In a continuing series exploring various aspects of Christian mission published weekly on Fridays, I now want to address the whole issue of what is Contextual Mission. Here is my opening exploration which I am sure will need future clarifying posts, but here goes.

I think we need much greater clarity about what we mean when we talk about contextual mission. This matters because contextual mission is not simply a more imaginative way of doing church or healthy expressions of outreach. It is not a programme for attracting people into existing churches, a recruitment strategy for getting more people into Sunday worship, or church planting by another name. Contextual mission begins somewhere quite different. It begins with the conviction that God is already present and active in the lives, relationships, cultures and communities around us. The task of the Christian community is therefore not to arrive carrying God into a godless place, but to learn to notice where God is already at work, to listen deeply, to build relationships, to serve, to discern, and gradually to discover what the Spirit might be doing. This relies on a deeply Trinitarian understanding of the mission of God which is akin to 2 Corinthians 4 and 5, of a God restoring all things back into right relationship with God.

There is an important distinction here between people who are open to the Church and people who are effectively closed to the Church. There are still people who are open de-churched or unchurched, those who have left churches but still receptive to the faith and church and those who have no experience of the faith and church and open to it. They may be receptive to an invitation, a course, a community event, a Sunday service, an intro to Christianity form of enquirers course, a special service or some other form of conventional outreach. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this kind of mission. Healthy outreach matters, and we should continue to do it well. But this is not the majority of our contemporary missional situation.

For many people, the inherited church is not simply irrelevant but often out of negative experience or stereotyping, see Christianity as judgemental, politically compromised, exclusionary, intellectually implausible, culturally alien or simply irrelevant to their lives. Some have inherited a profound suspicion of Christianity from their families or wider culture; others have no meaningful Christian memory at all. These people are not all hostile to God, some may simply be closed to the forms in which we have traditionally expected them to encounter God.

This is where contextual mission becomes critical. Contextual mission asks a much harder question than, “How do we get these people into church?” It asks, “What might God be doing here, among these people, in this place, and how might we participate?” That is a fundamentally different missional posture. It requires the practice of presence: staying long enough to become known, listening before speaking, developing relationships which are not simply instrumental, serving without immediately turning service into an evangelistic opportunity, and becoming attentive to the stories, hopes, fears, wounds, aspirations and spiritual questions already present within a community. It means allowing the context itself to shape the mission rather than arriving with a predetermined ecclesial product that we expect people to consume.

The FX or contextual mission process has been an essential learning from the days when contextual mission was seen as critical for missional practice. There are differing iterations of this process, but for me, after over 20 years of missional practice, the process below for me is fundamental if we are serious about engaging with contextual mission with the closed un and dechurched.

The diagrams attempt to make this relational and mission contextual process visible and viable. They describe a journey rather than a programme. Deep local contextual listening leads to loving service; loving service leads to deeper relationships and community; community creates space for people to name their experiences of God and when ready, to explore God; discipleship develops through prayer, exploration, formation and learning; worship emerges in contextual forms; and, over time, an ecclesial community may begin to emerge. The important word here is “may”. Contextual mission cannot guarantee a particular outcome, because it is fundamentally an exercise in discerning and participating in God’s mission rather than implementing our own.

This process is open ended, where mission is God’s not ours, and it is God’s Spirit that unsettles people in this spiritual path. The Spirit is continually unsettling, inviting, awakening and drawing people towards the presence of God. Jesus is encountered through relationships, love, service, community, prayer and spirituality, and has become curious about Christianity breaking down negative stereotypes, become curious about exploring the faith and Scripture, and in time forms of contextual worship as people gradual discover what it means to follow Jesus. The Church participates in the life and mission of the Triune God. We do not manufacture the Kin-dom of God; we learn to participate in what God is already doing.

Once we understand mission in this way, (as defined in 2 Corinthians 3 and 4, of a God seeking to restore all things back into right relationship with God), it becomes obvious why contextual mission takes time. Sometimes it takes years. People have to become known and trusted. Relationships have to develop. Communities have to discover their own identity. Questions of faith need to emerge naturally rather than being forced. People need space to encounter God in ways that make sense within their own context. A missioner needs to remain attentive to what is happening, discerning the movement of the Spirit and continually asking what the next faithful step might be. This required skilled curation skills. This is not a quick process, and it cannot be reduced to a series of measurable stages through which people are moved towards Sunday attendance.

Contextual mission more than any other form of missional and evangelistic engagement needs a healthy balance of incarnational and redemptive theology. Notice in the diagrams that the first 3 circles the focus is definitively on incarnational theology, and as people begin to explore Christian spirituality and faith, there is a shift to redemptive theology. This is critical in a world where incarnational theology, the heart of Jesus as the Emmanuel get’s too often lost when there is an over-focus on redemptive theology.

That is one of the reasons contextual mission can be so uncomfortable for contemporary church systems. We have become accustomed to projects, programmes, targets, outcomes and strategies that can be planned, measured and managed. Responsible stewardship obviously matters, and evaluation matters, but the Kin-dom of God is not a project-management exercise. People are not projects, and communities are not markets. Mission is not simply a mechanism for transferring people from the category “unchurched” into the category “church attendee”. This is yet again the language of Christendom and the Imminent Frame. Contextual mission requires us to surrender some of that desire for control and to trust that God is already active beyond the boundaries of our institutional life.

This is particularly important in a post-Christendom context. Charles Taylor’s description of the contemporary “immanent frame” helps us understand something of the world in which we now undertake Christian mission. We inhabit a cultural environment where transcendence can no longer simply be assumed as the shared horizon of public life. Christianity has become one possibility among many, and for many people the institutional Church has lost the authority and cultural familiarity it once possessed. People inhabit multiple worlds, identities and communities, and their spiritual lives are often eclectic and complex. In such a context, the Church cannot simply assume that people will cross the cultural threshold into our existing ecclesial world. We have to learn how to cross thresholds ourselves.

This is where I think much of the current debate about mission goes wrong. I increasingly encounter an impoverished missional imagination in which the answer to declining participation is essentially to become better at healthy outreach while simultaneously managing the decline of inherited congregations. Healthy outreach is good, but it cannot be the whole answer. If the majority of the contemporary mission field is increasingly closed to inherited forms of Church, then simply becoming better at inviting people to inherited forms of Church cannot provide the whole missional response. We need to be able to imagine something more.

Equally I get frustrated working with churches that are politically progressive but ecclesiologically conservative. I have experienced this a lot in Canada. One frustration I have, which is why following the contextual mission process is so important, is that many attempts at contextual mission get derailed at the loving service stage. Sometimes social, economic and ecological justice can be such a dominant focus and activity and where the forming of an ecclesial form get’s lost, and yet again the focus becomes doing rather than being, so the mission then is in effect subverted at the loving service stage and then effectively becomes non-contextual mission and get’s stuck as it has inadvertently become another outreach initiative.

