Author Archives: Ned Lunn

Into Culture: Borrowed Portfolios

For the past nine months, amongst other things, I have been holding the traditional Canon Precentor’s portfolio; overseeing the liturgical logistics and the quiet choreography that, together, go into creating the invisible landscape that leads people into worship. As I sat, therefore, in a gathering of Canon Precentors from all the Cathedrals in England and Wales, I felt entirely capable of following the conversation, I could track the discussion, I could contribute and I could even anticipate where some of the pressure points would surface.

It had been a privilege to be invited to join my colleagues and friends. The invitation, in my current situation, however, carried a certain ambiguity, however, because during the introductions the Chair referred to me, kindly and casually, as “our non-Precentor canon.” It landed with a double sensation: recognition and dislocation arriving at the same time. For a moment, if I am honest, it felt faintly like an insult, but I know it wasn’t intended as such. I realised later, reflecting on that repeated sensation throughout the day, that competence and belonging are not always the same thing. I can learn the patterns of a role, I can carry its weight for a season, I can even begin to speak the language with some fluency, but that doesn’t mean the same thing as vocation.

What I felt in that moment was not exclusion. It was something more subtle and, if I am honest, more theologically interesting. I was both inside the conversation and slightly adjacent to it. Trusted to contribute but named as other. Which, as it turns out, is not a bad place from which to begin thinking about a larger question that has been quietly gathering weight over the past year for me at Bradford Cathedral: what happens when your ministry becomes defined by the things you are temporarily holding together? Or, perhaps more precisely, how do you remember what you feel called to when the institution quite genuinely needs you to be several other things first?

To understand the question properly, you should know something more of the current context I’m inhabiting at Bradford Cathedral.

This has been, by any reasonable measure, a stretched season: the inevitable frustrations as organisational cultural and strategic change is further embedded, staffing transitions and, on top of that, UK City of Culture year. All of this is the ordinary, unspectacular fragility that institutions can carry more visibly in some years than in others. Aside for the City of Culture, all of these pressures and strains are not unique to us and many cathedrals will recognise the pattern with perhaps more intense financial challenges than we have.

In the space of change, roles begin to behave differently. Over recent months I have found myself covering various significant aspects of leadership in the Cathedral. In addition to inhabiting much of the operational and liturgical responsibility of the Canon Precentor, I have been supporting parts of the events management space, working closely alongside vergers and operations to keep the daily life of the cathedral moving with some degree of grace, and in the last month or so, covering aspects of the Dean’s portfolio.

None of this has felt inappropriate. Still less has it felt unwelcome. There is something deeply proper about stepping into the gaps that inevitably appear in any living institution. Cathedrals, perhaps more than most ecclesial bodies, run on a kind of invisible elasticity. People stretch. Roles flex. Goodwill does a remarkable amount of heavy lifting. If you have spent any time in cathedral life, you will know this instinctively. Job descriptions are worked from, not to and the reality is a web of relationships and responsive adjustments, but elasticity, if sustained indefinitely, begins to carry its own cost. The real danger, in times like this is vocational amnesia.

There comes a point (and it rarely announces itself loudly) when the necessary act of holding things together begins quietly to reshape how you are perceived, and eventually how you perceive yourself. What began as provisional cover starts to solidify into assumed identity.

I have become increasingly aware that the inherited model of residentiary canon roles presumes a level of boundary clarity that contemporary cathedral life does not always permit. The assumption is that it is possible to have distinct portfolios, relatively stable domains of responsibility and a certain institutional tidiness. I have found that it is much more porous than that and porous leadership is not, in itself, a problem. In fact, there is something ecclesiologically healthy about a clergy team that can flex, respond, and redistribute energy where it is most needed. The Body of Christ is always spoken of organically and not in mechanistic terms; it was never meant to operate as a set of sealed compartments.

But…

Porous must not become formless. Without some intentional attentiveness, flexibility can slide into diffusion and responsiveness can become reactive drift. Individuals who are temperamentally inclined to say “yes”  (and I include myself in that category) can wake up to discover that their ministry has slowly reorganised itself around institutional necessity rather than a vocational centre.

Augustine, who has become a regular companion in my own thinking, is helpfully perceptive at precisely this point. One of his most enduring contributions to Christian moral theology is the idea often summarised as the ordo amoris (the ordering of loves). He developed this idea most clearly in his De Doctrina Christiana and within his vast argument of The City of God. The idea is deceptively simple. The problem with human beings, he suggests, is not usually that we love bad things outright. It is that we love good things in the wrong order, with the wrong weight and/or with an urgency that quietly displaces what should properly come first.

For Augustine, wisdom is not primarily about intensity of devotion but about proportion. We are created to love God above all and to love our neighbour rightly. Created goods are to be received gratefully, but not allowed to occupy the centre of our attention. Disorder creeps in not only through obvious vice but through subtle misalignment of what we prioritise.

It is disarmingly searching when I apply it to what I have been doing over the past nine months. Supporting colleagues, sustaining worship, ensuring the cathedral’s daily life continues to function with integrity; there is nothing here that Augustine would want to rebuke. In fact, much of it is, in itself, unquestionably good and yet the Augustinian question presses gently but persistently: what happens when everything becomes equally urgent, every portfolio feels temporarily necessary and when the immediate institutional need begins to flatten the hierarchy of attention?

Borrowed responsibility, if we are not careful, can begin subtly to dis-order calling. Not dramatically, and not through any obvious failure of faithfulness, but through a slow recalibration of where energy, imagination and identity are most consistently invested.

There is another layer here which intersects with what I have elsewhere called inclusive othering. In that moment in the Precentors’ Conference, I was inhabiting a curious vocational liminality. I was fully engaged in the work but not fully located within the identity being named around the table. I was both participant and, gently, an outsider. The temptation at such moments is usually to resolve the tension too quickly. Either to insist on full belonging or to withdraw into defensive distance. Neither move feels particularly right to me.

Cathedral life, it seems to me, increasingly requires the capacity to remain present within such tensions. Many of us residentiary canons are operating in spaces that are neither entirely ours nor entirely alien. The institutional map no longer corresponds neatly to the portfolio shaped assumption of previous generations. Which is where, again, provisionality becomes not just descriptive but theological.

Bradford, at present, is living through a genuinely provisional season (I have begun to argue that we will always be doing so). Decisions are being made with partial information and structures are being held lightly enough to adapt. There is, if we are honest, a fair amount of holy improvisation taking place, which, for me, is great. Improvisation, however, still requires a key signature.

The Church, at it’s best, has always known how to live provisionally. The danger comes when the provisional quietly hardens into the assumed, or when the temporary becomes so extended that we forget it was ever meant to be temporary at all.

It would be easier, at this point, to resolve the tension neatly. To say either, “this is simply the season we are in; get on with it,” or, “this drift must be corrected immediately; redraw the lines.” The truth, as usual, is less obligingly tidy.

I am deeply grateful for the trust that has been extended to me over this past year. There has been real joy in some of the work. Real satisfaction in helping to steady parts of the cathedral’s life during a time of transition. I have learned things I would not otherwise have learned. Seen the institution from angles that have sharpened rather than diminished my affection for it. None of that is to be forgotten or remain unsaid. Yet, alongside the gratitude there is a slowly growing awareness, not quite resentment but of gravitational drift. There is a quiet sense that the centre of my ministerial energy has shifted, almost imperceptibly over time, and will continue to do so if it is not occasionally re-examined.

The truth is, I can do many things, but competence is not vocation.

I have found myself recently returning to an idea from Jostein Gaarder’s The Christmas Mystery. He suggests ‘there are two ways of becoming wise.’

One way is to travel out into the world and to see as much as possible of God’s creation. The other is to put down roots in one spot and to study everything that happens there in as much detail as you can. The trouble is that it’s impossible to do both at the same time.

Jostein Gaarder, The Christmas Mystery (London: Phoenix, 2004) p.55

I suspect part of what I have been feeling at Bradford is not simply the pressure of workload but the quiet pull between these two wisdoms. Over the past nine months my ministry has necessarily leaned toward the second mode: staying, tending, stabilising, noticing the fine grain of how the cathedral’s daily life actually holds together. There is real grace in that work but, if I am honest, much of the energy that has historically animated my priesthood lives closer to Gaarder’s first path. I am most alive when I’m learning something new, finding new connections between ideas, mining different disciplines of thought for ‘the theory of everything’. Which is another way of saying: I can inhabit the rooted work for a season. I am less convinced I am called to live there indefinitely.

What has been slowly surfacing for me over these months is not the discovery of a new vocation but the reappearance of a very old one. Every few months it seems to return, usually when institutional life has required me to settle more fully into maintenance mode than I instinctively inhabit. At first it comes as a mild restlessness, then as a question I cannot quite silence and eventually, if I am paying attention, as a recognition.

I have been here before.

Over the years I have reached for different images to name that vocational nudge, each one catching part of the truth but never quite exhausting it. Sometimes it has felt like standing on the walls as a watchman, scanning the horizon not because danger is certain but because someone needs to pay attention to what is coming into view. This is the language of the prophet, not in any grand or dramatic sense, but in a quieter, more uncomfortable calling to notice what others might prefer to step around.

At other times the image is less dignified and more like a mountain goat picking its way across harsh and uncertain terrain while, somewhere below, the sheep graze contentedly in the lush fields. It is not that the fields are wrong, still less that the sheep are foolish. It’s only that I seem constitutionally drawn to the challenging environments where the air is thinner and the footing less secure.

Then there remains in my imagination something of the pioneer, repeatedly finding myself drawn toward spaces where something new is trying to emerge and where the path, if there is one, is not yet clearly marked. If that particular image risks sounding like a love affair with novelty, then that needs correcting. My instinct has never been toward the new simply because it is new. Nor am I interested in dismantling what is old in order to feel prophetic. The tension I experience is not between stability and adventure but between different forms of fidelity.

I find myself returning, again and again, to the words of Oscar Romero, who warned that unconditional attachment to what is old can hamper the Church’s progress and restrict its catholicity, while an unbounded spirit of novelty becomes an impudent exploration of what is uncertain and a betrayal of the Church’s rich inheritance. His conclusion was neither reactionary nor reckless: “think with the Church.”

That phrase has always mattered to me. To think with the Church is not to freeze it in time, nor drag it impatiently into whatever appears fashionable. It means to love it enough to help it renew itself from within. Which means that the watchman image is not about abandoning the city but guarding it. The mountain goat is not scorning the lush field below but navigating terrain the flock will one day need to cross. The pioneer, if that word is to be used at all, is not founding a rival settlement but clearing space so that the old settlement can breathe again.

This is why the tension in this season feels more complex than a simple pull towards adventure in opposition to staying put. My passion for the intellectual and strategic exploration has always been inseparable from a desire for institutional reformation and detailed correction.

It is not accidental that many of the Church’s reforming figures that I have been drawn to lived precisely at this intersection. Augustine did not set out to invent a new Christianity; he wrestled to recalibrate inherited faith in a moment of crisis. Martin Luther did not begin by founding a new ecclesial body; he began by calling the existing one to account. In different centuries and under very different pressures, both stood uncomfortably close to the centre while also refusing to ignore what they saw on the horizon. Reform is rarely born from detachment or abandonment but emerges from those who love the institution enough to risk standing at its fault lines.

