The Ghost in the Skatepark

Posted on by
Reply

Originally this was the first of the series exporting contextual mission and opens with a look at HUPs,deep contextual mission, and why proximity isn’t the same as presence……

Between 2004 and 2015 I spent a great deal of my life hanging around a skatepark in the southwest of England. Not doing much, most days. Watching young people drop in, fail, drop in again. Learning the names of tricks I would never land myself. Out of that came the Church of Flow, a Fresh Expression of church and part of the wider StreetSpace work (a part of FYT). I led it for the first eleven years. In 2015 I stepped back, and for four more years it carried on without me, held by other leaders and, crucially, by young people who had grown up inside it and were now capable of carrying something they had helped build. It finally came to a natural end in 2019. At the time it was fun, and a well recognised, a piece ofwork. The community grew, planted others, articles were written, videos were made, groups visited to learn, and the BBC even made a documentary called “does Christianity have a future?”

Those young people are adults now, still connected into the wider church in various ways, still exploring what faith means for them years after the community that first held it stopped meeting. I will come back to why that ending mattered later in this series. For now I want to start with a question the whole fifteen years kept putting to me, one that got sharper again back in June, after reading Francisco Herrera’s piece in the Christian Century on Donald McGavran’s legacy. Herrera, F. (2026) ‘Donald McGavran’s complicated legacy’, Christian Century. Available at: https://www.christiancentury.org/features/donald-mcgavran-s-complicated-legacy (Accessed: 9 July 2026)

McGavran, is the architect of the church growth movement and the man behind the homogeneous unit principle, HUP for short. His observation, drawn from decades in India, was simple and not wrong. People become Christian fastest when the least change of race or clan is involved (McGavran, 1955). His work is around how Churches grow when they let people join alongside others who look, sound and live like them, without asking them to cross a cultural border to do it.

There is something true in that. I have seen it. A skater is far more likely to encounter Jesus among other skaters than in a pew, dressed in someone else’s Sunday best, singing songs written for a different tribe entirely. Alpha, LICC, Youth work, Messy and other approaches whether they admit it or not often thrive most where cultural distance is shortest. Eating a meal together/inviting others to dinner may seem like a ubiquitous cultural norm, but in many communities it’s not.

But where it gets uncomfortable, and where Herrera’s article does something important.He traces how McGavran’s principle, whatever its intentions, gave a theological alibi to segregated churches, letting white congregations recast their exclusion of Black neighbours as faithful evangelism rather than what it actually was (Herrera, 2026). The homogeneous unit stopped being a starting point for mission and became a wall around it. It became a critique and sledgehammer to use against for expressions of church that were emerging that were deeply contextual.**

That is the ghost I want to name. Not McGavran the man, who by most accounts opposed the caste system he encountered in India and pushed for integration in his own denomination. The ghost is HUP thinking dressed up as contextual mission. It is the practice of finding your tribe and staying there, mistaking comfort for calling, and calling it incarnation.

The thing nobody tells you about deep contextual mission, is it looks, from the outside, almost identical to a homogeneous unit. Both involve going to where people already are. Both refuse to make someone cross a cultural border just to meet God. Both build community around shared language, shared life, shared taste, shared wounds.

The difference is not in the starting point. The difference is in the posture.

Vincent Donovan worked this out among the Maasai before I ever picked up any of this thinking myself. In Christianity Rediscovered, the book that first cracked my own thinking open and that I later drew on heavily in my own writing, he refused both extremes on offer to him. He would not impose an already Westernised Christianity onto a people who had their own theology of God already at work among them. But he also refused simply to sit with the Maasai, affirm their existing beliefs, and leave. He went in prepared to be evangelised as much as to evangelise, and let the gospel wrestle honestly with what he found there, without a script (Donovan, 1978).

That is not a homogeneous unit. A homogeneous unit finds the group and rests in it – Proximity.