This can be avoided by keeping focused on the contextual mission process. It seems many find it hard to stick to this process, and in effect this lack of commitment to the contextual mission process then prevents participants explore spirituality and further the exploration of Christian spirituality and then the forming of any ecclesial community, as the missioner or facilitator is not curating the room for this to happen organically in a process of missional evolution. I know this to be true as I have made this mistake myself! In my experience, too many promising contextual mission initiatives loose their edge at the loving service stage, hence why I think only 1 in 3 contextual mission projects succeed.

This is not an argument against inherited church. Quite the opposite. Healthy inherited congregations remain an essential part of the Church’s life and mission. The challenge is that we cannot assume that one form of ecclesial life will be appropriate for every context. The Church needs both renewal within inherited forms and the courage to allow new forms of ecclesial community to emerge. This is where the idea of mixed ecology becomes so important. A genuinely mixed ecology recognises that different communities may require different forms of Church because they inhabit different contexts, cultures and stages of spiritual development. See separate writing on Mixed Ecology Parishes.

This is also why I believe the Church needs properly trained missioners and pioneers. My experience of Anglican Dioceses is that Bishops and Archdeacons can be very good at talent spotting, but then there is very little awareness that being a missioner requires a lot of competencies in terms of skills and knowledge. Contextual mission should not simply be handed to an already overstretched parish priest as another item on an already impossible workload. The skills required are distinctive. A contextual missioner needs theological depth, spiritual maturity, relational and emotional intelligence, cultural awareness, missiological understanding and the ability to work patiently in ambiguity. They need to be able to discern the movement of the Spirit without confusing their own preferences with God’s activity. They need to understand community development, pioneer practice, ecclesiology and contextual theology. They need to be able to create hospitable spaces in which people can explore faith without being manipulated towards a predetermined outcome. Most importantly, they need the maturity to stay when nothing appears to be happening, sometimes for prolonged time when even God can feel absent.

This is not a criticism of parish clergy. Parish ministry requires a particular set of gifts and responsibilities, and many parish clergy are deeply committed to ministry with almost no training on mission. The skill-set required to sustain an inherited congregation is not the same skill-set required to cultivate a new contextual mission. The Church should therefore not expect every parish priest to become a missioner, just as it would not expect every missioner to become an expert in the complex pastoral demands of inherited parish ministry. We need different gifted people working together, and we need structures that recognise and support these different vocations.

The Anglican tradition has actually been developing this thinking for more than twenty years through the Fresh Expressions movement around the world. Fresh Expressions challenged the assumption that the only legitimate destination for mission was existing parish church inherited congregations. It encouraged Christians to listen deeply to particular contexts and to allow new forms of ecclesial community to emerge among people who were not already part of the Church. This was never intended simply to produce alternative worship services or to create attractive activities that would eventually funnel people back into inherited congregations. At its best, Fresh Expressions was an experiment in contextual ecclesiology: discovering what it might mean to be Church among particular people in particular places.

I have heard increasing criticism, particularly from some church planters within more conservative and evangelical traditions, that Fresh Expressions has been “proved not to work”. I think that claim is simply not supported by the evidence. Fresh Expressions certainly produced failures, as every missional movement does, but the research does not support the sweeping claim that the movement failed. The Church of England’s Church Growth Research Programme found that, across the dioceses studied, fresh expressions represented approximately 15% of church communities and around 10% of average weekly attendance. In seven of the ten dioceses studied, participation in fresh expressions was equivalent to reversing the decline in average weekly attendance over the preceding period. The subsequent Day of Small Things research examined more than 1,100 fresh expressions across 21 dioceses and identified approximately 50,600 people involved in them. These are hardly the statistics of a movement that was simply “proved not to work”.

The research also matters because it reminds us that success in contextual mission cannot simply be measured by whether people eventually fill the pews of an inherited church. Fresh Expressions were reaching people who had little or no previous involvement in church and were creating communities in forms that emerged from their particular contexts. That is precisely the point. If our only measure of success is whether a new mission eventually becomes another congregation operating in essentially the same way as an inherited church, then we have fundamentally misunderstood contextual mission.

This also distinguishes contextual mission from church planting, although I think the relationship between the two deserves a separate post. Church planting can be highly contextual, and some contextual missions may eventually developed into new churches, but the starting point and methodology are not the same. Contextual mission begins with listening, presence, discernment and relationship within a particular context and allows the form of community to emerge. It is therefore much less concerned with establishing a predetermined ecclesial model and much more concerned with discovering what God is doing among particular people. That distinction matters if we are going to have an honest conversation about different approaches to mission rather than simply collapsing everything into the language of “church growth”.

There is therefore a theological and spiritual challenge here for the Anglican Church. Contextual mission requires us to believe that God is already ahead of us. It requires us to trust the Spirit enough to enter places where we cannot immediately see the outcome. It requires us to believe that the Gospel has a future beyond the cultural forms through which many of us first encountered Christianity. It requires us to stop assuming that people must first become interested in our Church before they can encounter Christ.

This is why my life work and focus is now focused on discerning, supporting and enabling missioners and pioneers to engage in effective contextual mission activity. They are not church growth officers, (Far too corporate and lacks any christian ecclesiological understanding) or religious entrepreneurs or people employed to make failing churches look successful. They are practitioners of the difficult Christian missional vocation of listening, discerning, accompanying, experimenting, forming community and helping new ecclesial possibilities emerge. They are people who are prepared to stay long enough for relationships to become real, to work patiently within complexity, to recognise the presence of God where others may not see it, and to hold open a space in which something genuinely new might emerge.

This is why I am focused on the discernment, forming and deployment of commissioned lay, licensed lay and ordained missioners to lead on contextual mission initiatives. Most are volunteers, some are paid. When they are paid, missioners need to also be entrepreneurial given the stark reality of limited funds of the post-christendom Church.

The future of Anglican mission will not be secured simply by working harder to preserve what we have inherited, nor by assuming that every new initiative must eventually become another Sunday congregation sitting in rows in an existing church building. Nor will it be secured by managerialism disguised as mission strategy. We need a much larger missional imagination: one that has confidence in the Gospel, in the Spirit, in people and confidence in the possibility that God is already doing something new among us.

That will require bishops and dioceses willing to invest in mission rather than simply reorganising decline. It will require parish clergy who can bless rather than control what they did not initiate. It will require inherited churches with sufficient theological depth and spiritual maturity to participate in a genuinely mixed ecology rather than seeing every new mission as a threat to the existing congregation. This will require trained missioners and pioneers who have the faith, knowledge and practical skills to curate contextual mission over the long term.

The great missional question is therefore not simply, “How do we get people back into church?” It is, “Where is God already present, and what might God be inviting us to do there?” That question takes us beyond the logic of attractional outreach and beyond our obsession with control. It takes us into the much more demanding and much more hopeful work of contextual mission: learning to become present, listening deeply, loving and serving particular communities, discerning the Spirit, and allowing new forms of Christian community to emerge in response to what God is already doing.

The Church does not need less mission because the old models are struggling. It needs more missional imagination, more theological depth, more patience, more courage and more people who have been formed and trained to discern where the Spirit is already moving. The future of the Church may not be waiting for us inside our existing buildings. It may be waiting for us in the places where we have not yet learned how to listen.

