which was brilliant and I would highly recommend that model to other dioceses.”

Personal Reflections

My own reflections on this? It seems clear that OPMs continue to inhabit a Church environment in which their vocation, whilst affirmed and supported by the national Church through the OPM designation, still really struggles to thrive at the local level. There is no doubt in my mind that some OPMs are reluctantly taking traditional parish roles out of necessity, hoping that there might be space to do some pioneering if time allows. Inevitably that results in a loss of the charism of pioneering to the church as a whole.

In response Dioceses might well argue that the distinctive role for OPMs is in enabling the pioneer of others. But is it realistic for an OPM as a parish incumbent to give attention and space to this kind of ministry with the demands inherent to that kind of role? Are we basically colluding together to dilute the distinctive role that pioneers bring to the church? Sure, I’ve felt for a while that a key role of OPMs is in enabling the growth and development of lay pioneers. But firstly, I’m not convinced that hitching that ministry up to an incumbency role will do anything other than ensure it doesn’t happen. And secondly, most pioneers feel called to pioneering because they want to pioneer! Some may well have a particular gift in enabling others, sitting somewhere between the pioneer space and the inherited, making the case for pioneer ministry and helping the church reimagine itself into something more like the mixed ecology that is now supposed to be the norm. But many want to give their life to the margins, to mission amongst those with little or no background in the Christian faith, and sadly as things stand OPM (or at least stipendiary OPM) may not always be the best option to enable people to do that.

If you’d like to read the full report that I’ve put together from this research do email me at paul@poolemc.org.uk.

Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia – an icon for the church of today and tomorrow

Wow! A visit to the Sagrada Familia (Church of the Holy Family) in Barcelona did not disappoint. I am not generally drawn to cathedrals or even historic buildings when travelling. But a friend insisted that a visit to Barcelona simply had to involve going. So with a single day in the city at our disposal we did just that. It is an astonishing place which to my mind at least shows us something, not just of what a church might be, but what the church is called to be.

But before I get into that, a brief background and description of the Sagrada Familia if you haven’t been. In the 1870’s a Jesuit Society bought some land at the edge of the growing city of Barcelona and began work to build a new place of worship. The building was to be built in a neo-Gothic style. After 1 year the first head architect left the project and a 26-year-old by the name of Gaudi was given the role. Gaudi reenvisioned the project with a bold and daring design which, whilst true to the neo-Gothic brief, was unlike anything that had ever been built. The building would have 18 towers and 3 ‘facades’ which would tell the story of the Christian faith to those looking at the building from outside. Gaudi envisioned ‘a Bible in stone’ and decorated his elaborate design with immense detail and creative flair.

Gaudi died in 1926 with only one of the facades and 2 of the towers completed. Nearly 100 years later and the building is still under construction with a team of architects and artists working to the vision and design of Gaudi.

Visiting this building was an experience that was at the same time moving and inspirational. Here are 3 ways in which I think this building acts as an icon for the church now and in the future.

1. A church in the world

Gaudi had a deep sense of the church’s context in creation. So often when you go to an English cathedral, entering into a walled close as though going back in time, and then finding your way into its interior, you feel as though you are being disconnected from the world. OK, so there is a reason for this, to point us to the transcendent and precisely to invite us to consider the things of heaven, not of earth. But in this materially obsessed culture we live in I believe the church needs to show how heaven meets earth, how the world and the presence of God are not separate but related.  

Gaudi was deeply conscious of the context of this building in the world. It is midway between the sea and the mountains that bound Barcelona to the south and north. It is midway on the west/east axis of the city too. Its exterior is festooned with sculptures of lizards, snakes, snails, birds, fruit. Gaudi insisted that the main entrance would be from the south, from the seaward direction, from the origins of the life of the city. On the nativity façade, the figures of the holy family above the main door are help up by two columns. Each are themselves footed by a turtle. On the left as you face the door, on the seaward side is a sea turtle with flippers, on the right-hand side, the landward side, is a land turtle with clawed feet. This is a church in creation, with its context written into the design and stonework of the building. Its as though the church merges seamlessly with its context, within the prior context of creation and the local context of the city. It is a church in the world.

• A church joining in with the mission of God

This humbler posture of the Sagrada Familia, as though emerging from its larger context in creation, is reflected in the mission of the building. The greatest witness of the building is not on the inside but the outside. You do not have to even go into this church and participate in its worship, or take the sacrament (don’t forget this is a Catholic Church) to connect with its message. Three enormous and dramatic facades tell the story of the nativity, the passion and the resurrection.