If these reflections were simply about my personal internal bandwidth or external capacity it would not be worth a whole blog post. What I suspect may resonate beyond my own ministerial balance is the larger ecclesial as well as the nuanced vocational questions that sit underneath my current lived experience.

What if residentiary roles in cathedrals were shaped more explicitly around charism rather than merely function? What if cathedral chapters became more intentional about naming when elasticity is a short-term grace and when it is quietly becoming a long-term distortion?

None of this requires a retreat into rigid role protection. That would be neither realistic nor particularly faithful to the collaborative instincts of cathedral life at its best. It might, however, require a more deliberate attentiveness to the difference between the roles we can faithfully cover and the vocations we are actually called to inhabit over time.

The question before me, at least, is not whether I am called to the edge or to the centre, but how to inhabit the edge in order to serve the centre faithfully.

Bradford, for all its current pressures, has often shown a willingness to experiment in this kind of space. There is room here, I think, for some careful, hopeful reimagining of what residentiary life might look like in a more fluid ecclesial landscape. Perhaps something more consciously aligned with the particular gifts that each canon brings into the shared life of the cathedral.

I find myself returning, as I close, to that conference room moment and the phrase that has lingered longer than I expected: “our non-Precentor canon.” There was no need to resist the description; in a straightforward sense, it was true, but the more interesting question is not whether I am or am not a Precentor. It is whether, in this stretched and searching moment, we might learn again how to recognise the difference between the responsibilities we faithfully hold for a time and the vocations we are actually being called to remember.

Some priesthoods are shaped primarily in the centre of the field. Mine, it seems, keeps being led back to the edges of the hill not to abandon the flock, but to help the whole landscape breathe again.

Into Culture: The Tiber

Last month I wrote about some indirect criticisms I received following my appearance on the BBC Christmas service from Bradford Cathedral (here). Many have since felt the need to jump to my defence and, in doing so, have fallen foul of the very danger I was trying to name in that reflection. In navigating the conversation that followed, and in trying to attend carefully to the kind of posture I am attempting to cultivate in polarised public debate, I have found myself returning to an earlier, more controversial post on the Anglican Communion.

In that post I explored my sense that the Anglican Communion has lost sight of the need for theological rationale to its polity. That idea was entirely overlooked by some readers and critics due to my, admittedly, sloppy framing of the argument, with an under-researched statement about Archbishop Sarah Mullally. Debate became fixated on my perceived position on gender and cultural and political alignment, rather than on the question I was actually trying to raise.

What I still find interesting (and revealing) is not simply that the argument was missed, but why. Why was the conversation so quickly drawn toward identity, representation, and position, and so reluctant to engage the deeper claim? Might it be because there is already a widespread and often unexamined acceptance that the Church of England has, as several critics of my Christmas Day appearance put it, “lost its way”? And might it be that we are not yet ready to reflect on the theological anaemia that makes such loss possible?

These questions were reignited when I recently watched a video in which a General Synod member for the Diocese of London was strongly defending the view, ‘as an elected member of General Synod’ (as though that gives a person moral authority), that abortion is not the killing of a human being. When the interviewer asked the member of Synod whether they believed that Jesus was fully human in the womb and from the moment of conception, the responder faltered. There was a stutter and then silence.

The interviewer went on to outline, theologically, the argument against the Nestorian heresy, and why the moral position of the person defending abortion as not the killing of a human being might be problematic. The silence that followed was painful to watch. What struck me was the confidence with which election to General Synod was invoked, and the apparent belief that the political process to the privileged position in the conciliar life of the Church of England automatically granted them authority to shape its doctrine without any corresponding sense that theology might interrupt, challenge, or even judge what is being said.

It is this same lack of confidence in theological rigour among those discerning and debating the doctrine, faith, and order of the Church of England, and in a lesser way the Anglican Communion, that lay at the heart of the post that became more about the person of Sarah Mullally rather than about the deeper principle I was trying to name: theology is no longer even assumed to be a necessary consideration when appointing, or authorising, those who shape the life of the Church.

I have wanted to read Holly Ordway’s Tolkien’s Faith since listening to her podcast interview back in 2024. At the start of this month, I finally managed to get round to delving into this unique biography of a man whose literary output has inspired me in multiple ways. This biography is not a recitation of the chronology of his life nor a decoding of his fictional Middle Earth and its characters. It is, instead, a search for the spirituality of Tolkien and how that was expressed, yes, in his fictional writing, but more insistently in his letters, relationships and decisions.

Halfway through reading this 480-page book I began to feel a growing unease and dissatisfaction. Tolkien’s own approach, his seriousness, towards his Catholic faith and how that informed his academic work, as well as his literary writing, stirred something in me. It enlivened a deep, perhaps slightly romantic, longing for a form of academic life where theology is not an optional add on but is unapologetically a governing discipline. It was the people and saints that Tolkien lauded and was inspired by, however, that really touched a nerve. Figures such as John Henry Newman, in particular, whose theology and spirituality have long resonated with me. These were not simply historical influences for Tolkien; they were living interlocutors that shaped his moral imagination and intellectual posture. For someone who was once Catholic and later became Anglican, such figures have also given shape to my own ecumenical instincts

The unease began to formulate into a question to myself, “Why do so many Anglicans, ‘cross the Tiber’ and become Roman Catholic?”

Now there are lots of obvious reasons why, particularly in Tolkien’s time, this has been common: Anglican cultural dominance and Catholic social martyrdom that lead to a quiet heroism of dissent, etc. As someone who has travelled against the stream the other way, I did find myself wondering whether I had made a mistake. Which Anglican ancestors do I look too who made a similar choice to move away from the Magisterium and historic centre of gravity of the Church, towards the Anglican polity and (I do believe there is one) theology?

This is why, in part, I followed my reading of Tolkien’s Faith with Paul Avis’ The Identity of Anglicanism. I am thankful, as ever, for Avis’ writing and passion. This book grounded me back in the church I intentionally chose and continue to choose, despite the weakening of its self-confidence or self-understanding.

And yet, reading Avis alongside Ordway, I was still left with some troubling questions: does Anglicanism possesses theological depth and coherence? Does it have the resources to sustain seriousness of doctrine, faith, and order and why does it so often speak of itself as though it does not? Why is confidence in Anglican theology so fragile, so quickly displaced by process, representation, or political legitimacy? And why, when theological questions press most urgently, do we so often reach first for mechanisms of governance rather than habits of thought?

There is one piece of analysis that Avis offers that particularly chimed with me: Anglicans are prone to describe their own tradition as incoherent, provisional, or as a pragmatic result of history. Proponents of this view (some of which I hold in high regard, like Michael Ramsay) often offer this self-deprecation as a mark of humility, or even generosity. But, like Avis, I am not convinced that either is true.

In the preface of my book, Ash Water Oil, I wrote,

The curses spoken over the Bride of Christ have been so constant that it is rare to hear her speak positively of herself. She has become so self-critical that she has begun to talk only of a complete make-over akin to surgical enhancements and distortions.

Ned Lunn, Ash Water Oil: why the Church needs a new form of monasticism (Sheffield: Society of the Holy Trinity, 2020) p. xv)

This habitual tendency of the Church of England, in particular, reveals, to my mind, a lack of confidence in, and a reluctance to speak clearly about, doctrine. Avis reminds his reader that when the debate around the ordination of women was had in the 1980s, ‘the Doctrine Commission was not put to work on any doctrinal implications; the Faith and Order Advisory Group was not consulted about the ecclesiological and ecumenical aspects; and the General Synod did not take the opportunity to set up a commission of all the talents that could have examined the theological, ecumenical and pastoral arguments for and against.’  He then goes on to say that when it came to the debate on women’s ordination to the episcopate, on the other hand, there were theological resources produced, but the process and use of these resources was ‘half hearted’ (Paul Avis, The Identity of Anglicanism (London: T&T Clark, 2007) p.119).

This is why the video of the General Synod member begins to feel less like an isolated moment and more like a symptom of something larger. What was striking was not the position being defended, nor even the faltering silence that followed the interviewer’s Christological question. It was the apparent assumption that election itself conferred to them an authority to speak decisively on matters that are, at their heart, doctrinal. That a political process within the Church could grant moral standing without any corresponding obligation to theological coherence, was the question I was trying to raise in my poorly framed post on the Anglican Communion.

When theology as a guiding discipline is no longer trusted to carry authority, something else must inevitably takes its place. What we now seem to rely on are the mechanisms of governance: election, representation, process, public opinion and mandate. These are not wrong or unimportant; they are necessary to any social order, but they cannot bear the weight we are increasingly asking them to carry. When procedural legitimacy is allowed to stand in for theological judgement, the Church risks confusing how decisions are made with whether those decisions are right or true.

This helps me to understand why my earlier post was so readily reframed as a comment on gender or cultural and political alignment. Those are the categories we have learned to reach for; they are familiar and seemingly more intelligible. Theology, by contrast, is slower, more demanding, and far less easily mobilised. To engage it seriously would require us to admit that not all questions can be resolved by process alone, and that some forms of authority are not conferred but received.

I agree wholeheartedly with the view that a strength in Anglicanism is its provisionality. Where I disagree with those who use it to underplay the need for theology to become a governing discipline of our life together, is in what areas we can claim, with confidence, that provisionality. The disagreement is not, therefore, about whether Anglicanism is provisional, but about what provisionality is for.

They have described it as incomplete, temporary and destined to lose itself in a greater whole. This sounds rather noble and altruistic until we ask whether there are, in fact, any extant expressions of the Church that should not be regarded as provisional but as final and permanent.

Avis, The identity of Anglicanism, p.156

Augustine’s use of the concept of provisionality is different to the one outlined in Avis’ characterisation of his opponents. Provisionality, for Augustine, is not an excuse to fall into a state of impasse or uncertainty. Rather, it is the opposite. It is the reason to keep striving towards greater understanding and into deeper communion with the mystery at the heart of our faith.

I guess we all have a tendency to be selective as to what we want to resolve and what we’re happy to remain open and curious about. I acknowledge that I’m more ready to pursue the complexity and sit with it longer than most when it comes to philosophy and theology (as explored in Pursuing Mystery). At the same time, I also admit that when uncertainty touches more relationally or personally I push for definition and resolution.

What I felt reading Ordway’s description of the Tolkien’s faith and the wider Catholic Church in his day, was a deep and sustained seriousness about the primacy of coherent and historically rooted theology that can hold throughout the ebbs and flows of public opinion and cultural change. The reason, however, that I left the Roman Catholic Church was its tendency to be too inflexible to reason and ressourcement. Anglican theological methodology sings when it ‘tries neither to be centralized nor fragmented, neither authoritarian nor anarchic. It is comprehensive without being relativistic.’ (Avis, The identity of Anglicanism, p.169)

Our current social media-driven world demands quick certainty. Positions and statements are better than ongoing dialogue, relational discernment and deeper appreciation of the beauty of mystery. It is my hunger for a life centred on the experience of communal and ecclesial discovery that inspires me about Tolkien and his influences. What keeps me Anglican, however, is the conviction that its tradition still carries resources we have not finished using, questions we have not finished asking, and a seriousness we have not yet relearned how to inhabit. The question is not simply why some Anglicans leave, but whether those who remain are prepared to do the work that staying now requires.