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This guided contemplative practice follows the contemplative reflection posted yesterday that you can find here.

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Music: Stories in Sound by Brock Hewitt as recorded on Uppbeat.

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In this Gospel text, Jesus is increasingly clear how the Messiah or the Christ is going to be very different to the folk religion of the time. Jesus will show his increasingly distressed disciples that the Messiah will not be a warrior who will set up a theocracy under a God of the vision of the Hebrew Covenant that would rule for a thousand years, where all the invaders of Judea will be thrown out or defeated in war. Matthew 16:21–28 takes us into an intimate moment in the relationship between Jesus and his disciples. Peter has just made his great confession: You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God, echoing the words of many including the Canaanite woman and the Syro-Phoneician woman. Again very interesting that Jesus’ Messiahship is recognised outside the Jewish faith before being recognised by the disciples which is significant. Peter has finally recognised and named the divine nature of Jesus. Yet, immediately, Jesus begins to unsettle Peter’s understanding of what it means for Jesus to be the Messiah as he has not understood what type of Messiah Jesus is going to be.

The Gospel text states that Jesus began to show his disciples what was going to happen to him. The Greek verb is deiknyō means to show, reveal, or make something visible. Jesus is revealing truths about the nature of God, that the Messiah will suffer, be rejected and be killed. The God whom Peter has begun to recognise is not the expected God of power and triumph in the way Peter expects. God is revealed through vulnerable love.

It is important to say that the ‘suffering’ Messiah is present in Isaiah 52:13 - 53:12 where the suffering servant will be despised and rejected, acquainted with suffering, wounded and pass through death to new life.

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Psalm 22, 69, 118: 22 and Zechariah 12:10 and 13:7 all allude to the realities Jesus is teaching to the disciples, and it is interesting that these understandings and predictions of the Messiah are not known.

Jesus says that the Son of Man must suffer. The Greek word is dei, meaning it is necessary or it must happen. This word has often been interpreted as though Jesus’ suffering were demanded by God as some kind of payment as a very dodgy atonement theory, but there is another way of seeing it. I think Jesus is saying that when divine love enters fully into the reality of human life, suffering becomes unavoidable. Love does not remain safely outside the pain of the world as God enters into it. To be fully human, Jesus encounters rejection, violence, betrayal, fear and death. The cross is therefore not evidence that God has abandoned Jesus. It is the place where divine love refuses to abandon us.

Peter is finding it difficult to accept this because he cannot let go of the egoic and nationalistic story he is holding onto for the Messiah, (note: Here again we see the tension between real faith and nationalistic distorted faith, a problem that has continued to our times). Peter cannot yet see that might and power are distortions of the faith and has the check to take Jesus aside, when he has just recognised him as the Messiah, and begins to rebuke him. The Greek word is epitimaō, a strong word meaning to rebuke, censure or command someone to stop. Peter is effectively saying, “No Jesus, this cannot be the way.” Peter hold an expectation of the Messiah to be a form of ‘Superman’. For him, the Messiah means victory, strength and the one who will finally putting everything right. Peter can recognise Jesus as Messiah, but he does not want to recognise what kind of Messiah Jesus is.

As a side note, what Peter believed at this point is exactly the same position that Modern Judaism holds. That he was a significant teacher or Rabbi, but because he did not bring in the new theocracy and the consummation/judgement of God, he cannot be the Messiah. These expectations Christians now believe will be fulfilled at the second coming.

Yet Jesus responds extremely strongly, because Peter is not listening to him, and says: Get behind me, Satan! Satanas means adversary, one who opposes. Peter has become an adversary because he is resisting the way of love, a far more incarnational vision for the Messiah that Jesus is revealing. By incarnational, I mean incarnational theological understandings and not the victorious King of redemptive theology. Yet there is something very interesting about Jesus’ command. He does not say, Go away. He says, Get behind me.

That is the position of a disciple. Get behind me. Follow me. Let me lead. He is asking Peter to follow him not dictate expectations on him.

This therefore becomes a deeply contemplative invitation for us. There are many times I can recognise when I project my expectations onto God, when I effectively want to take Jesus aside and tell him he is wrong. Times often unconsciously, when I have already decided what God ought to be like, knowing how God should act.

In so doing, we attempt to control the narrative and in effect make ourselves up and indeed attempt to make God up too. We can even become frustrated with God when God does not conform to our expectations. And perhaps Jesus gently says to us, Get behind me. Not as a judgment, but as an invitation. In such times God reminds me, stop trying to lead God, to control the mystery. Come behind me. Follow. Boy does someone need to say that to the now many Christian nationalists and fundamentalists around the world right now who have significant power in many nations!

The Christian life is, after all, is not primarily about mastering or controlling a system of beliefs but a commitment to following and indeed surrendering control to God through a relationship with Jesus recognising him as the Messiah. As Jesus reminds the disciples and us, If anyone wants to become my follower… The language is about movement, relationship and trust. We do not have to understand everything (and then be controlling) before we follow. We follow Jesus into mystery. We learn the way by walking it.

Then Jesus speaks of taking up the cross. The Greek word stauros means cross, while airō means to take up, lift or carry. These words have sometimes been used in Christianity to suggest that suffering itself is something we should seek or passively accept. But I do not think Jesus is telling us to go looking for suffering. Rather, he is inviting us into the costly vulnerability of the way of love. The cross is what happens when love remains faithful in a world that does not always recognise, welcome or understand love, and often actively resists.

Then Jesus speaks one of the great paradoxes of the Gospel: Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. The Greek word translated as life is psychē. It can mean life, soul, self, or the deepest reality of who we are.

Jesus is not simply talking about physical survival. He is speaking about the self we spend so much energy trying to protect: the self that needs to be successful, admired, secure, right, in control and certain about the future. Jesus asks what happens when we spend our whole lives protecting a version of ourselves (the false self) that was never really who we were created to become.

What will it profit someone if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? The Greek ōpheleō, translated “profit,” means to benefit, gain or be of advantage. Jesus is asking us to reconsider our accounting system. What actually counts as gain? What is the point of gaining everything if, somewhere along the way, we lose our soul?

We live in a culture that constantly tells us what a successful life looks like: more recognition, more possessions, more achievement, more security, more influence, more control. But Jesus asks a different question: Who are you becoming?

That question can become the heart of our prayer and our spiritual path.

Perhaps we can sit quietly with Jesus and hear him say, Follow me. We do not need to rush to answer. We can simply notice what happens within us. Perhaps there is fear. Perhaps resistance. Perhaps longing. Perhaps relief. Perhaps a sense that we have been trying very hard to make our own life work.

Then we can hear those words again: Get behind me. Perhaps they become the loving words of God’s restorative purposes for us.

Let go of the need to lead God.
Let go of the need to know exactly where everything is going.
Let go of the demand that God conform to our expectations.
Come behind me.
Follow.

And then we can hear the promise hidden within Jesus’ paradox: Those who lose their life will find it. The Greek word for find is heuriskō, meaning to discover, or come upon something that was previously hidden.