But even inside it feels as though God’s own revelation is prioritised above anything the church might do or say. The place is full of the most glorious, coloured light. It is a feast of natural light which streams through stained glass windows without embellishment. On the east side blue and green glass accentuate the clean colours of the morning sun. On the west side oranges and reds dramatize the richer warmer colours of the evening. There is such a wealth of light because Gaudi designed tree-like pillars that could take greater strain and avoid the need for smaller windows and flying buttresses that cut out so much light. The overall effect of standing in the ‘church’ is that of standing in a forest, with light dappling through the trees, and the fingered branches of the trees making a celestial pattern through which the light dances.

The point is that the church doesn’t have to try so hard to tell out the revelation that God has made in creation and in Christ. It needs to reflect it. At the Sagrada Familia you do not feel like you are in a church waiting for something to happen that speaks of God; a service, a prayer, a sermon. God is already speaking. The ongoing worship of creation is already taking place. Anything the church does joins in with whatever is already taking place.

• A provisional church

Gaudi died tragically in 1926 with only a few elements of his design in place. He knew however that he was never going to see his building to completion and planned for that eventuality. It’s hoped that the building will be finished by 2026, 100 years after his death. As it is, when I visited, a number of the towers (including the tallest) are still to be completed as well as the last of the facades.

The Sagrada Familia has always been under construction. It is also changing. Some of it visible, much of it swathed in scaffolding and plastic sheeting. It is always unbuilt, provisional, unfinished – and being built by a succession of new people drawn from the present, helping shape its future.

Of course, it will be finished in a few years. But in a sense its legacy will be of a building always evolving, never ‘finished’. As soon as the church thinks of itself as something finished it risks becoming a museum piece, always seeking to revive or renew some sacred blueprint. As long as it unfinished it can be humble, provision, open to the world in time and in place, always being shaped by what is to come.

Of course, you might say, the church is not a building. Buildings serve the church in its calling not the other way round. But if there is a church building that speaks to this calling and inspires us to it, spinning us out, rather than dragging us in, then this is it. You can get to Barcelona by train from London in a day. Please go and visit – you won’t regret it!

50 words for ‘church’

I was given a book last Christmas called ’50 Words for Snow’. Riffing on the famous adage about the eskimo language and snow, the book offers 50 examples of words for snow or snow related features from cultures across the globe. We learn for example that the Greenlandic word immiaq means both ‘melted ice or snow’ or ‘beer’. This is because melted snow was the source of drinking water for any travelling hunter. When people began importing beer to Greenland in the 19th century there was really only one word for something you drink – so immiaq became the word for beer.

Language is as fluid and fickle as the cultures in which words emerge and where they travel through. Language is also almost effortlessly creative as new words emerge, fuse, are adapted and reappropriated to keep up with the demands of our experience.

There is good reason scientifically why we might have so many words for snow. For snow is a various, fickle thing too. Each chapter of ’50 words for snow’ is prefaced by an image from the 19th century photographer and mineralogist Wilson Bentley. Bentley perfected a technique for photographing snowflakes. He then spent the next 50 years doing it. And in 1933 his extraordinary photographs were compiled into one book ‘Snow Crystals’. In the book there are 2,453 different images of a single snow crystal. And every single one is unique! Leafing through this book is close to a spiritual exercise in wonder, as your narrow concept of snow is whipped up into a blizzard of complexity, beauty and diversity.

We might learn something though from the snowflake photography of Wilson Bentley to help widen our imagination of what we might mean when we utter the word ‘church’. Because what Bentley’s technical ingenuity and skill was able to reveal to us was something about the nature of snow. For snowflakes are emergent phenomena. What does that mean? It means that their particular form is an unpredictable result of a process of self-organisation from a lower level of complexity to another. Snowflakes form from water vapour when a threshold in the air temperature is reached, at which point the water molecules self-organise into crystalline structures. These crystals have a common basic 6-sided structure. However, the particular conditions and journey of that snowflakes formation and fall to earth shapes (literally) the individual snowflake into a unique pattern.

So what we blandly call ‘snow’ is in fact this unbelievable diverse and complex collection of forms which are the unique consequence of their own particular set of conditions and journeys. History and context are written into each flake. With enough knowledge and experience you can read back from a snowflake’s form and say with some certainty the kind of conditions in which it was formed. Snowflakes ‘carry their history on their backs’.

And much like the word ‘snow’, which at least here in the UK has a kind of dull normative meaning, the word ‘church’ could do with a piece of illuminating work not unlike the photograph of Wilson Bentley. We may experience the diversity, breadth and creative scope of the church – but our language struggles to stretch to accommodate it. Only today a headline in the Times stated that a 1400 year old church was to close with only 2 worshippers left. On Twitter someone commented in response ‘1400 year old building no longer has a church congregation to support it’.

Bur further, the emergent nature of snowflakes give us an insight into the nature of other kinds of reality. Human organisations work on a similar principle, organising and reorganising as external influences bring new ideas and challenges, in tension with the fundamental nature or ‘being’ of who they are and what they stand for. So likewise, church is a fluid and ever moving system, a very complex system, which is the result of the ongoing conversation between its essence and the environment in which it is set. Church’s also ‘carry their history on their backs’ – every, single, diverse and various, expression of them.