Deep contextual mission finds the group, moves in, and then refuses to rest – Presence. It stays close enough to belong and awkward enough to still be asking questions nobody in the tribe wants asked, as you see the spirit move. Some of that awkwardness was baked into Flow from the very start. In one of the earliest posts Iwrote about it, I described how the whole thing began with a single question put to a group of skaters. What does it feel like when you skate and ride? And then the riskier follow up: I think that maybe that’s God (Passmore, 2012). I never told them what to think that meant. I just refused to pretend the question wasn’t there. That is the asterisk I have written about elsewhere, belonging with a small mark beside it that says, there is more here than this. Without that asterisk you have simply found a comfortable subculture to plant a franchise in. With it (and I would argue this is the heart of what it means to follow the Missio-dei), you have something genuinely missional, something that can hold a person’s culture with real respect and still refuse to let that culture be the final word on who they are. This is what it really means to join in with the missio-dei, that questions who you are as much as others.

I set out my thinking on this most fully in my first two books, Meet Them Where They’re At(Passmore, 2003) and Here Be Dragons (Passmore, Passmore and Ballantyne, 2013), both of which grew directly out of the detached, on the streets work that became StreetSpace and, eventually, Flow. Meet Them Where They’re At was always meant as half a sentence. The otherhalf, the one that took me another decade to write properly, was and then to refuse to leave them there.

At the skatepark, this looked like years of turning up before it looked like anything you’d recognise as ministry. It looked like never once trying to make the skaters into something they weren’t, while also never pretending that skate culture, with all its glory and all its brutality, was already the kingdom of God fully arrived. It had beauty in it, god was already there, but It had cruelty in it too. Loving the culture did not mean leaving it exactly as I found it, and it certainly did not mean leaving myself at the gate either.

This is the posture I want to spend the rest of this series unpacking. Being alongside and embedded, genuinely, not performatively, while still holding the capacity to challenge. Not to challenge from a safe distance, the way a preacher challenges a congregation he does not actually know. Challenge from inside, the way a friend challenges a friend, because you are close enough that your words land as care rather than as judgement. Indeed elsewhere I have explored the idea of risk (of the relationships formed and time put in) being a key part of the incarnational missiology. Establishing a relational depth that is more akin to friend to friend than to client provider. A different posture but still recognising the issues of power and so held within good safeguarding frameworks.

McGavran’s mistake, or at least the mistake made in his name, was thinking proximity was the finish line. Get people into a church that looks like them, and the job is done. Herrera’s article, for all its complicated feelings toward the man, lands on something I think is right. Real mission cannot stop at discipling a people into comfort. It has to go on to the harder, slower work of forming lives of holiness, justice and faithfulness, together (Herrera, 2026).

That word “together” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. It is the difference between a chaplain to a subculture and a missionary within one. It is the difference between finding your tribe and being changed alongside it, for as long as you are there, and being willing to let it outgrow you when you are not.

In the next post I want to get into what that togetherness actually requires. Because it is not enough to say you’ll challenge a culture from within. You have to earn the right to, and that right is built one honest, reciprocal, faintly terrifying relationship at a time.

**Part of the misconception in this whole area and push back argument this kind of deeper contextual mission which is that all expressions of church should be multi age, diverse family church. Too often this is also a confusion between proximity and presence, rooted in a misconception of the deep discipleship happening in contextual spaces where the depth of connection is calling all the walls to dust, and the faith journey people are going on does unite them with the wider church family, but that’s another post for another day.

If you’ve built or joined something around a shared identity, a hobby, a neighbourhood, a stage of life, how would you tell the difference, honestly, between presence and proximity in it? Between staying because you’re still being changed, and staying because it’s comfortable and the group already agrees with you?

Laying some Ground work for contextual mission

Posted on by
1

Having introduced Re-remembering as the hermeneutic approach I will use to re-imaging contextual mission I want to introcuse some of the groundwork under neath the series that will follow. Alastair McIntosh tells a story of two young men walking home one night across a Hebridean island, each carrying a barrel of whisky. Passing some old fallen stones, they hear fairy music rising out of the ground. One cannot resist it and runs in to dance. The second, before he crosses over, drives a pin into the door behind him, a fixed point in the world he is leaving, something to find his way back to once the dancing is done. He dances. He comes back. The other man never does.

