Tag Archives: No-Man’s Land

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: 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.

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: Provisionality Defined

It has been a difficult month.

After months of planning, the intercultural conference I was organising was cancelled at the last minute due to a lack of funding. This wasn’t a minor event or distraction. I had invested a huge amount of energy and passion into it and had a great vision for it. It was meant to be a space where people from vastly different cultural backgrounds could come together to dream: a fragile but vital act in a world increasingly defined by division.

And yet, with a single email, the structure we had painstakingly built collapsed.

The cancellation wasn’t just an administrative setback; it felt like an indictment. Had I been naïve to believe this work mattered enough to secure funding? Was intercultural ministry just a well-meaning aspiration rather than a necessity? As I sat with the news, I felt the creeping temptation to retreat; to step back from the discomfort of advocating for something that, apparently, wasn’t a priority for everyone else.

But instead of stepping back, I found myself writing from the ruins.

With the conference gone, I turned to the academic journal article I had been meaning to write for months. What had previously felt like an abstract exercise, an attempt to articulate ideas that had been swirling in my mind, now became urgent. The cancellation forced me to confront the very questions I had been wrestling with: Why does intercultural ministry matter? Why does it so often feel like the latest fad? How do I articulate its significance, not as an optional endeavour but as a necessary gift to the Church of England?

Perhaps this was what I needed. The push to put into words what I had been struggling to articulate. The conference would have been an event, but writing would be an argument, a case that could not be as easily dismissed as a line in a budget.

And so, in the space where the conference should have been, I wrote.

Intercultural ministry inhabits no man’s land: the space between entrenched identities, where categories lose their certainty and encounter becomes possible. It is a place where cultural and theological boundaries are suspended just long enough for something new to emerge.

But it is not a comfortable space. The world prefers fortifications, fixed identities, clear allegiances, firm distinctions between inside and outside. Even within the Church, we too often treat diversity as a problem to be solved rather than a gift to be received.

Yet no man’s land is where transformation happens. It is where encounter moves beyond tolerance into something riskier: the possibility of being changed. It is a space that resists resolution, where we are required to remain, even when there are no clear answers.

Augustine’s corpus permixtum offers a theological vision of this space. The Church, he insists, is always mixed, unfinished, in pilgrimage, provisional until the eschaton. Against the Donatists, who sought a pure Church free from compromise, Augustine argued that any attempt to enforce purity before the final judgment was not just futile but theologically misguided. The wheat and tares must grow together. To be the Church is to inhabit that tension.

This is no man’s land as a theological reality. It is not an unfortunate byproduct of cultural difference but the very space where grace does its work. The impulse to resolve, to fix identity, to enforce certainty. These are the real dangers. Augustine understood that provisionality is not weakness but faithfulness: the refusal to collapse history into resolution, the willingness to dwell in the unfolding mystery of God’s work.

But if no man’s land is the necessary site of encounter, how do we remain there without being paralysed by uncertainty? How do we engage without defaulting to either avoidance or control?

Improvisation is what allows us to remain in no man land. It is not the absence of structure but the ability to shape meaning in real time. It is the posture of responsiveness, the refusal to impose a script onto an encounter before the other has had a chance to speak.

The instinct, in uncertain spaces, is either to withdraw or to dominate, to retreat to what we know or to force an outcome. But improvisation resists both. It assumes that truth unfolds in relationship, that we do not come to intercultural engagement with all the answers but discover them in the process.

Stanley Hauerwas speaks of Christian ethics as improvisation within a shared narrative. We do not act in a vacuum; we inherit a story but the story itself remains in motion. Kevin Vanhoozer extends this further, describing doctrine as improvisation in response to history as an ongoing engagement with God’s unfolding work in the world.

Improvisation allows us to stay in no man’s land when the temptation is to resolve the tension too quickly. It allows us to respond in the moment, to listen deeply, to shape meaning as we go. Improvisation without direction, however, can become either chaotic or manipulative. It requires an ethic as a way of ensuring that our engagement is neither passive nor coercive, but genuinely transformative.

If improvisation is the mode by which we remain in no man’s land, then inclusive othering is the ethic that ensures we do so faithfully.