And this is so much of the problem with the word ‘church’. We hear the word as if all the context and narrative contained within any expression of Christian community has been stripped out and boiled down into some generic image, probably a pew-stuffed building with a dot-matrix congregation awaiting a venerable cleric. There is no context, no narrative, no complexity, no sense of what this phenomenon was or might become.

Church is not a ‘thing’. It cannot be reduced down to some set of basic practices or principles and then built back up again like a machine. Bentley showed us that snow was not a thing that could be reduced to a single formula or diagram. He revealed it to be wonder of complexity, a myriad marvel of diversity and emergent beauty whose full nature cannot be removed from its particular context. We still use the word snow. But perhaps Bentley’s work means we use it with a more varied, humble and provisional imagination of what we mean when we say it. The same might be said of the word ‘church’. We will continue to use it. But let the word ‘church’ be open to the possibility of its becoming, of it confounding our dull sense of what it has always been and surprising us with new ways of being what it might be now and in the future.

Beyond Measure

I’ve been thinking about the place of measurement in mission and church planting for some time now. This week I gave part of workshop on this at a CMS conversations day and so thought I’d put a summary of my thoughts on here. The background to this is the growth agenda in the church – and within the Church of England the investment of significant amounts of money to support mission and growth through things like the Strategic Development Fund. Within this environment particular measures around making new disciples, attendance at gathered worship etc dominate. These are to the exclusion of many of the other aims that many pioneers value highly eg personal and community transformation, listening to the community, allowing something to emerge over time.

So why are we so focussed on growth? And measuring it in the particular way we do? And what might the alternative be?

I suggest that the focus on growth as a priority is wrapped up in the influence of modernity. Andrew Root in his book The Congregation in a Secular Age argues that the church is doing what institutions in general are doing in the modernist paradigm. To remain stable organisations have to grow – this is the logic of a modern culture which has disconnected itself from any sense of ‘sacred time’ and can only think of time as a series of present moments. The result is of a culture of acceleration. But more than that, a culture where busy-ness and acceleration are a ‘higher good’. So churches need to be busy to be relevant to such a culture and make themselves busy event- and programme-based organisations to appeal to the culture in which they sit.

But there’s a problem – a ‘double bind’ – people are too busy to have the time to support this level of busy-ness. The very culture the church seeks to engage with is undermining the church’s ability to keep up with it, as people find they have less and less time for the sorts of activities the church invites them to participate in.

The point is then, that constant growth, is simply the internal logic of modernity. And its own logic is, as it were, sawing off the branch it sits on.

Another perspective is that of Iain McGilchrist from his book The Master and his Emissary. McGilchrist, a neurologist and philosopher, has argued that the two hemisphere’s of the brain provide two different modes of attention to the world. The right brain is all about the senses, experience, and about holding these experiences in ambiguity and relationship with one another. The left brain is about systematising and codifying this information from the right-brain so that it works for us and provides what we need. The right brain is all about experiences, insight and imagination. The left brain is all about logic and linearity.

His key point though is that we are living in an age when the left brain dominates. More than that an age in which the left-brain’s mode of attention is making the world – as though this is in fact the way the world is. Left-brain thinking also becomes defensive towards information from the right-brain that might disrupt or subvert its logical take on the world. As a result we end up in a kind of hall of mirrors, a systematic view of the world that is a pragmatic reduction of reality, but made out to be all there is.

This seems to me to be exactly the challenge we face in the church – a system caught in a hall of mirrors where it struggles to see beyond particular formularies and structures of church, and a particular means of measuring them. Things become out of kilter because the ‘higher good’ of growth has been hard wired into a system of church which we find hard to break out of. Thus for example, mission is instrumentalised in service to growth in many cases, we can only see much of what we do through this lens.

To plot a way out of the hall of mirrors it might be helpful to reflect on the difference between measurement and evaluation. Measurement has its roots in the division of something into measures, the creation of a unit of measurement that is in relation to a standard. In other words its founded on the principle of something already standardised and predictable. Evaluation however comes the French valuer, to value – it is to find the value out of something. In other words it is upstream from measurement because it is suggesting that we are evaluating something that is in the process of revealing its secrets, unveiling its nature.

Its interesting to note in relation to this that the word ‘invention’, which in modern culture has the connotation of a human agent making something out of nothing, has its roots in the Latin invenire, which means to discover. So to invent something is to discover it, it is the disclosing of something hidden. Pioneer are inventors in this respect, they journey with others and with the Spirit of mission and discover what God is disclosing in the process.