To remain Anglican at this moment, then, is not an act of complacency but of labour. It requires resisting the temptation either to apologise for the tradition or to abandon it in search of firmer ground elsewhere. It asks something harder: the willingness to stay and to insist, gently but persistently, that theology matters: not as ornament, but as orientation.

That work will not be accomplished by louder processes or more efficient governance. It will require the slow recovery of theological confidence. Not certainty, not rigidity, but the confidence to allow doctrine to interrupt us, to judge us, and, at times, to leave us momentarily silent for the right reasons.

Into Culture: Between Humours

On Christmas morning I stood in the Cathedral and read the Gospel. I did not simply read it aloud; I ‘performed’ it. I moved between voices, I was an angel, I had a small rod puppet shepherd, and then there was the holy family. I was conscious that this story is not an abstract text but a narrative meant to be heard and inhabited.

There was a moment, brief and intentional, where the oddness of the scene was acknowledged: I, a bearded man, had to embody a pregnant Mary. The biblical text stated it, twice. Rather than pretending otherwise, I named it. People laughed, gently. The laughter was not the point; what followed was. The room relaxed. The congregation listened. In that moment something unspoken was shared: a trust that we were listening together, not auditioning one another for ideological purity.

For many in the room and, indeed, some familial viewers at home, my reading was a highlight; a focal point around which the rest of the service hung. I had worked with the BBC to ensure that it was the gateway to the liturgy, the sermon and the music.

Later that morning, on my phone, I encountered a different reception of the same moment.

On social media, particularly on X, the Gospel reading was redescribed in language I barely recognised. It became “prancing”. It became “a man pretending to be pregnant”, as though I were making a pro-trans statement. It became evidence that the Church had “lost its way”. One comment suggested that people like me were “mentally ill” and should not be given a platform on Christmas morning. Others contrasted the service with a more solemn broadcast elsewhere, as though Christianity were a consumer choice between aesthetic packages.

I was not especially hurt by this (maybe a little!). What struck me more was how quickly the moment was absorbed into a wider narrative that had already decided what it was seeing.

Why did this particular reading of the Gospel become a flashpoint? Why was humour interpreted as mockery rather than hospitality? And why did Christmas, once again, become the moment when Christianity was enlisted into cultural battle lines that long pre-dated the service itself?

I want to be clear about my intention here. I want to avoid simply justifying myself, but because intention and reception are now so rarely allowed to meet, I want instead to explore how our culture, shaped by the speed and incentives of social media, has become so individualised that any sense of sociality is quietly eroding. Grace, space, and curiosity are skipped over in favour of statement and performed certainty.

The humour in that Gospel reading was not there to provoke or to undermine reverence. It was there because I know how people listen. I know how easily attention can become trapped by surface strangeness, by the question of why this is happening rather than what is being said. By naming the oddness up front, I was trying to release the congregation from it. The humour functioned as a pastoral gesture; it said: you do not need to fixate on this, you can stay with the story.

In the room, that is what happened.

Online, the gesture was read very differently, either deliberately or through a lack of imaginative practice. What had been an attempt to open space became, in some accounts, evidence of contempt. The humour was not simply missed; it was reinterpreted as threat.

This is where social media culture becomes significant. Humour depends on trust, shared presence, and a willingness to be vulnerable together; it assumes a mutual commitment not to rush to the most hostile possible reading. These are precisely the things platforms are least able to sustain. Online, context collapses, intention is flattened, and the most suspicious interpretation is often the most rewarded.

It would be easy to attribute this simply to bad faith or a lack of imagination. But something more structural is at work. We are increasingly shaped by environments that discourage curiosity and train us to interpret quickly, defensively, and alone.

The reaction to the Bradford service did not occur in a vacuum. It came amid an ongoing argument about Christianity, nationalism, and belonging, sharpened recently by the controversy surrounding a carol service associated with Tommy Robinson.

Some Church of England clergy were quick to condemn that service, framing it as a distortion of Christianity and a capitulation to racism or extremism. In response, others accused the Church of despising the working class, of sneering at Reform voters, of aligning itself with a liberal elite that no longer understands national loyalty or cultural loss.

What struck me was how quickly both sides reached for caricature.

On one side, supporters of Robinson were reduced to racists or reactionaries, their fears dismissed as morally illegitimate. On the other, clergy and institutions were portrayed as decadent, faithless, and contemptuous of “ordinary people”. In both cases, the same move was made: complex human motivations were collapsed into moral shorthand, and with that collapse came the withdrawal of any obligation to listen.

This is where I find myself increasingly unable to stand comfortably with either camp.

I have no interest in baptising nationalism, nor in pretending that Christianity belongs naturally to any ethnic or political identity. But neither am I convinced that the Church serves the Gospel well when it treats national feeling, cultural grief, or anger at social change as inherently suspect or morally inferior.

Both responses are animated by fear. Both seek clarity through exclusion. Both prefer the certainty of an enemy to the risk of uncomfortable understanding. In different ways, both sides step away from a shared responsibility to treat one another as participants in a common moral world, rather than as symbols to be managed or threats to be neutralised.

The tragedy is that each believes it is resisting precisely what it is mirroring.

Social media does not create these dynamics, but it dramatically intensifies them once they are fed into the system. Platforms reward certainty over curiosity. They reward speed over attentiveness. They reward moral performance over moral risk. Across ideological spaces the same pattern appears, though it wears different clothes. Progressive platforms reward denunciation dressed as justice. Conservative ones reward outrage framed as defence.

In both cases, distance is created quickly. People become avatars rather than neighbours. Disagreement becomes pathology. The language used against me, particularly the leap to mental illness, is not unique. It is a familiar tactic across ideological lines: to name something as sick is to absolve oneself of the obligation to listen.

What concerns me most is not the aggression itself, but how readily it is normalised, including by Christians. Well-meaning colleagues on the left, myself included at times, can assume that the right kind of moral clarity excuses a lack of charity. Those on the right, again including myself at times, can assume that defending tradition excuses a lack of self-examination. Social media offers both sides endless opportunities to reinforce their own virtue by refusing complexity.

It would be easy at this point to conclude that X is simply broken, that the loudest voices are marginal, and that nothing of value is being lost. But that conclusion feels too easy, and too costly.

The sadness is not that people were angry. It is that the informal agreements that make shared life possible, the habits of patience, generosity, and interpretive restraint, feel increasingly thin. To dismiss these exchanges as inevitable noise is to accept the erosion of a social contract we rarely name because it once felt so obvious: that we owe one another enough time, care, and attention for meaning to emerge at all. The loss is not merely of civility, but of a common life in which faith, disagreement, and imagination can still meet.

So where does this leave me?

It leaves me deliberately standing in a space that is uncomfortable and increasingly unpopular. A space between easy alliances. A space where difference is acknowledged without being weaponised, and unity is sought without pretending differences do not matter.

This is not neutrality. It is a commitment of a different kind.

It means refusing to dismiss those who reacted angrily to the service as simply bigoted or backward, while also refusing to allow anger and fear to define the boundaries of Christian faith. It means challenging colleagues on the ecclesial left when critique slips into contempt, just as it means challenging nationalist readings of Christianity that collapse the Gospel into cultural defence.

It also means continuing to take risks in worship, not as acts of provocation, but as acts of trust; small, embodied ways of repairing the fragile agreements that allow us to listen to one another at all. Trust that the Gospel can survive misunderstanding. Trust that the Church does not need to harden itself into a single cultural posture in order to remain faithful.

Christmas does not offer us control. It offers us presence.

Social media will continue to demand sides. It will continue to reward outrage and simplify complexity. But the Church still has choices to make: about how it speaks, how it listens, and where it is willing to remain when misunderstanding arises.

The Gospel suggests that God does not resolve conflict by choosing a faction, but by inhabiting the space between. Perhaps the task now is not to shout louder from one trench or another, nor to abandon the public square altogether, but to stay, patiently and vulnerably, in that difficult middle ground where listening is still possible, where shared responsibility has not yet been surrendered, and where incarnation, against all odds, continues to take place.

Into Culture: Long Form Virtue

Fool(ish), the long form improv group I am a part of, returned to York Theatre Royal’s Old Paint Shop season last month. We decided to abandon the last vestiges of the safety net of short-form improv: the quick-fire sketches based on games that reflect the pace and fashions of our social media culture. Instead, we committed to the slower discipline of long-form, trusting that an audience who might never have seen it could stay with us through discovery rather than direction.

The second half was a Lugares, a form we have adapted that begins with us ‘painting’ the outline of several spaces in a location: describing in detail the discreet environments that we will then populate with pairs of characters. We then discover, through inhabiting the spaces and responding to how we interact with the context and the other person, ordinary people whose lives overlap in small, surprising ways. Over 40 minutes, those fragments of stories return and interweave. A shared world emerges almost imperceptibly until, in the final scene, everyone gathers in the one location left untouched, and the web reveals itself. There’s no script, no plot to aim for, only attention, listening, and trust that meaning will arise from relationship.

My first scene that night in York began in silence. I sat, flicking through a mimed Yellow Pages; my fellow performer entered, quietly miming the ritual of making tea. For nearly a minute we said nothing but all were aware that that didn’t mean nothing was happening. When I finally spoke, a comment about a plumbing firm’s bad pun based name, the audience laughed because it came from an established place not explained to them but still known. Something human had appeared amongst us without words.

In that minute of silence, I remembered why I love improvisation. It isn’t the cleverness of invention but the trust of discovery: the way characters and relationships come alive before plot, the way truth surfaces when no one forces it. The scene was mimed, yet it spoke volumes.

Later, I found myself wondering why that silence had felt so alive. Why do we spend so much of our lives trying to explain, defend, and declare what we mean, when sometimes meaning only emerges when we stop speaking?

So much of what passes for communication today feels like the opposite of that moment. Everywhere, we are told to “find our voice,” “make our case,” “speak our truth.” We live in a culture that prizes expression above all else. Virtue has become performative. To care rightly, one must post about it. To belong, one must declare allegiance. Even silence must be justified with a statement explaining why one is silent.

It is not that speaking out is wrong. It’s that the moral imagination of the West has become addicted to visibility. We equate articulation with authenticity. The louder and more urgent the performance of virtue, the more ethically alive we feel. But like short-form improv, this constant performance of moral clarity leaves little space for depth or discovery. The characters we play are two-dimensional, designed to land a point rather than reveal a person.

In my previous Into Culture reflection, A Communion Between Trenches, I described the growing pressure on Church leaders and cathedrals to take stances on every issue. There is an expectation that bishops must act as moral activists and cathedrals as platforms for campaigns. The assumption is that if the Church isn’t making a public noise about justice, it isn’t being faithful. Yet this demand to perform moral virtue can easily become another form of cultural conformity: a noisy mimicry of the world’s way of being right.

Our culture’s obsession with moral expression often disguises a fear of interiority. We prefer the quick applause of alignment to the slow work of conversion. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han notes how modern life has abolished mystery: everything must be made visible, explained, confessed. Silence is treated as guilt; opacity, as deceit. This insistence on total expression, Han warns, leads not to truth but to exhaustion. 