Perhaps this is part of the mystery of the Christian life. We are not ultimately being asked to construct ourselves into the person God wants us to be. We are being invited to discover the person God has already been loving us into becoming.

Perhaps salvation is not becoming more impressive, but becoming more real.

The deepest work of prayer is allowing the false selves we have constructed for protection, approval and control gradually to fall away, so that something more authentic can emerge.

And perhaps this is the mystery of the cross. We discover that when we stop clinging so tightly to the self we think we must protect, we begin to discover the self that God is continually giving back to us.

The cross therefore becomes not an instruction to seek suffering, but an invitation to surrender. To let go. To trust. To follow. To receive.

And beneath all the difficult words of Jesus there is a quiet promise: you do not lose yourself by giving yourself to love. You may finally discover who you are.

Amen to that!

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A good friend recently asked why I always focus on contemplative prayer for my faith and much of my writing, so I am writing this as a response and I hope as an encouragement for other contemplative Christian’s who don’t always feel understood

„Der Fromme von morgen wird ein ‚Mystiker‘ sein, einer, der etwas ‚erfahren‘ hat, oder er wird nicht mehr sein.“1 Karl Rahner

“The devout Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic’, one who has ‘experienced’ something, or they will cease to be anything at all.” Karl Rahner

Nid yw cytuno’n rhesymegol yn unig â chwestiwn Duw, na derbyn dysgeidiaeth Gristnogol fel athrawiaeth yn unig, yn ddigon. Rhaid cael cyflwyniad i brofiad ysbrydol Cristnogol, un sy’n galluogi person, ar ryw ystyr, i ddod yn dywysydd iddo’i hun. Nid yw “cyfriniaeth”, o’i deall yn gywir, yn groes i ffydd yn yr Ysbryd Glân, ond yr un realiti. Rhaid i gyflwyniad o’r fath ein dysgu i aros yn agos at Dduw, i annerch Duw fel “Ti”, ac i fentro i’w dywyllwch distaw heb ofn. Ifan Plant

Mere rational assent to the question of God, or merely doctrinal acceptance of Christian teaching, is not enough. There must be an initiation into Christian spiritual experience, one that enables a person to become, in a sense, their own guide. “Mysticism,” rightly understood, is not the opposite of faith in the Holy Spirit but the same reality. Such initiation must teach us to remain close to God, address God as “You,” and enter God’s silent darkness without fear.
Ifan Plant

These words, associated with the great twentieth century theologian Karl Rahner and the more contemporary words from a friend, have stayed with me for a long time.

Rahner and Plant were not imagining Christians becoming experts in extraordinary visions, spiritual phenomena or religious experiences. By “mystic” they mean someone who has encountered God personally and whose faith has become rooted in that encounter. Indeed, Rahner described mysticism as a genuine experience of God emerging from the very heart of human existence.2

This is why prayer and the mystics have become so important to me. At its deepest level, prayer is about connection: the mysterious meeting between God and us. Yet this connection is not something we manufacture. It is not a technique for getting God to do what we want, nor is it simply a way of asking God to intervene in the circumstances of our lives. Prayer begins with the recognition that God is God, and that God remains mystery. We encounter God on God’s terms, rather than trying to reduce God to something we can control, explain or possess.

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For me, this makes prayer much more about receiving than achieving. Prayer is learning to become receptive to the love of God. It is allowing myself, slowly and sometimes painfully, to be immersed in the reality that I am loved by God before I have achieved anything, understood anything, fixed anything or become the person I think I ought to be.

There is something profoundly Benedictine about this way of understanding prayer. The Benedictine tradition has helped me to hear the Shema: Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one, not simply as a command to love God through our own effort, but as an invitation into a life ordered around God. We are called to love God with heart, soul, mind and strength, and from that love to learn how to love our neighbour as ourselves. The two cannot finally be separated.3

For me, this becomes a movement of love: receiving the love of God, learning to receive and love myself as someone made and held by God, and then becoming more capable of loving others. We often imagine that Christianity is primarily about learning to love other people. But how can I love another person well if I have never allowed myself to receive love? How can I offer compassion if I am fundamentally at war with myself? How can I practise the radical love of the Beatitudes if my deepest instincts are governed by fear, anxiety, defensiveness and scarcity?

This is one of the reasons contemplative prayer matters so much to me. I need somewhere to return to beneath all the noise of my own mind. I need to be reminded that the world is not held together by my anxiety. I need to remember that my worth does not depend upon being successful, useful, approved of or in control. I need to encounter again the God who says, in Christ, that I am already loved.

Contemplation is therefore not an escape from reality. It is an immersion into a deeper reality.

Mystical and contemplative prayer are closely related, although the words are sometimes used in different ways. Contemplative prayer is a way of becoming attentive to God beyond our constant need for words, ideas and explanations. It involves stillness, silence, attention and consent. We stop trying to fill the silence and begin to receive it as a place in which God may meet us. Contemplation is not primarily about thinking about God; it is about becoming present to God.

Mysticism goes deeper into the mystery of that encounter. Christian mysticism is not an elite spiritual hobby for unusually holy people. Nor does it necessarily mean visions, ecstasies or supernatural experiences. At its heart is the awareness that God is encountered, experienced and known in the depths of human existence. The mystic discovers that Christianity is not merely a collection of propositions about God but a relationship with the living God.

This is why the mystics matter to me. They remind me that Christianity is supposed to be experiential. Theology matters enormously to me. Scripture matters. The Eucharist matters. The Church matters. Doctrine matters. But none of these things is meant to remain merely external. They are intended to open us towards communion with the God whom they proclaim.

The great mystics also remind us that this encounter with God is rarely easy.

Consider Julian of Norwich. She lived through the Black Death, one of the most devastating catastrophes in European history, and spent much of her life as an anchoress, enclosed in a small cell attached to a church. Yet from the depths of suffering emerged one of the most extraordinary declarations of divine love in Christian history: that ultimately “all shall be well.” Julian did not arrive at this conviction because life was easy. She arrived there through a profound contemplation of God’s love in the midst of a world filled with suffering.

Or consider Teresa of Ávila. She experienced extraordinary prayer, but she also encountered suspicion, opposition and investigation. Her reform of the Carmelite life created serious conflict, and her mystical experiences were subjected to scrutiny. Teresa’s writings therefore do not come from someone living in a comfortable spiritual bubble. Her prayer was forged through struggle, uncertainty, illness, opposition and the difficult work of trying to discern what God was actually doing.

Then there is John of the Cross, perhaps one of the most important Christian writers on contemplative prayer. In 1577 he was seized by members of his own Carmelite order and imprisoned in Toledo. He spent around nine months in a tiny, oppressive prison cell. Yet it was during this period of imprisonment and deprivation that some of his most beautiful mystical poetry emerged, including parts of the Spiritual Canticle and the poetry associated with the Dark Night.4

And then there is Marguerite Porete, the fourteenth-century Beguine and mystic whose writing on divine love brought her into conflict with ecclesiastical authorities. Her book The Mirror of Simple Souls was condemned, and in 1310 she was executed by burning in Paris as a relapsed heretic.5

These stories matter because they challenge the romantic idea that mysticism is simply about having beautiful spiritual experiences. Sometimes the mystics encountered God precisely in the darkness. Their prayer did not remove suffering. It gave them a way of inhabiting suffering without allowing suffering to become the final truth about reality.