Othering is often framed as exclusion, a way of defining oneself against another. Inclusive othering refuses this binary. It acknowledges difference without reducing it to opposition. It insists that engagement is possible without assimilation, that unity need not come at the cost of integrity.

Paul Ricoeur warns against two failures: the absolutisation of culture, where difference becomes impenetrable, and the erasure of culture, where distinctiveness is lost in the pursuit of sameness. Inclusive othering navigates between these extremes. It allows for mutual transformation without coercion.

This is not comfortable. It requires a commitment to remain in the tension of difference, to resist the easy exits of withdrawal or dominance. It asks us to trust that relationship itself is formative and that even when no agreement is reached, something vital is taking place.

And so, I return to the original question: Is intercultural ministry a necessity, or just a luxury?

Funding has not been secured, in part because the argument for intercultural ministry has not been persuasive. Writing forced me to clarify what I had already sensed: this work is not peripheral. It is the only viable way forward.

Without it, we entrench division. Without it, we mistake tolerance for engagement, proximity for relationship. Without it, the Church risks irrelevance, offering certainty when the world cries out for wisdom.

The Church of England finds itself caught between conflicting pressures: a fractured institution seeking coherence, a shifting society demanding relevance, a cultural landscape marked by division and distrust. It is tempting to respond to these crises with control, to seek definitive solutions, to shore up institutional identity in the face of decline.

What if the way forward is not resolution, but a deeper commitment to provisionality? What if, rather than retreating to entrenched positions, we learned to inhabit no man’s land? To lead not with fixed answers but with an openness to encounter? To rediscover the art of improvisation, responding to the Spirit’s movement in history rather than dictating the terms of engagement? To embrace inclusive othering, holding our convictions with integrity while remaining radically open to the transformation that only relationship can bring?

This is not weakness. It is faithfulness.

The Church is being called, once again, into the risk of relationship; not to dictate, but to dwell; not to dominate, but to discern.

Intercultural ministry is the work of inhabiting no man’s land, of improvising faithfully in the face of uncertainty, of othering in a way that does not exclude but transforms.

If the Church of England is serious about its future, it must learn to stand in this space. Not as a concession, but as a calling.

Improvisation remains. No man’s land remains. And that is precisely where we must learn to stand.

Into Culture: No-Man’s Land

Back in 2012 I came across a gathering of people known as ‘Burning Fences’. It was a community (of sorts) that had come together through open mic nights in York and all of the participants/‘members’ were curious about faith, philosophy and art. A year after encountering this collective, and very much identifying myself as part of it, I wrote a reflection on my experience in a post called ‘Fleeing to No-Man’s Land’. In this reflection I spoke idealistically about the desire to be ‘organic’ and to refute the need for definition and boundary. This was 2014 and we were still in the first wave of the re-emergent deconstructionist movement that has now morphed into post-liberalism with all its uncertainty, linguistic quagmires and frustrations.

A mere four months later I wrote again about this community in a post called ‘Struggling with No-Man’s Land’. The title was deliberate and the post speaks of the experience of struggle with living into the initial dream and ideal which we longed to exist. I had, over four months, inevitably fallen or arrived at the trap or reality (depending on where you stood) that comes from these types of dreams. I encourage you to read this second post particularly as it gives a foundation to what I feel called to reflect on this month: that is, ‘contested space’.

I do not have space to regurgitate John Milbank’s and Rowan Williams’ profound explorations of the ‘public sphere’ wholesale and, again, I can only encourage you, dear reader, to read for yourself ‘Theology and Social Theory’ and ‘Faith in the Public Square’ as two better articulations of what I am re-examining in my role here in Bradford. These two books and the authors’ wider work have been much on my mind as I have faced some curious forces as I move around in public life.

Back in October when I was interviewed for my new role I was asked to preach a short homily on the day’s gospel reading: Luke 14:12-14. This short teaching of Jesus on the subject of acceptable behaviour in social settings is set within a scene of pure hospitality. The teaching seems pretty clear, “When this happens; do this. When the other thing happens; do this other thing.” Rules of etiquette clearly put down to abide by and do good. As I was interviewing to be the Canon for Intercultural Mission this seemed particularly pertinent as the role would require me to navigate complex cultural spaces. Bradford Cathedral also celebrates its value of hospitality and is proud of its welcome of people of all faiths and none in a multi-cultural city. A passage about hospitality in a place of hospitality for a role focussed on hospitality; what a gift!