And yet, truth often hides itself in silence. The deepest transformation is rarely able to be declared. Think of the stillness before dawn or in a monastery, where prayer takes the form of breathing; or the long pauses at a deathbed, when words fall away and only presence remains; lovers reconciling not through eloquence but through the quiet willingness to stay in the room. In each case, silence is not absence but gestation (note the same etymological root to gesture) where meaning gathers itself before being spoken.

The mimed improv scene at York wasn’t about withholding speech; it was about trusting the silence enough to let meaning arise. The audience wasn’t excluded; they were invited in. They became co-creators in the quiet. There’s something profoundly ethical in that. It’s a shared act of vulnerability: will we stay with this moment long enough for it to become real?

That same question haunts our public life. Can we, as a society, stay with ambiguity long enough for genuine understanding to emerge? Or are we too impatient, too anxious to demonstrate that we are on the right side of history, theology, or politics?

Ethics in our time has become an exercise in performance anxiety. We are constantly auditioning for moral approval. The Church, too, risks confusing proclamation with performance; mistaking the saying of good news for the showing of costly grace.

Improvisation offers another way. It begins with listening. TJ and Dave, the Chicago duo whose work is shaping our group’s ethos, start every show with the words, “Trust us, this is all made up.” But what they model is not chaos; it’s attentiveness. They prove that the richest meaning comes not from premeditated plots or premises but from a deep faith in relationship. Every gesture, every silence, every hesitation becomes an invitation. The ethic is not “How do I express myself?” but “How do I attend to what’s being offered?”

It’s here that I find both inspiration and tension with theologians like Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells, who have long drawn on improvisation as a model for Christian ethics. For them, the Church’s moral life is like an act of improvisation: we inhabit a story whose script is Scripture, learning the habits of virtue by rehearsing within its narrative. This has been a deeply generative image, restoring ethics to the communal, embodied, and narrative. Yet the language of “script” carries a danger. A script, however sacred, can become a closed text tempting us to control rather than trust, using it as a mechanism of checking each move against a fixed storyline. In theatre, such ‘blocking’ kills the scene; in theology, it can stifle the Spirit.

Scripture, by contrast, is not a theatrical prompt. It is not a set of lines waiting to be recited, nor even a set of stage directions. It is embodied story: the living account of God’s continual improvisation with creation. It is a rule in the older sense of regula: a dynamic pattern that guides growth, not a fence that polices boundaries; not to shut down improvisation, but to form us in the habits of divine responsiveness. To live by Scripture, then, is not to recite it but to breathe with it, to let its rhythm tune the body’s movements. We do not protect the story by freezing it; we keep it alive by trusting that God still speaks through its silences.

To treat Scripture as script risks turning the moral life into a performance of correctness. To receive it as rule is to participate in God’s ongoing offer. In theatrical terms, Scripture is not the script that dictates our next line; it is the offer that invites our faithful “yes, and.” It’s the grace to respond.

Walter Burghardt writes that contemplation is “a long, loving look at what is real” (Walter Burghardt, Graying Gracefully (Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Publishing, 1997) p.19-26). It’s a description that could just as easily define good long-form improv. Both demand patience, attention, and the courage not to fill the air too quickly. The contemplative, like the improviser, learns to wait for meaning to arise rather than manufacture it. Hauerwas is right when he writes,

…performance that is truly improvisatory requires the kind of attentiveness, attunement and alertness traditionally associated with contemplative prayer.

Stanley Hauerwas, Performing the Faith (London: SPCK, 2004) p.81

Thomas Merton echoes this rhythm of attentiveness when he says,

When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality.

Thomas Merton, Thoughts In Solitude (Boston: Shambala Publications, Inc., 1993) p.93

Silence, then, is not the absence of language but the condition in which real communication becomes possible.

Our culture, by contrast, performs a kind of short-form improv with truth. Scenes begin with bold declarations: “This is who I am,” “This is what I believe,” “This is what’s wrong with the world”. The problem is, no one stays long enough to see what might unfold if we simply waited, listened, or allowed another to reshape our offer. Each line must land a punch or signal virtue before the next topic begins. The result is what improvisers call talking heads: scenes where characters explain themselves rather than relate to one another. We mistake articulation for authenticity, commentary for connection.

In the monastery (and in good improv) something different happens. Words become secondary to presence. The silence between gestures is not dead space but the field where relationship takes root. Both the monk and the improviser resist the temptation to control the scene. They trust that truth will appear if they attend to what is given rather than impose what they expect.

This contemplative stance is the exact inversion of our cultural instinct. We are trained to perform certainty; the monk learns to dwell in unknowing. We seek applause for instant clarity; the contemplative waits for grace to surface through obscurity. Where society rewards the loudest voice, the monastic tradition honours the quietest attention.

Such silence is profoundly active. It refuses to reduce encounter to statement; it withholds commentary long enough for communion to happen. It resists the violence of words that restlessly attempt to make reality yield its meaning too soon. In both theatre and theology, the urge to explain everything can kill what is alive. The scene dies the moment we decide what it’s “about.”

To be silent before God, as in good improvisation, is to trust that the next moment will come as gift. It is a prophetic refusal to play the world’s favourite game of short-form virtue: a noisy succession of moral one-liners, choosing instead the long-form patience of divine story.

This long-form attention is not reserved for monks or improvisers. It is the moral imagination our culture has forgotten, and one the Church must remember on behalf of the world. If the monastery is where this discipline is learned, then the cathedral is where it must be shown. What the cell cultivates in solitude, the nave can offer in public: a space large enough for silence to be shared.

Perhaps cathedrals could become cathedrals of attention: places that teach the city how to listen. Their very architecture already whispers this vocation. The high nave slows the body; the echo of footsteps demands patience. Light and stone conduct a kind of liturgical silence even when no service is taking place. Yet we too often rush to fill that space with programming, commentary, and noise, as though stillness were failure.

Cathedrals, like many institutions, face pressure from media, dioceses, and even from within, to prove relevance through activism. Every controversy demands a statement; every crisis, a campaign. But prophetic witness may require a different kind of courage: the courage not to perform.

What if cathedrals offered, instead, a public quiet: a civic silence that neither withdraws nor shouts but reveals another rhythm of being human? In a fragmented world, silence might be the most inclusive language we share. It holds the possibility of what I have called inclusive othering: acknowledging difference without domination, presence without possession. Silence says, “you belong, even when I do not understand you.”

This is not retreat but engagement at depth. In the hush of Evensong, strangers sit side by side, their differences suspended in the resonance of unforced harmony. The choir’s pauses are as important as the notes. The silence after the final “Amen” lingers longer than any sermon. That silence, like the minute on stage at York, is charged with meaning.

If cathedrals are to be schools of virtue for the common good, perhaps they must first re-learn the virtue of quietness: the strength to resist immediacy, the grace to wait for sense to emerge. Their witness could be less about declaring truth and more about showing what patient attention looks like.

Improvisation teaches that meaning is never manufactured; it is revealed through trust. The best scenes are those in which each player honours what has been given rather than chasing what they want to say. Likewise, holiness may be less about articulating right doctrine than about receiving reality as gift.

In a culture of performance, this can sound like weakness. But the Incarnation itself begins in silence; the Word spoken into the stillness of Mary’s consent. The resurrection dawns in the wordless awe of an empty tomb. The Church’s story is born from pauses between sentences.

Perhaps ethics, too, begins in those pauses. Moral life is the art of waiting upon meaning, of allowing the world to speak before we answer. It is improvisation in its truest form: neither chaos nor control, but consent.

In Lugares, the show ends when all the scattered characters finally gather in the one location. Stories intersect; fragments cohere. What began in silence ends in a chorus of presence. Yet even then, the best groups know when to stop speaking. The scene resolves not with a punchline but with a breath.

I imagine the Church in that closing tableau: a community gathered, many voices, yet listening. No spotlight, no closing speech, just the stillness of recognition: something human, something holy, has appeared between us without words.

And so we wait.

And breathe.

And trust that meaning is already here …

waiting to be revealed …

in the silence…

Into Culture: A Communion Between Trenches

When the announcement came that Rt Revd Sarah Mullally is to become the next Archbishop of Canterbury, I must admit, I felt deflated. Not because of her gender (I’ve long supported women in episcopal ministry) but because of her theological formation: a diploma. That was it. In a moment when the Church of England so desperately needs a leader who can think with depth, speak with nuance, and defend the faith in the public square, we appointed another administrator. Bring back Rowan Williams, I muttered, half in jest, half in longing.

My wife’s response? Disappointment. The reason for that? Her answer surprised me. She said.

Because she’s a woman.

My wife is ordained so that was obviously not out of opposition to women’s ministry! She explained that what she meant was what it (sadly) meant for the Anglican Communion. “It will lead to further division,” she said quietly.

Her instinct was relational; mine was theological. These two instincts named, together, the twin wounds of the Anglican Church: a loss of theological depth and a loss of relational trust. One names the mind, the other the heart; both reveal a body stretched thin, a Church caught between trenches, where administration has replaced contemplation and isolationism has replaced communion.

Joshua Penduck, in his critique of the Living in Love and Faith process, describes how the episcopate’s calling to hold the Church in unity was compromised by the demand to “show leadership.” Bishops, he argues, were drawn into activism or taking sides. Bishops, who should stand as a sign of unity across difference, were pressured into becoming campaigners within it, choosing visibility over presence, statement over symbol. It wasn’t personal failure so much as a symptom of our culture’s logic: we must be seen to stand somewhere.

And I recognise that same pull within cathedral life. We, too, live under our culture’s pressure to pick a side, to speak out, to declare our alignment. That’s just the air we breathe: a world that equates silence with complicity and visibility with virtue. We want to be known as good, relevant, righteous. And so, we raise our flags above the trenches, often before we have knelt to pray.

But cathedrals, like bishops, are called to something harder. We are meant to inhabit the space between the trenches: that costly, grace-filled No Man’s Land where relationship is risked and reconciliation remains possible. Yet our culture pulls us elsewhere. It rewards clarity over compassion, performance over presence.

This is not an accusation, but a confession. The temptation to posture rather than to pray, to curate identity rather than to cultivate encounter, touches us all. It is the logic of an anxious age that has forgotten how to wait, how to listen, how to hold.

So when the announcement of a new Archbishop came, our disappointment was not about Sarah, who has been called to take on an unenviable role, but about the Church’s captivity to trench-thinking. One of us lamented the loss of theological rigour, the other the loss of communion; but both named the same drift. We will honour her election, support her ministry, and pray for grace in the immense task she now shoulders. Our reactions were not rejections of her, not at all, but lament for a Church that has become adept at speaking from its dugouts and reluctant to step into the space between.

This is not a new situation for the Anglican Communion. We are not strangers to fracture and threats of fracture. This does feel, however, like a new threshold. The appointment of Sarah Mullally as Archbishop of Canterbury has accelerated what was already a painful unraveling.

The Nairobi–Cairo Proposals, published last Advent, were intended as a last attempt to hold the Communion together. They were meant to be a vision of differentiation-in-communion, where churches/provinces might disagree without disowning one another. It was a document written in the spirit of hope, but, more significantly, born from exhaustion.