McIntosh takes that story somewhere I had not expected, to the Israeli psychoanalyst Yolanda Gampel, who describes something she calls radioactive identification, the way a violent history, a war, a persecution, seeps invisibly into a person’s inner world across generations, until what happened out there and what is carried in here stop being clear as two different things. My own childhood carries something of that further back than I usually admit, to a grandfather who came home from the trenches carrying what we would now call PTSD, and passed more of it down than he ever meant to.

So I want to offer a re-telling of the fairy story, where instead of sticking the pin to the door it is carried with you into the room handheld against your skin, because the door was never going to be my version of this. A pin in a door only asks something of your memory and your orientation, and you can dance a long way from it before noticing you have wandered too far to see it. The door will not come looking for you. The kind of childhood that makes re-remembering necessary also makes staying with the fairies look like relief rather than temptation.  I left through an actual door at sixteen, and for a while home was my sister’s shed rather than anywhere with a door I could have pinned anything to.

It was ten years on fells and beside becks in Cumbria, learning that the self I was protecting could not be kept safe at a distance, guarded by a marker at the door I would have to relocate later from memory. I learned the pin had to be carried and held against my skin, into whatever weather or dance was actually happening.

Then there is a third re-telling underneath both of those that I think this whole series is reaching for: a pin driven through flesh rather than into a doorframe or held against skin, the nail that fixed Christ in place. Not a marker left behind to be remembered, but a wound that can be touched, a fixed point that calls you and holds you at once.

Within contemporary theology there are a number of creative and sometimes surprising conversations taking place across traditions that once appeared far apart. The place I keep landing, when I ask what actually holds all this together for me, is much older than any of those conversations. It is the language of covenant. Relationship. Partnership with a God who has not stepped back from the world and is not finished with it.*

A covenant is not a contract with a guaranteed outcome, and it is not a leash either. It is a relationship two real parties keep choosing, over time, through failure as much as through faithfulness. Read the Old Testament that way and you get a God who binds himself to an unreliable people rather than simply ruling them, who keeps showing up after they wander, who negotiates, grieves, and stays. That is the God I want as the starting point of this reimagaing, present, active, really there, and signed to the relationship with an iron pin rather than a signature that could later be quietly disowned.

Pete Ward has a phrase for the boldest move inside that partnership  and talks about the first humiliation as the incarnation itself, God taking on flesh and the second humiliation is God handing the mission to the church and letting go, trusting something as flawed and clumsy as an actual congregation with the thing that matters most. You do not hand your life’s work to a stranger. You hand it to a partner, and a partner who could still walk away and simply has not yet is not the same as a partner who has driven something through his own hand to make walking away a different kind of act. That, I think, is the shape of the pin contextual mission keeps circling back to. ,

I like this stuff because it is a theology of an open future. What I had not clocked, until I started writing it, is that it is also a theology of an open past. If God is genuinely still keeping covenant rather than having authored a life and moved on, then the same has to be true, in a smaller and more human register, of a life looked back over. A life is not a closed file. What happened at the skatepark between 2004 and 2019 is not exhausted by what I understood about it while it was happening, any more than the Kingdom of God is exhausted by what is already visible.

That is not a licence to invent. Grace arrives unbidden, within the flow of life as it was actually lived, not conjured to order. I am not free to decide that my childhood means whatever is convenient for the argument I want to make this week. BUT I am entitled to keep asking what else was happening in it, and what else my covenant partner was doing in it that I did not have eyes to see at the time, without either question ever landing on a final, closed answer.

So here is the question I would actually like to sit with you on, rather than hand you an answer to: is there a piece of your own story you have treated as closed, finished, filed away, that might, looked at again with whatever you have learned since, still have something new to say to you?

 

*in the book that I hope will follow up this series Im also drawing in strands of Process and Radical Theology and the space and place of grace unfolding, as we co-create, what it means to be and grow church.

Re-remembering – A new series on Contextual Mission

Posted on by
Reply

Over the past few years I’ve been coming to terms with my own childhood experiences, and this series is where I’ve started exploring what’s actually been sitting underneath my contextual missional work all along. This first post opens with the difference between two ways of looking back, remembering and re-remembering, and I want to invite you into that conversation with me, not just as something that happened to me, but as a question worth turning on your own story too.