I ended up reflecting on the overuse of ‘welcome’ and ‘hospitality’ in community identity. What do we mean by ‘welcome’? How do we express or judge ‘hospitality’? In the passage the ‘hosts’ are crticised by Jesus and then the ‘guests’. It seems that the culturally agreed system of manners and customs were wrong to Jesus. Most churches would want to be welcoming to all and yet many of them, despite their expressed aims, are judged to be unwelcoming, particularly to certain groups. People express an experience of feeling unwanted, ignored or, even worse, demonised. How does our desire to welcome go so badly wrong? How do we defend ourselves from being ‘unwelcoming’? Is it possible that those offering hospitality have a conflicting understanding of welcome to those who are looking to receive it from them? And who decides, anyway, what is culturally acceptable behaviour and polite?

The reality is that we work on the assumption that we all agree on what makes for good hospitality and welcome. My friend, Russ, came over to my house early on in our friendship. I welcomed him in and said, “Make yourself at home.” He and his wife sat on our sofa and we chatted. About half an hour passed by and Russ suddenly said, “Did I just hear the kettle go?” A more passive aggressive question I have not heard! His point though was made: I had not offered him a cup of tea nor had I made it for him. In my mind I had not been rude for I had stated, as he came into my home, that it was his home. If it was his home he would make himself a cup of tea if he wanted one. We had different expectations of what a welcome is. The same is true in community life and, indeed, in public life.

This is where my reflections on Burning Fences comes into focus. With any social encounter there are underlying power dynamics at work and different cultures negotiate that exchange in different ways. I am reminded of the HSBC advert some years ago where they promoted their banking services on the premise that they understood the cultural nuances and distinctives across the globe. This negotiation is the work of intercultural mission. We must be clear as to what we mean by hospitality, how to express it and what to do when that conflicts with a different cultural paradigm. This, however, has become so complex it might be now rendered impossible without causing offence. No man’s land can only ever be temporary before one side advances and colonises it. It is, as anarchist Hakim Bey once called it, a Temporary Autonomous Zone.

At the cathedral we welcome many different groups into our space and we often articulate it as the oldest shared spaces still being used in the city with a long 1400 year history of gathering people from different perspectives to share in the full gamut of life; sacred and mundane. This all sounds good in theory but in practice it is much more complicated. It sounds like we have ambition to create something of a no-man’s land but, of course, we’re not; not really. It will always be a sacred space owned by the Church. We, canons of the cathedral, as stewards and custodians of this historic building, have responsibilities for its upkeep so we can faithfully pass it on to the next generation of Bradford. We want, in some way, for the cathedral to feel like it is ‘your cathedral’, ‘their cathedral’ but, maybe more clearly, ‘our cathedral’. How do we achieve these powerful, beneficial elements of no-man’s land or Temporary Autonomous Zones whilst accepting that the space is possessed by one particular group, us? With that in mind, what does genuine hospitality look like, for example, when we accept the invitation to give room for communities of different faiths and none to break fast together at the the first Iftar of Ramadan? How far do we go to ensure those who do not share in our faith might feel welcome in the cathedral space? Do we allow the conflicting cultural expressions and rules take precedence in a space designated as inheritance of a wholly/holy other culture? When we hire out our space to corporate events and conferences I am struggling to balance the rules of who is host and who is guest and what rules are in play during that time. How does this space keep its integrity and not just become a hollow venue for any to make their own and go against the architectural purpose, before we even begin to talk about the spiritual purpose? What rules of hospitality do we require for guests to follow and what are they expecting from us as host?