This is one of the things I find most compelling about the mystical tradition. The mystics are not people who have escaped being human. Quite the opposite. They often seem to have become more deeply human because they have dared to enter the depths of their humanity in the presence of God. Their wounds, fears, failures, loneliness and uncertainty were not necessarily obstacles to prayer. They became places where God could be encountered.

That has become increasingly important in my own understanding of prayer. I do not pray because I have somehow mastered my inner life. I pray because I haven’t.

There are parts of me that are anxious. There are parts that anticipate rejection. There are parts that instinctively assume there will not be enough — not enough love, not enough security, not enough approval, not enough time, not enough control. There are wounds that can easily begin to dictate the way I interpret the world.

Contemplation gives me somewhere else to stand.

When I sit quietly before God, I am learning that my feelings are real but they are not necessarily reality. My anxiety is real, but it is not God. My fear is real, but it is not God. My sense of scarcity is real, but it is not God. My wounds are real, but they do not have the authority to tell me who I am.

God’s love does. This does not mean that contemplation makes the wounds disappear. It does not mean that difficult emotions cease to exist. Nor does it mean pretending that everything is fine. Rather, prayer slowly teaches me to hold my wounds within something larger than themselves. I can acknowledge them without allowing them to become the centre of my existence.

Perhaps this is what I mean when I say that contemplation grounds me. It grounds me in the love of God. It reminds me that before I am a priest, a theologian, a missioner, a partner, a friend, a writer, or anything else I might identify myself as, I am a human being held within the mystery of divine love.

From that place, something changes. The Beatitudes begin to look less like impossible instructions and more like a description of a life emerging from a different centre. The poor in spirit, the merciful, the peacemakers, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, those who mourn and those who are persecuted — these are not people who have learned how to manipulate life so that everything goes their way. They are people who have discovered another way of being in the world.

That is what I need prayer to teach me. I need prayer to loosen my grip on control. I need it to interrupt the stories my anxiety tells me. I need it to expose the places where scarcity has become my default way of seeing. I need it to not let my emotions to determine my reality. I need it to return me to the simple truth that I am loved.

This is why the mystics remain so important for Christianity today. They remind us that faith cannot finally survive as something merely inherited, institutional or intellectual. It has to become encounter. It has to become lived experience. It has to become relationship with the God who is always more than we can comprehend and yet who continually gives God’s self to us in love.

Prayer, then, is not simply something I do, it is the place where I learn to receive. It is where I allow God to be God and I discover that divine love is deeper than my fear, wider than my wounds and more trustworthy than my feelings.

The great invitation of contemplation is simply this: to remain there long enough for that love to become more real to me than anything else.

To receive God’s love.
To learn, slowly, to love myself as someone loved by God.
To become capable of loving others.

That, for me, is why contemplative prayer matters.
That is why the mystics matter.

And that is why I believe Karl Rahner’s old warning still speaks with extraordinary force: the Christian future must be a mystical one - not because Christians need more extraordinary experiences, but because we need to rediscover what it means to encounter the living God and follow this type of God in a complex and broken world.

As one of the Diocesan Missioners working in the Anglican Diocese of Niagara in Canada now for three years, I have been seeking to support parish churches to lean into becoming Mixed Ecology as a focus for their identity. For a number of reasons this has been a really challenging task in the second year of this support and training. For some I have encountered unspoken passive resistance or that it’s ‘too hard’ or ‘too new’ or even that ‘it has nothing to do with the story and development of Anglican Parishes’ and even, ‘Ian this is an English Anglican Church gimmick that is not really relevant for other national churches’. So with this in mind I write this article to point out that I do believe that these sentiments are misplaced and that none of this is new to Anglicanism or biblical understandings of the church. So here is a full response from me, that I address these concerns and at the same time encourage Anglican Parish Churches to explore Mixed Ecology in more depth as a recovery of what parish was always about.

I do believe that the future of the Anglican parish church will be mixed ecology or it will increasingly diminish and become irrelevant. Indeed, I would go further: the future of the Anglican diocese will also need to be mixed ecology. This is not because one particular Anglican province has discovered a new initiative or programme for reversing decline, or because the Church of England has developed a useful strategy called “mixed ecology.” It is because Anglicanism is once again being called to rediscover something deeply embedded in its own ecclesiology: the Church is called to be a Christian presence in particular places, among particular people, and in forms capable of responding to the missional context in which God has planted an ecclesial community.

Parish derives from the latin Parochia from the Greek Paroikia, meaning to dwell and sojourn with. Parish Churches were always supposed to be deeply relationally embedded into a particular place with all the people who live, work, study or simply pass through a particular geographic area. In many Anglican Dioceses parishes literally have physical boundaries like the Diocese of London in the UK and the Diocese of Toronto in Canada. Some like the Diocese of Niagara never had hard set boundaries but were called to serve particular parish neighbourhoods.

Unfortunately with the effect of the ever increasing market society, this basis has been eroded over time so that parish churches became little more than those who turn up on Sunday mornings, which was also exacerbated by the selling of rectories so that clergy no longer lived and worked in the places they served and those who attended churches often increasingly did not live in or near the parish. This has resulted in a reduction in relational presence and the loss of understanding of what parish churches are supposed to be about.

Additionally, we are living beyond Christendom (although some do not really own this). Yet we are not necessarily living in a post-religious world. Across Canada, the United States, Britain, Europe, New Zealand and elsewhere, the cultural assumptions that once made Christian faith familiar can no longer be presumed. Many people have no experience of Christian faith or the Church. Others have left churches but remain spiritually curious or open to returning. Others have little interest in what they perceive as institutional religion but are searching for meaning, community, transcendence, spirituality, justice, belonging and hope. We are therefore living in a post-Christendom and increasingly post-secular context: a culture in which the Church can no longer assume that people will come to it simply because it is there.

What is not said but implied, is that some who work for churches find it impossible to reimagine the church in non-Christendom form, who then advance the notion that they would rather see their local church die rather than change. I do think this shows a failure of leadership. For me, this is unacceptable, partly because this really does not own Church history which has been a constant source of struggle over millennia as the Church has faced crises and forced to respond to major cultural change.

In our times, I do believe that the missional challenge is therefore not simply to make existing congregations larger, although growing healthy congregations remains an important focus. We need to recover two complementary forms of missional engagement at the parish level. We need ‘healthy outreach’ to those with whom it is bridgeable towards inherited church, and we need ‘contextual mission’ among those for whom it is currently unbridgeable to inherited church. Both are essential. Neither should be allowed to consume the other. Finally, we need mixed ecology parishes who then hold together and engage in healthy outreach AND contextual mission.