Remembering is the easy one. It’s the version I tell my kids at the dinner table: the chaos, the Dennis the Menace childhood, black and red stripes and an unbothered relationship with boundaries. Remembering only asks one question: what happened. It doesn’t ask what else was happening underneath it at the same time.

Re-remembering asks that second question, and it took me most of my adult life to be willing to ask it. Same childhood, looked at again from inside the years I’ve since spent training as a youth and community worker, sitting with trauma, safeguarding, human development, theology. A working life spent watching what happens to people underneath their behaviour. Looked at that way, a chaotic childhood with no boundaries at all stops being just a funny origin story. Growing up around a father whose drinking made the house unpredictable, and a mother who stayed and loved a broken man, carrying, I’ve since re-remembered, not just his brokenness but the trauma that had made him, reaching back further than either of us. None of that excuses what the chaos cost the people inside it. It just means the story was never only mine to tell as a funny one.

What re-remembering actually gave me, was a recognition that  I did not become a youth worker despite what happened in that house. I became one because of what it taught me early and without my consent: how to stay present inside chaos I couldn’t control, how to read what someone’s behaviour is protecting rather than flinching from the behaviour itself. I needed someone to do exactly that for me, and mostly they couldn’t. That’s the theological claim sitting underneath everything I’ll be writing about in this series: every person carries something sacred that their worst behaviour never manages to erase, and mission that doesn’t start from that belief is just management wearing a collar.

This is the hermeneutic the whole series works with: not new theology arriving from nowhere, but thirty/fourty years of mission practice gone back over with older eyes, asking what else was actually happening underneath the story I told about it at the time. I don’t expect to finish asking it. I’d genuinely like to know what happens if you turn the same question on something in your own past, not the version you’d tell at dinner, but the one underneath it. What was it actually teaching you, without your consent, that you’re only now starting to name?

On a break

Posted on by
1

I’m taking a bit of a posting break to think through some of the Theological ideas behind many of my recent posts and do a bit more work on process v radical theology and contextual mission so will be back in September

The path is a gritty teacher

Posted on by
1

The way is calling me to take of my shoes,
not to humble me,
but to keep me honest
about the distance between what i believe
and what I am willing to feel.

So I walk barefoot,
and the dust rises to meet me,
small circles lifting with every step,
hanging a moment in the light
before they fall,
dancing not because they mean to,
but because motion is the only way
dust knows how to pray.

The sole learns before the soul does.
A stone presses its hard truth
into the part of me that touches earth,
and I embrace the grit because some things are only understood from underneath.

I am not walking toward enlightenment.
I am wearing it into the arches of my feet,
the outer path and the inner ache
rubbing against each other
until they become one.

Remember you are dust, someone once said,
and so I seek oneness with this least regarded thing.
Dust whispers catch the light and turn,
we trace a shape across the road
slowly settles together we become part of the path.

The path does not reward the ones who grip it hardest.
so let your hands go loose,
stop carrying the map like a cross
and feel the weight carrying nothing.

There is grace in this dust, this path and in each step,
Let each step rise and settle
Let the path rise and fall
Let the dust dance and rest
until it is a single liturgy and the sole and soul become one.

Speed v depth

Posted on by
Reply

I came across a video of Richard Osmond talking about speed of thought v depth of thought, and how he as a public figure could give opinions on things and be listened to because society rewards sped of thought. However he was honest that he has friends who went into academia who offer better options but won’t get heard because in our sound bite society we don’t hang around for those coming at things with depth of  thought.

The person who speaks first, projects certainty, and fills silence with fluent answers tends to rise in politics, in business, in pulpits, in boardrooms. We read their confidence as competence. We mistake their speed for intelligence. And research seems to show that in doing so, we consistently hand influence to the wrong people.

Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, spent decades demonstrating that the human brain operates in two modes: fast, intuitive thinking that produces instant, emotionally compelling answers; and slow, deliberate thinking that is harder, messier, and far more likely to get things right. I wonder if Keir Starmer has fallen in part because of this. The tragedy of modern life is that we have constructed nearly every significant institution, democratic debate, media commentary, church leadership, corporate decision-making, around the first mode, while systematically excluding people who operate in the second.