On the hand I continue to navigate the public, secular square as a Christian working alongside people of other faiths and none. I am struck daily by the unspoken rules of social etiquette and how inconsistent those rules are applied. Again, my neuro-diversity does not help me in this but I am acutely aware on how un-neutral the secular space is. For all our culture’s explicit desires to be welcoming to all and equal and diverse, it is feeling less and less true. Secularists want us all to believe that they oversee a neutral sharing of all voices of society but that facade no longer stands the test of truth. The public square is always contested. What is happening now is that the rules of the contest are changing and we have no means of agreeing on those rules. Democracy is revealing its darker side in our days and there is no escaping an ever advancing cultural narrative of intolerance. There is some truth in the call that we are seeing a new form of puritanism in the public sphere with media and cultural organisations claiming diversity and inclusion but at the expense of selected groups and voices. The perceived no-man’s land of the public square where we all can speak and participate is being colonised; it’s just no one has won and we have no agreed way of knowing when it can be over.

If Burning Fences dreamt of creating a clearing where no one group held power then I am now at the realisation that that was always doomed to fail because power is always present. Power is what drives change and creates action. It is better to build a clearing where the power is clearly named and acknowledged and then rightly shared and is mutually beneficial for all. The power should be dynamic and not rest too long on one individual or group. Above all in that clearing, whether it is Bradford Cathedral or the public square, the rules of hospitality must be clearly stated; if there is no such thing as uncontested space, then we should at least know how we are to contest without us all killing each other or living in the polarised state as we do now.

Back to Luke 14.

Throughout the gospel accounts Jesus seems to pass through contested space with ease. He is both at home and not. He is both host and guest. Consider the story of the wedding at Cana; clearly a guest and yet he works behind the scenes to make the party happen. Jesus never claims ownership of space and yet he influences everywhere he goes. In the public square I will continue to try and be salt (distinct and set apart offering an alternative vision of society and the world) and light (illuminating, prophetically, where darkness conceals truth and confuses with lies or mistruths). In Bradford Cathedral I want to welcome people genuinely into ‘our space’, meaning, whoever I am speaking to, that we share ownership of it but, if we are going to share the space, we must share the rules of the space. There will be negotiations and, as such, mistakes to learn from, but I don’t want to become a mere gatekeeper who has to decide who is welcome and what behaviours are acceptable or not. For I am not the host. I am a fellow guest invited and welcomed by the one true host: Jesus. Now the question is: What are his rules of hospitality? It seems to me not our business to know in advance we are merely told to go and invite all into the banquet of the kingdom. He will discern if people enter in without respect and send them away.

I’ll leave you with this quote from D.T. Niles,

Christianity is one beggar telling another beggar where he found bread.
D.T. Niles,The New York Times, May 11, 1986, Section 6, p.38

Struggling with No-Man’s Land

I have, in the past, been a fan of the part ii’s, the part iii’s, etc. I was going to name this post ‘Fleeing to No-Man’s Land (part ii)’ but I realised that the verb was wrong. I am calling this ‘Struggling with No-Man’s Land’ because that better describes my honest, if not entirely correct, emotion at the moment. This post comes from my continued reflection on the community which I love, Burning Fences.

If you have not read my first reflection, which I remain completely committed to, then please read it here before proceeding…

…

Nomansland …Ok. Since I wrote that reflection there has been a growing sense of some footing being lost amongst us. We have felt, at different moments, that we have lost our way or the passion has waned. This has been due to various small events in the life of our community which have combined to create not a destruction or a despair but a niggle, a question to arise: what are we doing?

I, in a broken and fumbled way, attempted to voice this concern to my fellow fence burners to see if I was alone; I was not. I tried then to gauge where this ‘dis-satisfaction’ was coming from. It was not clear. We all had different theories and, therefore, different solutions. We gathered together for a weekend away and I ‘hosted’ the space. I didn’t do a perfect job but I tried my best but even at the end of this wonderful time together there was a niggle; quiet but persistent, like a headache which has become habitual, not debilitating but present, sometimes forgettable but, in the still times returns to remind and prompt attention.

After the weekend away I sent out an email to some to see if people thought it might be good to have an open meeting to discuss this ambiguous question of how to acknowledge what Burning Fences is.

This desire to define and name came with a great heaviness for me as I still believe that there is a danger in this course of action. With definition come boundaries to cross, requirements to meet, entitlement to battle with, etc. The temptation to do so is great and most follow it but seem to come unstuck by it. I wonder whether this is our challenge, as a community, to pioneer the narrow path away from it and lead others to a secret place of truly organic and free space. Is such a place possible?