Then, this October, GAFCON issued a statement declaring that Canterbury had “forfeited moral authority.” They would, they said, “walk apart for the sake of truth.” That phrase ‘for the sake of truth’ has an ancient ring to it. It is the same reasoning that tore Christ’s seamless robe into denominational rags. It sounds noble, but it so easily sanctifies separation rather than purifies community.

And yet, GAFCON’s protest reveals something genuine: a fear that the Church has lost confidence in her own faith. Their anger exposes an ecclesial malaise and the sense that what once bound us theologically has been replaced by managerial diplomacy. Beneath all of it though, lies a deeper disagreement: what kind of unity the Church is called to embody.

GAFCON’s theology is, in its own way, apophatic. It defines faithfulness by what it cannot affirm. Truth is drawn in negatives: not this, not that. Its lineage runs more through Cyprian than Augustine, through a vision of the Church as pure community, a moral body kept untainted by error. There is something admirable here: holiness matters; integrity matters; doctrine matters. Unity without truth is sentimentality.

But Cyprian’s purity is brittle. It risks equating separation with sanctity, mistaking clarity for charity. The Church becomes a fortress rather than a body. It can be a system built to exclude.

Augustine, by contrast, begins from grace. He saw the Church as a corpus permixtum, a mixed body of saints and sinners, wheat and tares, gathered and held by mercy. Unity, for him, was not an achievement but a gift: something received through patience and penance, not control. It is a humility that trusts grace to work through imperfection.

The weakness of Augustine’s approach, of course, is complacency and the danger that inclusion slides into indifference. Yet his vision recognises what Cyprian’s cannot: that the holiness of the Church is not ours to secure. It is Christ’s, and we live within it by grace.

Between Cyprian’s zeal for holiness and Augustine’s patience of grace, Anglicanism has always tried to live; sometimes awkwardly, sometimes beautifully. The tragedy of our current situation is that neither side seems capable of trusting the other’s virtue. Holiness fears that grace will excuse sin; grace fears that holiness will harden into judgment. That Anglican tension might still have been creative, redemptive even, were it not for something else: the Church of England’s turn towards management.

As Penduck points out, the Living in Love and Faith process became a case study in procedural religion, an attempt to heal deep theological wounds through structure and strategy. The bishops became facilitators rather than confessors, executives rather than symbols of unity.

It is a symptom of a wider disease as the Church increasingly feels structured for efficiency, not for holiness; for compliance, not communion. Theologians are replaced by facilitators, bishops by managers, discernment by data. When unity is treated as an administrative problem, communion becomes a brand, and faith a policy. We have inherited the structures of an ecclesial tradition without the spiritual imagination to inhabit them.

This is where GAFCON’s anger finds resonance, even among those who disagree with the cause. Beneath the rhetoric lies a yearning for a Church confident in its own faith: one animated by conviction rather than mere institutional survival. And yet, their solution of walking away betrays the same managerial impulse. Division is simply the inverse of bureaucracy: both seek to avoid relationship. One by enforcing procedure, the other by severing ties. Both are evasions of communion.

And this brings us to the uncomfortable truth: the very Instruments designed to hold the Anglican Communion together (the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Primates’ Meeting, and the Anglican Consultative Council) are largely bureaucratic scaffolding. They were built to administer an empire, not nurture a Church. Their purpose, inherited from colonial frameworks, was procedural coherence and maintaining correspondence between far-flung dioceses. But communion is not correspondence. It is prayer, shared faith, sacramental recognition, mutual dependence.

The Instruments rarely engage these theological depths. They call meetings, draft communiqués, and issue statements in the language of management, “good process,” “stakeholder engagement,” and “representative diversity.” Meanwhile, the real theological imagination of Anglicanism withers.

If the Communion is to survive, or more than that, to be reborn, its Instruments must become sites of theological formation rather than administrative coordination.

So what might that look like?

First, Canterbury must recover/adopt a kenotic vocation: to convene rather than control. The Archbishop’s authority should be theological, not jurisdictional. It should be grounded in wisdom, humility, and depth of thought. Imagine the Archbishop of Canterbury as an abbacy/exemplar of learning and prayer; a person who calls the whole Communion to wrestle with God, not with governance.

Second, the Lambeth Conference should be reformed into a genuine council of discernment: bishops gathered for theological study and prayer, not parliamentary resolution. The Church does not need more “calls”; it needs conversion.

Third, the Primates’ Meeting must rediscover collegiality: a college of shepherds, not executives. The goal is not coordination but care and mutual accountability, rooted in intercession for and with each other.

Fourth, newly focused Anglican Communion Synod (a renewed successor to the ACC) could become a global assembly where laity, clergy, and bishops discern the Spirit’s movement in mission and theology together: serving the Communion through theological discernment, not bureaucratic management. Its work would be Eucharistic in shape: receiving Christ together, listening for the Spirit’s voice together, and discerning how to live that faith together, not drafting policies apart from prayer.

These are not merely administrative reforms. They are acts of repentance. They signal that our identity as Anglicans is not procedural but sacramental; bound together by Word and Table, not custom and compromise.

That night, after the announcement, Philippa and I sat in quiet agreement. We had seen the same wound from different sides, one of us naming the loss of theology, the other the loss of relationship, but it was the same tear in the same fabric.

The Church, like its bishops and cathedrals, has become too comfortable in its trenches: confident in its statements, clear in its alignments, but afraid of the exposed, uncertain ground between. Yet that No Man’s Land, that space between the trenches of certainty, is not neutral, nor safe. It is where our certainties come undone and our defences are tested.

I’m not naïve to ignore or minimise the very real truth that each side bears wounds that run deep. Many have been hurt by exclusion and contempt; others by accusation and dismissal. Each can point to the pain they’ve suffered, and each, if we’re honest, has caused pain in return. That is what makes No Man’s Land so costly: it reveals that none of us are innocent.

Augustine called the Church a corpus permixtum. But so are we, individually. Each of us carries both faith and fear, both love and resentment. The divisions of the Communion reveal our own divided hearts. To step into No Man’s Land is not to abandon conviction, but to let grace reshape it.; to face the truth that the enemy we fear across the trench may look uncomfortably like ourselves.

Such a step does not mean silencing truth or tolerating harm. It means speaking truth from within relationship rather than against it. It is not fairness that calls us forward, but faith: the hope that God meets us not in our victory, but in our vulnerability. If Anglicanism still has a vocation (and I hold out the hope that it does) it must be this: to walk into No Man’s Land carrying neither flag nor weapon, but bread and wine as signs of a truth that feeds rather than wounds.

The Eucharist is not an equal table but a reconciling one: it gathers both sinners and the sinned-against, not to erase difference but to make forgiveness imaginable. Because it is not, finally, a question of who leads the Communion, but whether there will be a Communion to lead and whether we still believe that grace is stronger than grievance, and that Christ still meets us in the space between the trenches.

POSTSCRIPT

Since publishing this piece, I have been helpfully corrected that Archbishop-designate Sarah Mullally has undertaken further theological formation beyond the diploma mentioned above. I am grateful for the clarification, and apologise for the imprecision.

I also have no insight into how she herself understands the relationship between theological depth and administrative skill in episcopal leadership. If she brings the fruit of her study to bear visibly and courageously in the Church’s discernment, I will be overjoyed and thankful.

My concern in the post is not with her personally, nor with her gender. If a man were appointed with the same public emphasis on administrative achievement rather than theological depth, my critique would be identical. Indeed, the fact that some have assumed a hidden bias against women’s leadership only reveals how fragile trust has become: how quickly we presume ill motives, and how easily fractures deepen.

My argument is aimed at a wider cultural drift: the Church’s increasingly consistent elevation of managerial competence over theological wisdom. That concern stands, and it stands for the sake of the Church’s health, mission, and unity.

My commitment to supporting and praying for Archbishop Mullally remains unchanged. I hope and pray that her ministry will help renew the Church’s confidence in the depth and richness of its own faith.

Into Culture: Flags in No Man’s Land

Drive through many English towns recently and you will see a rise in popularity of flags. St George’s crosses painted across roundabouts. Union Jacks tied to lampposts. Flags in windows, on cars, in gardens or draped over flyovers on the motorways. This acceleration of flag-flying in particular towns and regions has been linked to grassroots campaigns like Raise the Colours, which frame the flag as a symbol of neglected communities reasserting pride. Others note that it clusters in areas hit hardest by economic decline or debates about immigration. Surveys even suggest that while many view the St George’s cross as unifying, for others it is bound up with hostility and exclusion. Flags, in other words, are never neutral. They are contested signs: comfort for some, confrontation for others.

For some, these are signs of pride. For others, they feel like warnings. Whatever they mean, their very proliferation speaks of anxiety, a people uncertain of their place, grasping for symbols to say, we are still here.

This is not a new story. I have written before about the fragility of Englishness and how it shows itself most clearly in absence, in the fear of being overlooked. I have also noted how English identity is rarely named positively in intercultural conversations. Add to this the deep changes of the last forty years: deindustrialisation, globalisation, austerity. We begin to see why flags are multiplying. They are signs of a wound, the feeling of being forgotten, left behind, excluded from the story of your own land.

This wound has been seized upon by populist politics. In Britain, in Europe, in the United States, whole movements have been built on the claim that ordinary people no longer belong, that the system is rigged, that elites welcome others at your expense. Flags become rallying points not just for belonging but for blame.

And yet, this is not only one group’s story. Migrants and asylum seekers know a parallel pain. They arrive in places that promise welcome only to be met with suspicion, rejection, or conditional acceptance. Their flags are invisible. Their belonging is fragile.

The result is a crisis of belonging that touches everyone. A gnawing sense that no one belongs, that home itself is slipping away. Which raises the question: is there a place where both can belong without erasing their differences? Or are we doomed to live in parallel, separated by suspicion?

“No man’s land” once named the blasted ground between enemy lines, uninhabitable, unclaimed, deadly. It has become for me a fertile metaphor for intercultural practice. It describes the in-between, not one side or the other, not settled, not safe.

Anthropologist Victor Turner spoke of ‘liminality’, the threshold stage in a rite of passage where one is no longer what they were but not yet what they will be. In that space, the old identity has been stripped away but the new one is not yet given. Liminality is disorienting but necessary. Transformation cannot happen without it.

Hakim Bey’s ‘Temporary Autonomous Zones’ describe moments when established orders loosen. For a time, people can imagine and act differently, outside the control of dominant powers. They rarely last, but their fleeting nature is part of the gift. They show that another world is possible.

Homi Bhabha’s ‘third space’ describes the unpredictable zone where cultures collide. It is neither one nor the other, but something new, created in the negotiation of difference. Identity, in Bhabha’s view, is always hybrid, always contested.

Each of these thinkers invites us to reimagine no man’s land not as waste ground but as generative. It is unsettling and risky, yet full of possibility.

The Church has long known this ground. Augustine fought the Donatists’ dream of purity with his vision of the corpus permixtum, a mixed body of saints and sinners, insiders and outsiders, wheat and tares. The Church on earth is never pure, never settled, always provisional. Belonging is always contested, always mixed, always awaiting God’s final gift.

Paul Ricoeur adds a further insight. We only know ourselves in relation to others. Identity is never sealed off. It is always shaped in recognition of the one who stands different from me. Belonging is not possession but encounter. Not fortress, but relation.