The fast thinker performs well. They give TED talks. They win debates. They preach sermons that fill seats. But research consistently shows that their confidence outstrips their accuracy. Medical experts who were completely certain about diagnoses were wrong forty percent of the time. CFO surveys showed that the most confident financial forecasters had predictions that correlated with actual outcomes at almost zero. High confidence, it turns out, is a feeling, not evidence that the story is true.

Deep thinkers meanwhile tend to hesitate, qualify, and acknowledge complexity. These are intellectual virtues, but they read as weakness in a performance culture. So the deep thinker is passed over. The room moves on. The fast thinker’s answer becomes the decision.

In faith communities this dynamic becomes particularly dangerous. Spiritual authority can be weaponised to insulate fast-thinking leaders from the accountability that might correct them. Charisma gets mistaken for anointing. The very traditions that most commend humility, silence, and patient discernment often still promote the rhetorically gifted. 

The answer is not to silence fast thinkers. Speed and intuition have genuine value. The answer is to design better spaces, that slow the room down, and draw out the quieter voice, and that require confident facilitation and well designed process.

Three Ways to Create Spaces Where All Voices Matter

1. Introduce the pause before the vote. Build in period of written reflection before any discussion moves to decision. Asking people to write their response before speaking levels the field dramatically, it gives the deep thinker time to surface their best thinking, and it prevents the fast thinker’s first answer from dictating everyone else’s.

2. Name the dynamic openly. Most groups do not realise they are systematically amplifying certain voices. Facilitators and chairs can change this simply by naming it “we’ve heard from several people quickly; let’s deliberately invite those who haven’t spoken”.  Treat silence not as absence of thought but as thought in progress. Cultures that normalise saying “I need more time on this” produce better outcomes than those that treat hesitation as weakness.

3. Separate generation from evaluation. One of the most effective tools in collaborative decision-making is to split the process: first gather all ideas without comment or critique, then evaluate them. This prevents the fast thinker’s loudly stated position from shutting down contributions before they are even made. In faith settings specifically, this means ensuring that discernment processes are not dominated by whoever speaks most authoritatively, but space is structured so that every voice, including the tentative, the marginal, and the slow reaches the table before the group reaches a conclusion.

The wisest person in the room is often the quietest. The question is whether we have built rooms where they can be heard

You don’t want a bike. You want to belong.

Posted on by
2

There’s a TikTok doing the rounds about the rise and fall of Peloton. It’s framed as a business story. But it’s really about something much older and more interesting than that.

Peloton didn’t sell exercise bikes. At its peak it sold the feeling of belonging to something. The instructors built real relationships through social content. Riders became fans. Fans became a community. And that community started to feel like something people didn’t want to miss. They set their alarms early not to burn calories but to be with people they felt they knew.

When the pandemic hit and the world contracted, Peloton exploded. Not because people needed fitness. Because they were starving to be somewhere that felt like theirs.

When it fell apart, people didn’t grieve the product. They grieved each other.

We’re living through a belonging crisis. Loneliness is now a public health emergency. Streets where people don’t know each other’s names. Online spaces that simulate connection while quietly making it worse. People are more reachable than ever and more alone than ever.

And into that, something is possible. Not a programme. Not a platform. Just genuine human presence. The kind of thing that forms around a shared table or a regular walk or a conversation that goes somewhere real. Belonging that costs something because it’s actual.

The missional question Peloton accidentally poses is this: if a company selling fitness equipment can create that depth of community, what does it say about the rest of us who claim to be in the business of human flourishing?

Because here’s the uncomfortable bit. Most churches are not actually offering belonging. They’re offering belonging with an asterisk. Come as you are, yes. But come to our thing, on our terms, at our times, with our language, towards our agenda. The community is real but it is also a means to an end. And people can feel that. They can feel when they are being welcomed and when they are being recruited.

Peloton at its best didn’t feel like that. The instructors weren’t trying to convert anyone. They were just genuinely present, and people came back because of it. When the company started optimising for growth over connection, the spell broke. Users noticed before the share price did.