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Some people are relatively close to our existing ecclesial life. They may have grown up Christian, have memories of church, have friends who attend, have been baptised or confirmed, or have simply been looking for a community of faith for sometime. Others have left church but remain open to returning. Others have never belonged to a church but are comfortable entering an existing Christian community to explore. For these people, healthy outreach can build genuine bridges. Invitation, hospitality, ‘being-with’ type explorations, pastoral relationships, community meals, accessible worship, baptismal ministry, children’s ministry and other forms of outreach can help people move naturally towards inherited church. This work matters enormously.

The answer to the decline of inherited church cannot be to abandon those who are genuinely able and willing to cross the bridge into it. Parish churches should remain places of welcome, prayer, Eucharist, teaching, pastoral care and Christian formation. Ordained priests and parish church congregations have an important vocation to cultivate healthy, outward-facing communities that invite people into the richness of inherited Christian life.

But there is also another missional reality that many seem reluctant to face.

There are people for whom there is no bridge. Some have no Christian background. Some have been profoundly alienated by what they consider Institutional religion. Some inhabit social or cultural worlds where church is largely absent. Some are spiritually curious but have no interest in conventional congregational life. Some are interested in contemplation, justice, community, spirituality or questions of meaning but would not identify those interests with Christianity. Some have never encountered a form of Christianity that speaks intelligibly into their lives.

For these people, simply improving our Sunday invitation is not going to work. This is where contextual mission becomes essential.

Mixed ecology church therefore requires us to recognise that mission happens across different distances from inherited church. There is healthy bridgeable outreach, where the task is to build relationships and pathways into existing Christian community - and there is contextual mission among those who are presently much further from our inherited forms, where the task is not bridgeable into our church but instead, to discover what faithful Christian loving service might look like in their context.

I deliberately use the language of “the unbridgeable” here with some caution. I do not mean that people are permanently unreachable by God, nor that some people are somehow outside the possibility of Christian faith. The “unbridgeable” describes the missional distance between a person or community and the forms of church we currently know. What appears unbridgeable from the perspective of our existing congregation may become bridgeable when trained missioners assist the willing Church to move towards people and discover a different form of relationship.

This distinction has profound implications for how we deploy various vocations and the increasing need for lay missioners, particularly volunteer commissioned lay missioners, (see earlier post).

If every ordained priest is expected simultaneously to maintain an inherited congregation, grow attendance, provide pastoral care, administer a parish and pioneer contextual mission among people who have no relationship with church, something will inevitably give way. This is an impossible ask. In most cases, the urgent demands of the existing congregation will always win and mission will not happen.

This is not because all ordained priests are insufficiently missional. It is because clergy only have so much capacity and also because we have confused different vocations and the need for teams given the complexity of our post-secular context.

A mixed ecology parish therefore needs different vocations working together.

We need ordained priests who are gifted in growing and renewing inherited congregations.

We need some ordained missioners who are called to pioneer new initiatives that we hope will eventually grow new Christian communities in a Diocesan context.

We need permanent or distinctive deacons whose vocation is particularly suited to connecting the gathered Church with the needs and people of the wider community and engage in healthy parish-based outreach.

We need commissioned volunteer lay missioners and licensed lay missioners - both paid and voluntary, appropriately trained and supported - who are released to undertake contextual mission beyond the normal reach of the parish church.

This is not duplication. It is an ecology of vocations.

The permanent deacon has a particularly important place within this ecology. The distinctive diaconate should not be understood simply as a halfway point on the way to priesthood. The deacon’s vocation is distinctive: a ministry of service, proclamation and connection between the gathered Church and the world to which Christ sends it.

The deacon can stand at the threshold. The deacon belongs within the sacramental life of the Church and yet is sent towards those beyond its ordinary boundaries. The deacon can help the parish discover its parish neighbourhood again. The deacon can listen to the community, identify needs, cultivate relationships, build healthy bridges and help the congregation recognise where Christ is already present.

This means that the permanent deacon can be particularly important in the healthy outreach end of mixed ecology in a parish neighbourhood. The deacon can help a parish become genuinely outward-facing. They can develop relationships with local organisations, schools, community groups, people experiencing poverty, newcomers, older people and others who may already be within reach of the parish. They can help the congregation understand its responsibility for the neighbourhood and create pathways through which people can encounter Christian community.

The deacon can therefore become a bridge-builder. But bridge-building is not the whole of mission.

There are also contexts where there is no obvious bridge. This is where the vocation of the commissioned, lay and ordained missioner becomes essential.

A missioner may be sent into a neighbourhood, network or community where there is little existing relationship with the Church. Their task is not to begin by asking, “How can we get these people to our church?”

Their first questions are different:

Who are these people?
What matters to them?
What are their hopes and fears?
Where do they gather?
What are their stories?
What is God already doing among them?
What might a Christian presence look like here?
What form of community might emerge if we listened carefully enough and begin with some form of loving service?

Note: I am going to do a future piece on the Contextual Mission Process, not for now.

This is contextual mission. It requires people who are able to inhabit uncertainty.

Missioners need to be comfortable with experimentation, patient relationship-building and outcomes that cannot be predicted in advance. They need theological formation, missional skills, spiritual maturity and the freedom to try things that may not work.

Some will be ordained, many should be lay, some should be employed by parishes or dioceses as Ordained and licensed lay missioners. Some will be volunteers or Commissioned Lay Missioners who receive serious formation and supervision. Some may work part-time. Some may emerge organically from the communities themselves.

What matters is that the Church recognises these as genuine missional vocations rather than treating them as enthusiastic volunteers who happen to run missional initiatives.

A trained lay missioner may have a vocation every bit as significant for the future of the Church as an ordained priest.

A permanent deacon may have a missional vocation that is different from - and not inferior to - that of an ordained priest.

An ordained missioner will have a ministry radically different from that of an incumbent whose vocation is to sustain an inherited church and its congregations.

Mixed ecology requires us to recover this differentiation of vocations.

The New Testament itself gives us an extraordinarily diverse ecclesial ecology. The earliest Christians gathered in the Temple and in homes. The Church in Jerusalem did not look identical to the Church in Antioch. Paul preached in synagogues, public spaces and households. He reasoned with people who already knew the Jewish Scriptures and proclaimed Christ among Gentiles who had no such religious framework. Christian communities gathered around households, networks of friendship and local communities.

Acts chapter 18 provides a particularly striking picture. Paul begins by reasoning in the synagogue in Corinth. When opposition emerges, he simply moves next door to the house of Titius Justus, and a Christian community develops there. The Gospel is not restricted to one organisational doorway. It moves between inherited religious space, public engagement, households and newly forming Christian communities as living breathing organisms.

Romans chapter 16 gives us further evidence of churches meeting in homes. The New Testament Church was not a single ecclesial format replicated everywhere. It was an ecology of Christian communities emerging in response to different people, places and missional opportunities.

The point is not that the New Testament provides a ready-made blueprint for contemporary mixed ecology church. It does not. The point is that the apostolic Church was never dependent upon one uniform way of being Church or one missional strategy.