And this is why this post is called ‘Struggling with No-Man’s Land’ because I am deeply torn. The call/demand on my inner being to follow suit and define this community is great. I have justified how we can do it without damaging the freedom we have enjoyed in not defining or acknowledging. Most of these justifications come from a deeply held understanding that with no markers we must be prone to float from one thing to another and there is no defence against any ‘spirit’ or idea which could equally destroy than strengthen, enslave as to liberate. There is, in this non-demarcated space no source of discernment accept our flawed concepts of reality and shifting judgments.

the_clearing_by_crossie A wise brother amongst us wrote a deeply honest and profound response to my call for a discussion. He named the beauty of Burning Fences as ‘a clearing’. He writes,

We run into problems when any one group tries to colonise the clearing.

That sentence struck me as deeply important. How? I’m not sure.

In a discussion about Burning Fences with someone on the periphery looking in we were described, by them, as either,

A secular space in which Christians inhabit and live out their faith.

Or,

A space created by Christians and where anyone and everyone is invited to come and inhabit.

Both have strengths and weaknesses. The first image has the strength of describing the Christian as a resident alien, a guest who honours the code of hospitality that guests have. It’s weakness is that it can easily be seen as an invasion or takeover. The second image develops a sense of hospitality. There is a basic assumption in good hospitality that the guest is free to make the space their own and the host serves them and welcomes. The problem comes when the power is mis-read and, no matter how much it is expressed, the space is never owned by the guest.

There are big questions here of our understanding of hospitality and one which we must wrestle with but both these images are not apt descriptions of Burning Fences because the space in both has an ownership by one party. Hospitality requires a power-game between host and guest. My wise friend and fellow fence burner is closer: it is a clearing which is not owned by anyone. It is ‘no-man’s land’.

The beauty of No-Man’s Land is that it is neutral territory where everyone is simultaneously both host and guest. The different parties come together and build together.

It reminds me of Vincent Donovan’s approach to his mission to the Masai described in ‘Christaianity Rediscovered’. He writes this,

…the unpredictable process of evangelization, [is] a process leading to that new place where none of us has ever been before. When the gospel reaches a people where they are, their response to that gospel is the church in a new place, and the song they will sing is that new, unsung song, that unwritten melody that haunts all of us. What we have to be involved in is not the revival of the church or the reform of the church. It has to be nothing less than what Paul and the Fathers of the Council of Jerusalem were involved in for their time – the refounding of the Catholic church for our age. (Vincent Donovan, Christianity Rediscovered (London: SCM Press, 2009) p.xix)

It was in No-Man’s land that peace came, for the briefest of moments during the Great War. It was in the middle of the deeply dug trenches that people were free to meet and experience peace in a simple game of football; neutral, no power games, shared. This is the beauty of such a clearing.

I begin to realise that my issue at the weekend away was the locus of hospitality was skewed. I, along with a select few others, were ‘hosting’, and others considered themselves ‘guests’. This has a definite dynamic in the relationship and how people respond to the space created. What I wanted was a shared ownership but I attempted to achieve this by ‘hosting’. This is where the invitation to a radically different hospitality comes into its own. One which I consider godly; where the host is the guest, the guest the host and service is from all to all in a beautiful mutually loving community.

But is it sustainable?

In this space, what is the source of discernment? What is the shared authority? What fosters peace and reconciliation? What is it that guards against colonisation? For me, as a Christian, what does it mean to see God’s Kingdom extend and grow in this place where no name can be spoken over it? Where does No-Man’s people move to?

orthodox-priest-in-kiev-jan-22-2014 This is our quest: to inhabit, together, No-Man’s Land. To share the space making no claim on it for ourselves or the parties, agendas and personal empires which we are tempted to enforce. We desire, however, to build our home there for to be at peace one must feel a sense of belonging. To what are we committing and how can that be spoken in this between place?

I am convinced this is our challenge and one which, if manifested, will break a temptation that many groups have suffered under. There is a great weight to the task that lies before us and I pray to God for wisdom and boldness to enter in.