If we fail to recognise the connection between people and place we will miss something. So as well as taking cues from the space we need to be mindful of how young people interact with the space. In our case it was this mindfulness that led me to ask a young person how he felt when he skated and opened up the whole Flow conversation and subsequent church of flow.
People often ask me how do you know what to say, how do you perceive the way forward missionally in a group or context? The truth is I dont really know, it just happens. It is rooted in developing a missional spirituality and calling the walls to dust in our own lives is definitely an important contribution to developing a missional spirituality. We need to loosen ourselves from the binary dualist way we are conditioned; for example a move beyond a prayer time towards a more all embracing spiritually that takes seriously they call to pray constantly. There is also something about the recognition that newness has to happen elsewhere, so we need to be in the spaces (conceptually and physically) that can give birth to this, and an important step for me in this was a move away from traditional expressions of church. When we call these walls to dust in ourselves, we are far more able (recognising our own blindness) to feel our way forward with the young people we serve and stuff seems to just happen with a lot of mistakes, bumps and scrapes along the way.