So how do we inhabit no man’s land? My answer is improvisation. Improvisation is not chaos. It is the practiced art of responsiveness. It listens, adapts, takes risks, co-creates meaning in real time. It allows us to act boldly yet provisionally, to commit without total control. Improvisation is how we live with difference without demanding its erasure.

And this is what I call inclusive othering. We do not deny difference. Nor do we let it harden into hostility. We acknowledge it, honour it, and still choose unity. It is not assimilation, not purity, not separation. It is life together in tension, trusting that something new can emerge in the contested ground of no man’s land.

Britain itself, I think, is living in a cultural no man’s land.

For white working-class communities, the disorientation is real. Industries gone. Neighbourhood rituals fading. Economic insecurity biting. The feeling that the nation’s story is moving on without them. In former mill towns, pubs stand empty and terraces crumble. In coastal villages, young people leave because there is no work to stay for. Hence the flags: “we are still here.” They are not only signs of pride but pleas for recognition.

In cities like Bradford, another flag has appeared with growing frequency: the Palestinian flag. Draped from windows, waved at marches, painted onto walls, it signals solidarity with a people perceived as oppressed and stateless. For some, it is a banner of justice and compassion. For others, it is unsettling, even threatening. Like the English flag, it carries multiple meanings, and like the English flag, its presence is contested. Together, they show how the struggle for recognition is being fought out through symbols. Flags are becoming the visible language of belonging and exclusion.

For migrants and asylum seekers, the challenge is different but parallel. Hopes for safety and belonging meet suspicion and hostility. Hotels are filled with people whose cases drag on. Families are scattered by bureaucracy. Headlines reduce them to numbers. They too live in no man’s land, neither fully welcomed nor fully at home.

Here zero-sum logic takes hold. A zero-sum game is one where one side’s gain is another’s loss. If migrants are welcomed, are working-class communities displaced? If the English flag is flown, are newcomers excluded? If the Palestinian flag is raised, does it signal recognition or division? Populism thrives on this frame, belonging as scarce, a prize to be fought over.

We can see this logic in national debates. Housing shortages are blamed on migrants rather than decades of underinvestment. Hospitals are said to be strained by asylum seekers rather than chronic underfunding. “Taking back control” becomes less about empowerment and more about exclusion. In each case, the flag is enlisted as a marker of “us” against “them.”

But belonging is not zero-sum. It is not a limited commodity. It is relational, dynamic, capable of expanding. The problem is not that one group belongs and another does not, but that both feel they do not. As I wrote in Into Culture: Patronage, whose stories are told and supported matters. When whole communities feel invisible, belonging collapses. Populism grows in the gaps.

Where, then, can we model another way? Cathedrals have a unique vocation here.

Cathedrals are, by nature, no man’s lands. They sit at the crossroads of church, city, and nation. They belong to everyone and to no one. They are symbols of continuity, yet constantly pressed into new uses. They can be places where identities meet, unsettle, and reshape one another.

But there are blockages. Many cathedrals are perceived as elitist, grand buildings for “other people,” not for ordinary lives. Financial pressures push them to prioritise survival, hiring space, hosting events, protecting heritage, rather than risk inhabiting the raw edges of belonging. Governance often rewards caution rather than imagination. The tie to establishment power can blunt their ability to stand in contested ground.

Yet cathedrals, if they dare, could be laboratories of belonging. Spaces where multiple stories are heard without being collapsed into one. Places where worship is voiced in many accents, where art unsettles easy assumptions, where the overlooked find recognition. Not pure. Not settled. Not easy. But real.

For cathedrals to be a form of no man’s land is to risk the discomfort of contested space. It is to host conversation across suspicion, to embody recognition across difference. It is to resist populism’s fortress logic by opening space for belonging that is shared, provisional, larger than expected.

And so, the flags. The English flag, the Palestinian flag. They can be read as fortresses, lines drawn, territory claimed, belonging defended. Or they can be read as cries for recognition. “See us, do not forget us, we matter too.”

The challenge of our age is whether we will remain trapped in zero-sum suspicion, doomed to live in parallel, mistrusting neighbours across the street, or whether we will dare to step into no man’s land.

No man’s land is unsettling. It is unfinished. It strips away easy security. But it is also gift. It is the place where the deep work of belonging can be done. Where difference need not mean division. Where recognition can grow into relationship.

The health of our societies depends on this. Populism feeds on despair, on the sense that there is no shared home left to claim. If we cannot model a different kind of belonging, we leave the field open to fortress politics. Cathedrals, churches, communities; we all face the same choice.

So the question stands. Can we stop treating belonging as scarce? Can we risk inhabiting no man’s land, even when it hurts, in the hope that there we might find not the end of belonging but its renewal?

Into Culture: The Loom

For the past four months, a loom has stood at the west end of Bradford Cathedral as part of a National Lottery Heritage Fund project we are running. We have invited members of the public to choose a thread of wool and weave it into a growing community tapestry. Children and elders, visitors and locals, those who come by chance and those who come with the single intent to weave; all have added their own strands.

It is strikingly simple, even meditative. The warp holds steady, the weft brings colour and movement, and each addition strengthens the whole. And yet, not everything has gone smoothly. Some people have misunderstood the instructions. Others have pulled too hard or left their threads loose. Quietly, those of us guiding the project have had to adjust, repair, and improvise to make sure the final piece still holds together. But none of that undoes the gift of participation. The tapestry only exists because so many hands risked adding their own imperfect thread.

And perhaps that is fitting, because Bradford itself is, in its very identity, a woven city. Its history is textile. Its present is intercultural. Its future is being worked out in the tension between tradition and innovation, roots and improvisation, scars and creativity. In recent weeks, as I have been part of conversations across the city, in civic forums, in the Cathedral, in cultural planning meetings, I have heard the same challenge surface again and again: how do we hold the threads together? I’ve found myself asking myself could this social weaving be the distinctive vocation of Cathedrals in the 21st century?

When I think back over the conversations I have been part of this month, I hear echoes of the loom in each of them. Different threads, different textures, yet all of them asking in their own way how we might weave this city’s life into something more than fragments.

With civic partners, the longing has been for more meaningful conversation than our public life currently allows. Too often dialogue becomes either polarised or polite, either combative or choreographed. But hospitality, one of our Cathedral values, is not about curating polite coexistence. It is about creating the conditions where people feel able to risk honesty, to sit with tension, and to trust that they will be held (you can read my reflections on this by reading last month’s post, ‘Into Cultire: Platform to Presence’) This, I believe, is part of what a Cathedral can uniquely offer: a hospitable loom, where threads that might otherwise fray or remain apart are drawn into a fabric that is stronger than the sum of its parts.

Within the Cathedral itself, my colleagues and I have been asking how our own vision document can be more than a paper statement. That too is a question of the warp and the weft. Rootedness, another of our values, reminds us that this community stands in more than a millennium of Christian witness and daily prayer. These are the warp threads, stretched tight across time, holding the structure. But without the weft, the innovative, intercultural, hospitable life that crosses them, the warp alone cannot make a fabric. To make our vision live we must keep weaving: to take the ancient story seriously enough to risk letting it meet the colours and textures of the present.

A third thread has come from our work on a Visitor Engagement Plan. We have been supported by consultants whose experience with other cathedrals is invaluable, yet the process has sharpened something for me: Bradford is not just any cathedral city. To describe it simply as intercultural misses what makes it distinctive. Bradford’s culture is forged in mills and markets, in migration and labour, in scars and solidarities. This is not a polished pluralism but a lived reality, raw and hopeful, shaped by both welcome and struggle. Any plan for engaging visitors here must reflect that uniqueness, not a generic template, but an experience that helps people encounter the texture of Bradford itself. That is what our value of interculturality really asks of us: not just to reflect diversity, but to interpret and host the distinctive, sometimes difficult, gift that this city carries.

And then there are the conversations about Bradford’s cultural future after 2025. When the spotlight of UK City of Culture fades, what will remain? Here the Cathedral’s value of innovation comes to the fore. Innovation is not about novelty for its own sake, but about courage: the willingness to improvise, to create new forms of beauty and dialogue that might not yet exist. Bradford has always produced outsider voices with global resonance, artists, writers, and leaders who have turned the tensions of this city into creativity. If we as a Cathedral can nurture that spirit, not showcasing diversity as finished performance but weaving it into new, surprising patterns, then perhaps we can help ensure that 2025 is not an endpoint but a beginning.

All these conversations, with civic partners, Cathedral colleagues, consultants, and cultural planners, are different threads. None of them by themselves make a fabric. But if the loom at the west end of the Cathedral has taught me anything, it is this: fabric only emerges when the threads are held in tension and patiently worked together, line by line.

On our loom there is no shuttle racing back and forth. The weaving happens slowly, by hand. That is significant; the tapestry only grows because people come, take hold of the yarn, and risk adding their part. Convening works the same way. A Cathedral cannot force unity or engineer neat patterns; what it can do is hold the frame steady, invite people forward, and create the conditions in which something larger than any one thread might take shape.

So what does this mean for the Cathedral’s future in Bradford? It means taking our vocation as loom seriously. It means curating conversations that do not stop at coexistence but risk honesty, vulnerability, and the possibility of change. It means rooting our life ever more deeply in prayer and worship so that the warp is strong enough to bear the tension. It means designing visitor experiences that reflect Bradford’s unique fabric, its scars as well as its solidarities, its particular story rather than a generic template. And it means using City of Culture 2025 as a beginning, not an endpoint, modelling intercultural creativity that continues long after the spotlight has moved on.

None of this will be straightforward. The tapestry will never be perfectly even; threads will be pulled too tightly or too loosely, and sometimes adjustments will be needed in the quiet. But perhaps that is the point. The work of weaving is never finished.

When the community tapestry on our physical loom is complete, it will hang as a piece of art. But its deeper value will not be the finished product; it will be the months of weaving, people meeting, hands moving, threads layered, mistakes amended, a fabric slowly emerging that no one could have made alone.

Too often our cathedrals are imagined in only two ways: either as monuments of the past, treasured for their heritage but disconnected from the present, or as venues for the present, hired out for franchised concerts and touring installations in order to keep the lights on. These roles may be necessary for survival, but they are not enough for vocation. If all we offer are relics or rentals, then we have missed the point.

What Bradford is beginning to show is that a Cathedral can be something else: not a museum, not a venue, but a loom. A place that holds tensions steady, invites difference into encounter, and patiently weaves new patterns of civic life. This is what our cities are crying out for; this is what our fractured societies desperately need.

The future of cathedrals will not be decided by balance sheets or by ticket sales, but by whether we dare to claim this vocation. We can continue as monuments and venues, but these will not last as long if we don’t primarily become looms for the future, weaving communities together, risk by risk, until something strong enough to hold begins to emerge.

Into Culture: From Platform to Presence

At the beginning of this month I stood on the same stage in the Cathedral for two different events both framed as a platform for interfaith encounter: one I was hosting the first public ‘Re:Imagine’ events looking at faith conversations with Baroness Sayeeda Warsi and Bishop Toby Howarth, the other, I was compering the annual ‘Sacred Music’ event for Bradford Literature Festival. Both events were billed as moments of dialogue, creativity, and shared spiritual insight: civic faith at its best.