The same is true of Anglican history.

The Church of England provides important examples, but it should not be treated as the normative Anglican model. Across the Anglican Communion, different national Churches have repeatedly developed new forms of mission alongside inherited expressions of Church. Missionary societies, religious communities, chaplaincies, schools, hospitals, urban missions, lay evangelism and communities of religious life have all existed alongside parish churches.

The nineteenth-century missionary movements of Anglicanism are one obvious example. But this history must be handled critically. Anglican mission was sometimes entangled with colonial power and assumptions of cultural superiority. In Canada, especially, the history of residential schools means that any contemporary account of mission must be willing to name the profound harm done when Christian mission became entangled with colonial domination and oppressive and violent forms of outreach.

A future mixed ecology cannot simply repeat that history in a new vocabulary. It must instead begin with listening, humility, local discernment and contextuality. But at the same time, it should not throw out the baby with the bath water in some form of panic. Mixed Ecology parishes should resist ‘church as business practice’ and also avoid slipping back to conservative patriarchy or beyond orthodoxy seeking to water down the centrality of Jesus or the Christian faith particularly in the face of rising forms of paganism and pantheism, (note this is different to panentheism which is thoroughly Christian arising in mystical theology).

Getting back to Mixed Ecology and the Anglican World Churches, this is why the Anglican Church of Canada matters in its own right, as do the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, the Episcopal Church in the United States, the Scottish Episcopal Church, the Church in Wales and the Anglican communities of Europe and elsewhere. Each embodies different relationships between inherited church, mission, culture and place. There is no single Anglican model to export. Mixed ecology must never become another form of ecclesial colonialism.

The principle is shared; the expression must be local. This is modelling unity in diversity not unity in conformity.

What mixed ecology parish church looks like in Hamilton Ontario will not necessarily look like a mixed ecology parish church in Cardiff, Auckland, Edinburgh, Chicago, Paris or Wellington. What it looks like in an urban Canadian parish will not necessarily resemble its expression in an Indigenous community, or a rural parish, or a university chaplaincy or a European congregation serving people across national and linguistic boundaries.

The genius of Anglicanism is precisely its capacity to inhabit particular places. Mixed Ecology parish is just a continuation of this.

This brings us back to the parish. As I stated earlier, if a church is to be a parish church it cannot simply be the congregation that turns up on Sunday. The parish is the Church’s commitment to a place. It is the promise that Christians will pray for, serve, love, listen to, and seek to discern what God is doing within this neighbourhood.

A mixed ecology parish therefore needs to sustain the inherited church and both healthy outreach and contextual mission.

The deacon and others can help the congregation build relationships with people who are already within reach. They can develop healthy outreach that enables people to encounter inherited Christian community without reducing outreach to recruitment.

The various missioners can be released to move beyond existing parish congregations and diocese into contexts where there is little or no existing relationship with church. They can then develop experimental, contextual forms of loving service, building new ecclesial communities out of contextual mission.

A mixed ecology parish therefore holds these three activities together - sustaining and deepening the spirituality of existing congregations, establishing new healthy outreach to grow these congregations (with the challenge that they need to practice loving hospitality) and starting long term contextual mission.

The diocese also then has the capacity to establish new missions through contextual missions by deploying ordained and licensed lay missioners to reach people groups in contexts miles away from any form of church.

This is precisely what makes ecology the appropriate metaphor. Different forms of life inhabiting the same ecosystem.

Yet some will continue to resist. The attractional church holding onto the delusion that Christendom has not passed, assumes that mission happens by inviting people into what already exists. Come to the worship service, the building, the programme, the course, and become part of our congregation.

There is nothing wrong with invitation when part of a committed healthy and relational outreach. Christian hospitality requires invitation, which is still relevant for open outreach with the bridgeable, but invitation alone is inadequate in a culture where many people are too far away from church for this approach.

For some people, the bridge into inherited church is short. For others, missioners as the Church will need to leave the building altogether and enter a context in which there is no bridge.

That requires courage, experimentation and trained missioners. It requires the Church to trust lay and ordained people enough to release them into genuinely apostolic missional ministry.

This is why a mixed ecology parish cannot simply appoint one person with the word mission added to their job description and expect transformation. It requires an intentional ecology of vocations.

The incumbent or priest may have primary responsibility for the sacramental and pastoral life of the inherited congregation.

The permanent deacon may have a particular vocation to service, community connection and healthy bridge-building.

Commissioned Lay missioner volunteers may lead neighbourhood engagement, from new loving service initiatives to build parish based mixed ecology contextual mission.

Licensed Lay and Ordained missioners may, with a long term vision, seek to establish new Christian communities supported by the diocese in areas miles away from any expression of Church.

Parish congregations can themselves become more missional by engaging in healthy outreach as community engagement rather than a group that simply receives ministry.

In the end, the diocese has a responsibility to support all of this to be made possible. A mixed ecology diocese needs to develop and support both forms of mission. It needs to encourage healthy outreach through parish ministry, deacons and lay leadership. But it must also deploy trained lay and ordained missioners into contexts where there is little or no existing relationship with the Church. This needs to happen at both parish and diocesan levels.

The point is to avoid the creation of another centralised diocesan programme. Rather the diocese needs to create the environment for missional ecology in which there is discernment and training for vocations and where the parish and diocese cooperate.

The diocese becomes the wider missional ecosystem within which parish experiments can flourish. The diocese can hold a larger geography and enable mission across boundaries. This is why the future of the diocese is mixed ecology too.

A mixed ecology diocese should know its territory. It should know its cities, towns, rural communities, universities, workplaces, hospitals, prisons and neighbourhoods. It should know where communities are growing and where they are disappearing. It should know where there is poverty and where there is wealth. It should know where people are spiritually searching and where the Church has become invisible. It should deploy differing Christian lay and ordained vocations accordingly.

This means training, theological formation, supervision, prayer, resources, and permission to experiment accepting that some experiments will fail. A Church that cannot tolerate failure cannot be missional.

A Church that cannot be missional will increasingly be unable to reach people for whom its inherited forms are inaccessible. This is why the distinction between healthy outreach and contextual mission matters so much.

The future of the parish is therefore not less parish. It is parish fully rediscovered as a mixed ecology of inherited church, healthy outreach and contextual mission.

The future of the diocese is not less diocese. It is diocese rediscovered as the missional Church within a particular region.

Mixed ecology is not the abandonment of Anglicanism. It is Anglicanism recovering its missional imagination for a world beyond Christendom.

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This prayer practice has six stages to pray and reflect through:

1. Entering into contemplation

2. Letting go of other peoples Jesus

3. The Question

4. Encountering Jesus

5. Receiving Jesus’ welcome

6. Your response

So this is a bit different to other contemplative practices I have posted as it is seeking to facilitate an encounter of God drawing on a particular encounte…

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Continuing with the theme of the last few weeks, of Jesus deliberately crossing social boundaries, confusing the disciples in his increasingly counter-religious behaviour, Jesus is quite provocative to the disciples in the next Sunday lectionary text of Matthew 16.13–20. Here Jesus, being in another non-jewish place, this time Caesarea Philippi, a very gentile place, Jesus begins with a question. Not holding anything back, Jesus says, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?”