The challenge for anyone serious about community beyond their own walls is to ask honestly whether the belonging they offer is truly unconditional. Not belonging that leads somewhere else. Not belonging as a pipeline. Just belonging. Full stop. The kind that doesn’t need you to become something other than what you already are in order to stay.

That is much harder than it sounds. And most of us, if we’re honest, haven’t got there yet.

Circling prayer field 4/4

Posted on by
Reply

I circle myself with the wide patience of the field,
with the soil that holds more stories than I can name.
I place my weight upon the ground that formed me,
my questions into the silence between growing things.

I relinquish the rush to harvest meaning,
letting the unfinished remain unfinished.
I ask the land not what it can give me,
but what it is already saying deep below its furrows.

I listen for the response in the stirring of wind through grass,
in the subtle shift within my own body,
in the quiet sense that something unseen is taking root,
binding me again to the work of becoming.

Circle me, O Presence,
in the slow grammar of growth and decay.
Teach me to sow attention and wait in hope,
until the hidden life speaks and I understand.

The walk that never ends

Posted on by
Reply

Two men walked. One in chains. One until he dropped. Both were already free. That was the thought that hit me when I watched The Long Walk the other day and equally hits you when you hold Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom. One is the autobiography of a man imprisoned for 27 years who refused, categorically, stubbornly, magnificently, to be anything other than free. The other is a dystopian nightmare about 100 teenage boys who walk until 99 of them are dead, by Stephen King. 

Different stories. Same question underneath. What does it mean to keep walking when everything in you wants to stop?

King’s story, recently brought to the screen, is brutal in its simplicity. No weapons. No monsters. Just boys on a road, and a rule: drop below four miles per hour three times and you’re shot. The horror isn’t the killing. It’s the capitulation. You watch boys bargain with themselves. Make deals with exhaustion. Convince themselves that slowing down, just slightly, just this once, is survivable. It never is.

Mandela walked a different kind of road. Robben Island with a brutal lime quarry, a small cell and years of incarceration. But what strikes you, reading his account, is how little time he spends in self-pity. He was building something in his mind that his captors could never reach. A vision of South Africa that didn’t exist yet. He walked towards it, every single day, even when his feet never moved.

The captors in King’s story are the State. The captors in Mandela’s story are the State. But they never let voice inside say this as far as you go.

Most of us aren’t in a prison cell, or on a death march. But are we still walking forward or are we held captive by the same opinions we held at 25, the same fears we inherited or the a definition of what’s possible. Mandela didn’t become Mandela on the day he was released. He became Mandela in the years he spent refusing to let his mind shrink to the size of his cell. The walk was internal long before it was external.

King’s walkers who last the longest aren’t the biggest or the strongest. They’re the ones who’ve detached somehow; who’ve found a rhythm that the road can’t break. A kind of radical, almost frightening acceptance that the walk is the thing. Not the destination. So here’s the point, what truth are you now walking towards because you can’t see around the corner or the road looks too long?

What would you believe, about the world, about people, about yourself, if you were willing to keep moving past the point where it gets uncomfortable? Past the point where your current tribe starts looking at you differently?

Freedom, both these stories insist, is not given, it is not even taken. It is walked into, step by grinding step, by people who decided that the alternative, standing still, was the only thing they truly couldn’t survive.

The walk is long. It always has been, but walk it anyway.

A strange kind of love story

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been working on a new version of the mixed ecology trellis.. it’s made me think about the personality of institutions and how elements of church relate to one another. one of the ways that plays out is the kind of love hate relationship between movements and institutions. Too often they are are opponents in a zero-sum game. It is an illusion the church returns to with remarkable consistency and one that plays out like the worst type of relational breakdown which repeatedly leaves both sides thinner than they imagine.

The truth is more demanding, and perhaps more beautiful, movements and institutions are not rivals. They are bound together in something closer to a romance. Drawn to one another, frustrated by one another, shaped by one another and, when at their best, quietly committed to one another’s flourishing. But inevitably like any enduring relationship, the question is not whether there is tension, but how that tension plays out.