So, measurement will be one tool for the pioneer, in a missional process that is open to the disclosing power of the Holy Spirit. A primary task will be evaluation. But this will be predominantly in a mode of ‘making sense’ of what God is doing. This will involve continual listening, story-telling, collaborative conversation and discerning prayer. Measurement may well be part of this. I wonder for example what measures we might have to evaluate the degree to which we are discerning the Holy Spirit? Surprise is a measure of the Spirit. Crossing cultural boundaries and including the other is also a mark of the Spirit. How might we measure those works of the Spirit?

In general though measurement, as important as this is, needs to be held in constant conversation with evaluation. Measurement must be held lightly. This will keep the church in connection with new experience, new contexts, the new thing that God is doing. If certain measures start to run the show we are pre-empting what God is doing, we are laying our blueprint ecclesiology onto a context. And there will be little to stop us from seeing this context as the place in which the resource for our blueprint can be extracted.

A circular ecology of church

‘I wonder…if compost believes in life after death’ (Naima Penniman)

In a conversation I had recently a colleague was saying to me how the church made significant mistakes in its response to the Covid pandemic. In particular it failed, she said, to talk about death and to give people space for lament and grief.

Whether you agree with that or not, it contains within it the argument that death is something the church could and should be talking about in a prophetic way within a society (perhaps particular a British one) that struggles to do so. I mean, the church does death right? Christianity does death? The symbol of Christianity is a device for killing people. We are brazen in our assertion of death at the heart of our faith, a particular death that leads to a universal offer of life. The trajectory of our faith is life through death, death as a powerful element in the liberation into new life.

Yet I wonder if my colleague is right? We aren’t very good at talking about death in the public sphere. This may well be because we are all too aware of the fact that it’s not a subject that the public want to engage with particularly. Much easier to join with discussions on how to care for and keep people alive, in the context of the pandemic, than suggest an honest conversation about the reality of death and finitude. But, on the other hand, maybe we’re not so comfortable with death ourselves.

Sam Wells argues that there was a point when something changed in the way we talk about the fundamentals of the Christian faith.¹ He argues that in the mid-19^th century people started to stop believing in hell. And as a result the message of the gospel has shifted from a focus on the issue of our ultimate fate beyond death, to the issue of the fulness (or otherwise of our life now). No doubt this is a good thing in many ways. It has done away with the dubious practice of preaching warnings of hell rather than the invitation to life in Christ. It also brings back into play (as Tom Wright has noted) the majority of the gospel story between the creedal statements ‘born of the virgin Mary’ and ‘suffered under Pontius Pilate’. But has this shift also dimmed our confidence in speaking about matters of eternity, matters of not just life but also death?

I say this because death seems an almost taboo subject when it comes to talking about churches themselves. We are all for growth, for church planting, church multiplication – all, as you will have noticed, organic metaphors for church life – and yet rarely do we talk about church death. We should be keenly aware of church death from our history. You only have to read the New Testament, perhaps most forcefully the book of Revelation, to realise that many church communities are not forever. And yet we act as though churches of our own experience are a given, with a right to eternally exist that is our role to protect.

Of course, no one wants to see a church close. And there is every reason to lament and grieve such an event when it happens. Sometimes no doubt churches do close when there was still life and witness in them, a premature death if you like. But in the same way there are churches that are essentially in palliative care for which the most dignified thing we can do is gently, and gracefully allow them to die.

I have a small plot in my garden where I do my best to grow a few veg in each year. One of the joys at the beginning of each season is to open up the compost heap which, through the winter, has been slowly transforming the surplus organic matter from the end of last season into the black, odourless and rich resource to kick start the next. Nothing is wasted in nature. Everything is recycled. Every death has the promise of life hidden within it. New life emerges from deaths transformed. Nature is a circular ecology.

Ecology is suddenly a very popular as a way of talking about the church. The Church of England asserts that its vision is for ‘mixed ecology’ of church as the norm. If so then we should also be talking about a circular ecology of church – because that is how ecology works, a constant cycle of life and death where death is not just the end of life, but critical to its beginning.

There is a tree that grows in the tropical regions between Costa Rica and Columbia which is commonly known as the suicide tree. These slow growing trees reach heights of 100 feet with large, buttressed trunks. Suicide trees produce fruit and seeds only once in their lifetime, and perhaps most remarkably, once they do the tree slowly dies and falls to the forest floor. Why? A number of reasons have been suggested. But one reason is that in its dying the parent tree provides two things essential to the flourishing of its offspring – light and nutrients. A circular ecology.

This is not a binary argument for the closure of ‘old’ established churches up and down the country to make space for new and innovative. Rather I’m asking that we have a more theological view of church death. It is absolutely natural and right that we ‘rage against the dying of the light’². But equally we have to be open to being mid-wives to a good death of churches in many place. Deaths which we will want to grieve and lament, but in which we must look for the seeds of the future.

1. Sam Wells (2019) A Future That’s Bigger than the Past (Intro)
2. Dylan Thomas from the poem ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’.