Both events were curated with care. Both featured thoughtful, experienced voices. And yet, as the applause faded and the doors closed behind the final guests of that weekend, I felt a distinct and unsettling ache but not from hostility or controversy, but of absence: the absence of risk, the absence of surprise, the absence of the kind of uncomfortable, necessary tension that makes real conversation not only possible but transformative. Both had a sense that we were speaking around each other, not with each other. For all the talk of openness, diversity, and dialogue, what I experienced was not encounter but choreography.

Despite the warm words and generous presence of our contributors, neither evening managed to break the deadlock of public discourse. Neither truly modelled the innovative approach to intercultural engagement I had hoped for; something deeper than polite pluralism or liberal tolerance, something bolder than a curated diversity of views. What do we do when faith conversations, however well-intentioned, merely reinforce the safest, most performative version of themselves?

If Re:Imagine is to live up to its name, if sacred music is to do more than soothe, then we need more than curated coexistence. We need a new grammar for faith conversation, and public debate in general, that is something less about making space, and more about inhabiting tension. 

We must confront the following questions head-on: what needs to be unlearned in the way we currently gather across difference? And what might it take to birth something new; something not just novel, but necessary?

One of the things I’ve been reflecting on over the last few weeks is the inevitability of performance, especially when events take place on a stage. As soon as we put people in front of an audience, in a structured setting, particularly under the vaulted ceilings of a cathedral, we are not just enabling speech; we are framing it. Whether we realise it or not, we are inviting a performance.

This isn’t a criticism. It’s simply a sociological fact. In his seminal work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman argued that social life is fundamentally theatrical. Each of us, he claimed, is always managing impressions; performing a version of ourselves that is shaped by context, audience, and expected norms. The ‘front stage’ is where roles are consciously curated; the ‘backstage’ is where we are less guarded, less polished, more uncertain. But Goffman’s point is that even our backstage is not fully free from performance; we are always somewhere on the spectrum of managing perception.

This framework helps explain why the platform changes things, even when the conversation is genuine. I tried to make Re:Imagine feel less like a panel discussion and more like an invitation to be present, unguarded, vulnerable. But the stage itself had its own logic. The lights, the audience, the publicity, all of it subtly nudged us into a mode of presentation. And once there, it was hard to improvise. When Baroness Warsi and Bishop Toby spoke, they were never really going to be able to simply share personal reflections. In hindsight, the temptation to enact identities was always going to be hard to resist. Warsi, a high-profile Muslim political figure, had to navigate all the projections, expectations, and contestations that come with that role. Bishop Toby, a Church of England bishop in a city like Bradford, was similarly constrained, not by lack of sincerity, but by the complexity of occupying an ecclesial role that is both spiritual and civic, pastoral and political. Both were, in a sense, ‘on stage’ before they even opened their mouths.

And yet I do not believe performance is always false. In fact, I’ve long thought that performance can be deeply true; perhaps even sacred but only when it moves beyond control into vulnerability. My background in theatre taught me that risk is the currency of authentic performance. It is not about getting it right but about stepping into the unknown with others. That kind of improvisational performance isn’t about projecting an image but revealing a self. For that to happen, the platform must allow for rupture and the inevitable mess to be held.

This is what I hoped Re:Imagine might enable. And while both our contributors gestured toward that vulnerability with grace and honesty, the structure around them hindered and blocked their improvisation. The conversation stayed within the boundaries of what the audience could already process. The performances were sincere. But they were still bounded.

What might it take to make a different kind of space?

This question surfaced again the next evening. I had hoped to co-produce this year’s Sacred Music event with Bradford Literature Festival. I’d proposed a shift in format: rather than sequential performances by artists from different traditions, what if we invited musicians to improvise and collaborate to create something new in real time, across the boundaries of tradition? Faith in motion. Difference in dialogue.

The conversations were encouraging but, in the end, the final event returned to the familiar: artists from different faith backgrounds performing one after another in respectful sequence. Beautiful but ultimately predictable. We honoured coexistence, but did not risk co-creation.

And this is where I believe we are stuck.

In many public conversations about faith and other contested issues we find ourselves in one of two places. Either we veer toward conflict: oppositional voices debating from fixed positions. Or we avoid it altogether: showcasing diversity in a way that flattens its tension. The former breeds fatigue and defensiveness; the latter, polite stagnation. Both forms are governed by what I want to call curated coexistence. It’s the idea that if we simply gather different people in the same space, a deeper understanding will naturally emerge. But that’s not how real encounter works. Not in theology. Not in art. Not in life. Encounter requires not just proximity, but vulnerability. Not just expression, but interruption… and interruption is risky.

This is why I’ve been returning to my ongoing reflection on inclusive othering; a framework which seeks to hold deep difference not as a problem to be solved, but as a place to dwell. I have been drawn to the idea that genuine unity comes not through flattening difference, but by learning to desire the good of the other precisely as ‘other’, as different.

Inclusive othering is not about everyone feeling comfortable. In fact, it’s about learning to sit in that uncomfortable ‘no man’s land’ between views, identities, and traditions and allowing that space to shape us.

No Man’s Land by Magdalena Mudlaff

What, then, might this mean for the Re:Imagine series moving forward as a platform for reimagining all kinds of contentious and complex topics: global diplomacy, AI and ethics, environmental activism, migration?

Firstly, I believe we need to experiment with form. What if the structure of our events is not just a means of delivery, but a form of witness? Drawing from performance theory and social improvisation, I am increasingly convinced that our formats encode our assumptions. If our structure assumes performance, then transformation will remain secondary. If the structure of our encounter is built to invite surprise, co-dependence, and change, then our content may finally have room to breathe. This means, therefore, more than changing the seating arrangements. It means actively disrupting the expectation that ideas must be defended or performed. What would it look like to invite guests not to explain themselves, but to ask each other questions they have never dared ask? What if every event required a confession—of failure, of misunderstanding, of being surprised by the other? What if participants weren’t experts, but witnesses?

Secondly, I want to explore the role of embodied practices in public conversations; silence, lament, artistic improvisation, shared meals, symbolic gestures. These are not just aesthetic flourishes. They are facilitated interventions. They disarm the impulse to perform and invite a mode of engagement that speaks to the whole person—not just their views, but their lived and vulnerable selves.

Thirdly, we must reckon honestly with power and representation. One audience member felt, after the Re:Imagine event, discomfort that a powerful political figure, Sayeeda Warsi, was given an uncontested platform who could say things without a firm response. What I found most interesting about that expressed opinion was what it revealed about audience expectation: namely, that public spaces are understood as a kind of battleground. What if we reimagined and restructured it as a sanctuary for disarmed curiosity? What if our role as curators of public space is not to ensure balance, but to nurture trust in order to create containers where difference is neither erased nor exploited and tension is embraced as an uncomfortable but necessary catalyst to creativity. As Miroslav Volf suggests to embrace is to open one’s arms, wait, and then close them around the other; not to absorb, but to hold the other. Too often, our public events keep the arms open but never move toward that vulnerable embrace.

Finally, we must accept that not all fruitful conversations are public. I am still wrestling with whether these events should happen on stage at all. Yet I worry that if we retreat entirely into the private realm, we abandon the possibility of redeeming the public one. The challenge is this: how do we make public spaces more porous, more reflective of the quiet transformation we know happens in private? Risk, after all, needs aftercare. Surprise requires structure. Vulnerability must be held. To reimagine means not only saying new things, but saying them in new ways and allowing our forms to speak before our words ever do.

So what now?

I remain grateful to Baroness Warsi and Bishop Toby. They showed up. They offered themselves. They attempted to be vulnerable. My disappointment is not in them, but in the format that could not sustain the possibility of surprise. The same is true of the artists and the people at Bradford Literature Festival curating the Sacred Music event.

We do need new formats for public moments and encounters. We need creative risks. We need voices willing not just to speak, but to listen and then acknowledge the possibility of change. We need events where musicians and thinkers improvise across difference, where politicians weep, where migrants and fearful indigenous peoples meet each other, personally over a meal and share stories.

Because if faith, and public life, are to mean anything in this fractured age, they must do more than speak. They must listen. They must risk. They must dwell in the gaps.

That weekend in the cathedral did not go as I had hoped. But perhaps that’s the point. Hope is not about things going to plan. Hope is the refusal to give up on what could be, even when what was falls short.

It is time, once again, to reimagine.

Into Culture: A Self Apart

I was on retreat: a gathered community of leaders with disabilities and neurodivergence, drawn together to reflect, to rest, and to listen. During one of the sessions, ‘Leading From Who You Are’ the facilitator posed a deceptively simple question:

Who are you, apart from your team, your organisation, your context?

It was meant to help us excavate our identity, to reach below our roles and responsibilities to the self beneath. But I couldn’t answer it. In fact, I couldn’t even understand what was being asked.

What does it mean to imagine the self apart from the people, patterns, and places that shape it? I didn’t just struggle for an answer. I struggled to comprehend the very premise of the question. The rest of the room began to engage in conversation and I listened in to attempt to discern what I was missing. Others were talking about self; their understanding of who they felt they were but none were acknowledging how that self has come into being. It was as if they believed they ‘sprang from the mind of God’ (Peer Gynt, Act 5 Scene 3), fully formed. That’s a common assumption about the self, but I don’t think it’s true.

I was baffled, in part, because when I usually experience a dissonance between my own understanding and that of those around me, I instinctively blame my neurodiversity/autism. In this context, however, I felt restricted in doing that. For a fleeting moment, I feared there was something wrong with me beyond what I could safely attribute to autism.

I’ve come to see that what unsettled me on that retreat wasn’t a lack of self-awareness but a different way of being a self altogether.

At first, it might seem contradictory to say that autistic people experience selfhood as fundamentally relational. The stereotype is that autistic people struggle with social connection and interpersonal understanding. Surely, then, autistic people would feel themselves as more isolated, not less. This assumption collapses, however, when we explore how autistic relationality actually works. Autistic people often experience difficulty with certain social performances: small talk, fluid group dynamics, decoding unspoken social rules. This does not mean we are less relational; it just means we connect differently.

Autistic researcher Damian Milton challenges the typical narrative with his theory of the ‘double empathy problem’, which proposes that autistic social difficulties arise not from inherent deficits but from ‘mutual misattunement’ between autistic and neurotypical people. I am not less social; I simply socialise differently. Neurotypical society tends to privilege social ambiguity, implicit communication, and high-context interactions and these modes are exhausting or bewildering to us autistics. This doesn’t mean that we are not interested in relationships but we tend to find fulfilment in these connections through shared activities, clear structures, predictable rituals, and deep focused interests. We flourish in communal spaces that are stable, ordered, and trustworthy; places where the unspoken social rules are replaced by liturgies, patterns, and shared rhythms.

Beyond this, many autistic people experience a form of ‘ecological selfhood’ which is a sense of self that is intrinsically tied to our environment, sensory world, routines, and the people and objects that anchor us. The boundaries between self and context, therefore, are often blurred.

Naoki Higashida captures this in his remarkable book:

It’s as if my body belongs to someone else and I have zero control over it… I can’t just think about things in isolation—my thoughts are all linked to other things.

Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism, trans. KA Yoshida and David Mitchell (New York: Random House, 2013), 36.