From the beginning, the attraction is obvious. Movements carry life, energy, imagination, risk, the sense that God might be doing something new. Institutions carry depth, memory, stability, the wisdom of what has been tested and held over time. Each sees in the other something it does not possess, maybe the newness is the spark, maybe the need to held by something bigger.

Missiologists call it model and sodal forms of church. We first see the tension play out in Acts: the wild expansion of the early movement gradually held within emerging structures that allow it to remain coherent. We see it in monastic communities, offering renewal to a drifting church and then, over time, becoming part of the very fabric they once disrupted. We see it in the Reformers, in Wesley, in Pentecostalism: again and again, a movement arises that needs, eventually, the very forms it once resisted. These patterns fit what complexity theorists describe as emergence, self-organization, and co-evolution in adaptive systems.

However as the relationship matures like many human relationships what begins as attraction often turns, quite quickly, into irritation. The differences that once felt complementary begin to feel incompatible. Institutions experience movements as destabilising, unpredictable, unwilling to commit. Movements experience institutions as controlling, slow, overly concerned with preservation.

And so the romance cools into critique. Each begins to speak about the other as other rather than to one another. Each becomes more convinced of its own necessity, and less curious about what the other might offer. Organisational narcissism quietly takes root, which at its worst shows up saying we are not just part of the story we are the answer.

That is exactly the kind of closuring down, systems theory warns about. Open systems stay in exchange with their environment; closed systems protect themselves so tightly that they lose adaptive capacity. In complexity terms, closed systems may look more stable for a season, but they become brittle, less able to learn, less able to respond, and eventually less alive.

The sad thing is that what makes the institutional/movement relationship so vivid is also what can make both so dull. It is not a dispute over style but a revelation about the posture at the heart and an exposure of whether the church (movement or institution) will remain open enough to be changed, to give and receive love.

Edwin Friedman’s systems thinking is useful here, he suggests that “chronic anxiety is systemic” and names what happens when an organisation becomes trapped in self-protective reactivity rather than relationship. In that state, every difference becomes a threat, every challenge becomes a crisis, and every conversation becomes an attempt to manage rather than to learn. The result is closure or shutting the other out disguised as wisdom.

Bowen Family Systems Theory gives another key insight: differentiation is not distance; it is the ability to stay connected while remaining a self. That matters here because the mature relationship between institution and movement is not fusion and not severance. It is the capacity to remain in relationship without collapse, manipulation, or mimicry. I think Relational therapy sharpens this further. In relational approaches, healing depends on mutual influence, not one-way expertise. Change happens when both parties are real to one another, when each is willing to be affected, and when the relationship itself becomes the site of transformation. That is a powerful description of what the church needs between institutions and movements: not just cooperation, but mutuality.

This is where the romance metaphor becomes more than decoration. Healthy relationships are marked by the desire that the other thrives, not merely survives. A real desire that is not sentimental; but that it is the opposite of possession, a passionate desire for the other to become more fully itself, even when that costs you control.

Imagine institutions that truly desire movements to flourish, not as experiments to be contained or used to prop up our own failures, but as vital partners in the church’s future. Imagine movements that genuinely desire institutions to flourish, not as relics to be tolerated, but as carriers of memory, sacrament, and continuity.

Real love is powerful and real mutual desire might actually change the bankruptcy of the current system. It keeps the relationship open. It reduces the need for defensiveness. It makes learning possible. It lets each side receive from the other without humiliation.

This is why spaces like Fresh Expressions matter so much. They are not simply innovative church initiatives; they are collision spaces. Brave spaces. Places where inherited structures and emerging communities are brought together not to flatten their differences, but to let them speak. In a complex system, that kind of contact is how new patterns emerge.

We also need a dose of reality here because the modern world makes this unavoidable. Organisations, institutions, and movements are all complex adaptive systems, not machines. They evolve through feedback, interdependence, and adaptation, not through top-down certainty. That means the church cannot survive by shutting itself away in closed loops of self-reference,and movements can’t survive by thinking they are the answer, both must remain porous, relational, and open to what it does not yet know.

So the issue is not whether institution and movement can get along by agreeing on everything. The issue is whether they can remain open enough to one another to be changed by one another and love one another enough to mutually flourish even when that means letting go.