I don’t perceive myself as something separable from my context. I experience selfhood as something that emerges within forms of social, as well as ecclesial liturgies, shared spaces, and communal belonging. When people ask me to strip that away to find some ‘pure self’ underneath I get lost, not because I am avoiding myself but because I have never known myself apart from the places and people around me.

Grant Macaskill, in his theological reflection on autism, puts it bluntly:

Autistic people often embody modes of relationality that resist the individualism of Western culture. Their difficulties are less about absence of sociality and more about divergence from normative expectations of social behaviour.

Grant Macaskill, Autism and the Church: Bible, Theology, and Community (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2019), 73.

What I struggled with on that retreat was not self-awareness. I was struggling with the premise that my truest self could somehow be detached from my community. That model of selfhood just doesn’t fit, but more than that, I am beginning to wonder whether it doesn’t fit anyone.

Perhaps autistic relationality doesn’t simply offer an alternative way of connecting but offers the Church a prophetic reorientation. If the dominant leadership cultures centres on the autonomous, performative self, maybe it is those cultures, not autistic people, that are out of step with the Body of Christ. Perhaps autistic ways of being illuminate what our theology has always said but our practice has too often forgotten: that the self is made in relation, that difference is not a problem to be managed, but the very ground where communion takes root.

What if autistic relationality is not a deficit to be overcome but a gift to be received: a sign that we lead most faithfully not by extracting ourselves from others, but by remaining deeply, dependently, unmistakably embedded in the life of the community?

Richard Giblett, Mycelium Rhizome, 2006-2009

Our culture tells us that identity is something we must cultivate independently. The self is seen as a solitary project: find yourself, be yourself, lead from your authentic self. This story of selfhood assumes that the truest ‘you’ exists somewhere prior to or beneath your context.

This story of selfhood is deeply rooted in the modern, Western imagination, shaped by Enlightenment ideals of autonomy, rationality, and the self as an isolated, self-determining agent. This is not just a cultural whim; it is a historically located worldview that has shaped leadership, spirituality, and even Christian discipleship in the West, and I believe this modern ideal is a myth.

The Christian tradition, particularly through the voices of Augustine, Rowan Williams, and Yves Congar, calls this into question. The self, they suggest, is not a fortress. It is not a self-contained treasure waiting to be uncovered through introspection. Thomas Merton offers a sharper vision:

The true self is not a private, isolated self… It is found in the act of self-forgetfulness, in love.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 2007), 42.

Love, relation, community; these are not optional extensions of selfhood. They are the very ground of it.

My recent reading of Yves Congar and Henri de Lubac gave this instinct theological clarity. Both rejected the idea that the Church is simply a collection of individuals. They insisted the Church is a communion: a people bound together by the Spirit, by shared life, by mutual dependence.

The Church is not the sum of individuals. It is the common life of grace and truth, a communion in Christ through the Spirit.

Yves Congar, Lay People in the Church: A Study for a Theology of the Laity, trans. Donald Attwater (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1957), 16.

Congar’s vision resonates deeply with this idea of autistic relationality. You cannot understand the Church, or the self, by pulling it apart into isolated units. The Church is a living body, not a loose assembly of separate selves and, perhaps, autistic relationality teaches us this in its own particular, embodied way. It shows us what I am calling ‘inclusive othering’, where difference is seen, honoured, and held together in the unity of shared life. It refuses to collapse our distinctiveness into a bland sameness but insists that we are bound together precisely as different. Autistic relationality is not about dissolving difference to find connection, but about finding connection through difference.

It is not only Christian theology that challenges the Western fixation on the individual. Many cultures across the world understand the self as fundamentally communal. The Zulu concept of ubuntu (“I am because we are”) expresses this beautifully. In ubuntu thinking, your identity is not forged first and then added to community. Rather, “You are summoned into your identity by others.” (Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 105).

The self is not a solitary treasure to be excavated. It is a calling, a voice that is spoken into being by the community that loves, challenges, and shapes us. Perhaps, then, the question is not, “Who are you apart from your context?” Perhaps the more faithful question is, “Who are you within your context? What unique voice, gift, and way of leading do you offer precisely because you are embedded in your community?”

I do not lead from some self distilled and extracted from others. I lead from a self that is deeply, inescapably connected to the Church, to the Body, to the patterns that sustain me. Augustine, too, knew this:

Let your heart be more closely bound to the Church than to your own heartbeat.

Augustine, Sermon 265D, in Essential Sermons, ed. Boniface Ramsey, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2007), 326

When I return to the question of who I am, apart from my context, I realise I still have no answer… but perhaps that’s not a failing. Perhaps it’s a faithful refusal to sever what God has joined together.

Into Culture: The Shape of Sacrament

Two conversations in recent weeks have stayed with me.

The first was with a parent, curious and pastoral in their enquiry. One of their children, unexpectedly, had received Holy Communion during a service without the parent knowing, and before the older sibling had done so. There was no anger, just a gentle, open question: how do we handle such things? What does it mean?

The other was with a Hindu friend exploring the possibility of converting to Christianity. As we discussed belief, belonging, and the nature of commitment, they said something that struck me deeply:

Monotheism is like monogamy. It’s choosing one, even though you could choose many.

The metaphor wasn’t just theological: it was cultural. They come from a society shaped by the traditions of arranged marriage, where ‘dating’ doesn’t carry the same social weight as it does in the West. Love, for them, often follows promise, not the other way round. It was also a metaphor born out of difference. Hinduism, after all, is not merely polytheistic in number but in relationality. It holds a world thick with deities, each reflecting a particular facet of the divine. To consider monotheism as monogamous was not a rejection of plurality but a fascination with the Christian claim: one God, one covenant, one beloved. Fidelity, not variety, as the heart of the divine-human relationship.

And here, of course, is where Christ steps into the conversation, not simply as a name for God, but as the one through whom we know this fidelity. The incarnation of God’s self-giving love. The one who calls, commits, and receives.

These two encounters, one quietly domestic, the other vividly cross-cultural, have refused to let go of each other in my imagination. They have drawn me again into pondering the complex choreography of the sacraments: of belonging and believing, of who comes to the table and when, and of how the Church holds open space for grace without making it cheap.

Back when I was serving in Sheffield, I remember a situation where I discovered a few children had been regularly receiving communion before they had been baptised. Their parents did not want them to be baptised until they could make the decision themselves. In trying to explain the theological dissonance of that moment, I reached for an analogy: baptism, I suggested, is like marriage, a public act of covenantal commitment. Holy Communion, then, is the consummation of that covenant; the intimate, embodied sign of a life now shared. To take communion before baptism is to jump ahead in the story. It is, I said, like sex before marriage: a moment of intimacy without the promise that gives it shape.

I know that analogy isn’t perfect (none ever are) but it helped me to name something important: sacraments are not isolated rites; they exist in relationship. They interpret each other. The Eucharist matters because baptism matters, and the sequence, while not legalistic, carries meaning: it tells a story.

This is why I find myself returning often to John Henry Newman’s observation:

Baptism may be the hand of the giver, and Faith the hand of the receiver.

John Henry Newman, ‘Tract 90: Remarks on Certain Passages in the Thirty-Nine Articles‘ (London: J.G. & F. Rivington, 1841) section 7.

The sacraments are not mechanical rituals. They are gestures of grace, relational acts of giving and receiving. Baptism is not simply a declaration of belief: it is the moment we are named and known. The Eucharist is not merely food: it is the kiss of Christ, the deep intimacy of shared life with Jesus and his Body.

And yet, the analogy, in light of my conversation with my Hindu friend, also exposed something deeper: a tension between our cultural assumptions about merit and the Christian understanding of grace. We often delay baptism, particularly in adult or convert situations, until we can be confident of someone’s belief, clarity, or readiness. But is that confidence always necessary, or even faithful? The Christian life does not begin with our certainty, but with God’s initiative.

As John Lennox insightfully puts it, “A Christian is a person who enjoys now a real relationship with God through Christ through trusting him that he or she has not merited.” He goes on to describe how we project our performance-driven society onto God.

We think that we can merit God and a relationship with him… But just a minute, what about marriage?… You wouldn’t insult a fellow human being by telling them that your acceptance of them depends on their performance. But that’s exactly what you’re basing a relationship with God on.

John Lennox, Facing the Canon with J. John, YouTube, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDQPvgi4HeQ

That’s what makes the baptism of infants so subversive and so revealing. A child cannot articulate trust or doctrinal clarity, and yet, this month I baptised my 4 1/2 month old son. Why? Because God’s promise comes first. Because grace precedes understanding. And that has reshaped how I reflect on conversations like the one with my Hindu friend. Was I, however gently, asking them to earn something that can only be received?

Lennox suggests our world defines religion as “…a path. You try and follow it. And you hope that when you get to the judgment, you’ll have done enough for God to accept you.” If this is true, then Lennox is right that Christianity is not a religion. Christianity is indeed a path but one not to somewhere (acceptance) but from somewhere (an encounter with the grace of the Risen Christ).

So what of the child who comes to the rail and stretches out their hands with innocent expectancy? The recent conversation reminded me how delicate and deeply human these moments are. I shared with the parent that there have been a few times (very few) when I have felt I should refuse communion at the rail. Each time, it left me aching, aware that in doing so, I opened myself to the charge of hypocrisy: who am I to decide? I don’t know everyone’s story. I don’t know what grace is doing beneath the surface.

And yet, I also know this: administering the sacraments is not about performing a perfect system. It’s about holding mystery with trembling hands. It’s about standing at the intersection of grace and form, of longing and limit. It’s about seeking to be faithful to the Christ who both institutes and inhabits these sacraments and who gives himself not only in bread and wine, but in the very act of our seeking.

What struck me in both conversations was not confusion but hunger; and beneath that, perhaps, the Church’s call to recover the fullness of its sacramental imagination. Communion is not simply about inclusion or exclusion. It is about meaning. It is a mystery into which we are drawn, a story into which we are written, a Person with whom we are united.

Yes, there are policies. Yes, there are pastoral accommodations. But more than that, there are people stretching out hands in wonder, asking in quiet tones what it means to commit, to be welcomed, to be known.

And this is the paradox at the heart of the sacraments: God’s grace always comes first. Its very freeness deepens our responsibility not to achieve them, but to honour them. Receiving what we do not merit asks of us a different kind of seriousness, not one based on performance, but on attentiveness, reverence, and response. To baptise is to welcome trust, not certify certainty. To receive communion is not to prove faith but to be formed by it, again and again. 

This is where the Church’s discernment matters; not to police the font and table, but to hold them as places where grace is costly because it is real. Sacraments are grace with weight. They cost us nothing, and they change everything. They are divine invitations, not human achievements.

Baptism initiates us into this grace-soaked life; Eucharist sustains us in it. Baptism comes first because the Church receives before it feeds. But when the order blurs, we do not panic: we discern. We ask not, “Have they earned this?” but, “What is grace doing here?” They do not work because we grasp them, but because Christ gives himself in them. That is not a contradiction to resolve, but a reality to live.

And so I find myself wanting to say, both to the child at the rail and to my Hindu friend, “this is the shape of grace: to come to Christ and to say yes, and that yes is not the end of the path but the beginning of it.” The sacraments are not prizes for the certain, nor performances for the worthy. They are where that path begins and continues; one in water, the other in bread, both in the gift of Christ himself who still says, “Come.”