The location matters. Caesarea Philippi was a place you would not expect a Jewish Messiah to visit, let alone the place for the first utterance by the disciples of Jesus being the Messiah. Caesarea Philippi stood for everything that was considered wrong by the Jews of the time. The town was previously a Greek settlement established for the pagan worship of the Greek God Pan. There was a large cave and rock which were the centre of a pagan worship cult which was also the source of the river Jordan. So it was considered desecrated place by the Jews as it was associated with pagan practices. We remember that the Greeks were hated by the Jews. In167 BCE under King Antiochus IV Epiphanes, one of the post Alexander the Great Greek rulers of Judea, this Greek King attempted to impose Macedonian/Greek religion and culture on Judea banning Jewish worship and circumcision and desecrated the temple in Jerusalem by building a massive statue of the God Zeus in the Holy of Holies, and where the temple was rededicated to Zeus rather than Yhweh. This led to a violent revolt. In the time of Jesus, Caesarea Philippi reflected a small remnant greek population in Judea and also the Roman-Jewish community and the puppet kings of Herod and Philip. The area was directly ruled by King Herod at the time, as part of the Roman Empire - a tactic used by the Romans to try and use local ethnic leadership to maintain order. So these pagan communities and both the puppet Herodian Kings and the Greeks were loathed by the Jewish inhabitants of Judea. In fact the name Caesarea was named in honour of Emperor Caesar and Philippi after Philip a previous King of the Herodian puppet line.

So by the time of Jesus, the memory of foreign rulers imposing pagan power on Jewish sacred land was very much part of the historical and religious consciousness of first century Judaism.

It is even more astonishing that in such a place of the gentiles, international foreign powers and pagan worship, that Jesus raises the question with the disciples of who he was. Jesus doesn’t take the disciples somewhere religiously safe and ask them who he is. He takes them to the edge. The question remains deeply challenging and almost like a test for his followers to discern who Jesus is within a plural and contested world. It is as if Jesus is deliberating setting up a contrast between himself the true Messiah and the imperial Emperor Caesar as a false Messiah, between himself as the humble Hebrew God-Messiah in the line of King David and the false kingship of the Herodians. In a world full of competing claims about God, power, identity and salvation, Jesus is really challenging the disciples.

Jesus refers to himself as the Son of Man. In Greek, the expression is ho huios tou anthrōpou. Literally, it means the son of the human being, though in ordinary biblical usage it can simply mean a human being or mortal. Its Hebrew and Aramaic background is important. In the book of Ezekiel, God repeatedly addresses the prophet as son of man, ben adam: mortal one, son of Adam, human being, creature of the earth. The phrase reminds Ezekiel of his humanity before the majesty of God.

But there is another and deeper scriptural resonance. In Daniel chapter 7, Daniel sees one like a son of man coming with the clouds of heaven. This figure is given dominion, glory, and kingship by the Ancient One. His kingdom is described as an everlasting kingdom that shall not pass away. The Aramaic phrase in Daniel is bar enash, one like a human being. In contrast to the violent and beast-like empires of Daniel’s vision, this figure appears in human form and receives authority from God.

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When Jesus calls himself the Son of Man, he seems deliberately to gather these resonances together. He is truly human: vulnerable, travelling, teaching, suffering, and eventually dying. Yet he is also the one through whom God’s missional restorative purposes and sovereignty are revealed and established. In Matthew’s Gospel, the Son of Man has authority to forgive sins; he will suffer; he will be raised; and he will come in glory. The phrase allows Jesus to reveal himself gradually. He is not a Messiah made in the image of human ambition or political power. He is the human one who bears God’s authority, enters suffering, and finally receives the kingdom.

The disciples answer Jesus’ first question with the names that others have suggested: John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets. Each answer recognises something significant. Jesus does indeed stand within the Jewish prophetic story. He speaks God’s word, calls people to repentance, confronts injustice, and announces the nearness of God’s reign. Yet none of these answers is sufficient.

Then Jesus brings the question closer: “But who do you say that I am?” In Greek Hymeis de tina me legete einai?

There are moments in prayer when this question becomes personal. We may have inherited Christian language. We may know the Creed, the hymns, the Gospel stories, and the theological answers. These are precious gifts. Yet Christ still asks each of us, “Who do you say that I am?” Not as an examination, but as an invitation into deeper relationship.

Simon Peter answers: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

The word “Messiah” in Greek Christos, from which we get the word Christ. It translates the Hebrew word Mashiach, meaning “anointed one.” In the Jewish Scriptures, kings, priests, and sometimes prophets were anointed for God’s service. Over time, the hope grew for God’s anointed king: one who would fulfil God’s promises, restore justice, shepherd God’s people, and reveal the reign of God.

Peter’s confession is therefore bold. Jesus is not merely another teacher or prophet. He is the Messiah, the one in whom the hopes of the Jewish people find their fulfilment. Yet Matthew immediately deepens the confession: Jesus is “the Son of the living God.”

The phrase “living God” matters. It contrasts the God of Israel with lifeless idols and with every false power that claims ultimate loyalty. In the presence of empire, religion, wealth, fear, and human ambition, Peter names Jesus as the Son of the living God. His confession declares that the living God is not distant from the world but has come near in this particular person: Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus responds, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah.” The Greek word for blessed is makarios. It does not mean simply happy or fortunate. It speaks of a deep condition of being held within the life and favour of God. Peter is blessed, not because he has worked out the answer by intellectual effort, but because this truth has been revealed to him through the Spirit of God.

Jesus says, “Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.” The word for revelation is connected with apokalypsis: an uncovering, an unveiling, the drawing back of a curtain. Peter has not invented Christ’s identity. He has received a glimpse of it.

This is one of the great contemplative movements in the passage. Faith is not primarily something we manufacture. We do not reason our way into possession of the knowledge of God. We become receptive of God’s presence. We learn to be still enough to notice what God the Father the Creator is revealing. We allow the image of Jesus given to us by fear, habit, ideology, or wishful thinking to fall away. Then, slowly, the true Jesus the Emmanuel comes into view.

But then Peter blows it, because he himself has not understood the contrast between Jesus the Messiah and the false claims of the Messiah coming in power and majesty, and hence his line ‘get behind me satan’. Clearly Jesus is frustrated that Peter has not understood what type of Messiah Jesus will be. He will not be another Judas Maccabeus, who literally raised armies agains the Gentiles to use might and violence to bring political change. Instead he will be the suffering servant Messiah who goes towards the cross. The true Messiah will be the one who truly reveals God’s rule is the emperor enthroned in glory, but instead, the suffering servant God.

Jesus then says to Simon, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” In Greek there is a clear wordplay: su ei Petros, kai epi tautē tē petra oikodomēsō mou tēn ekklēsian.

“You are Petros, and upon this petra I will build my ekklēsia.”

Petros means stone or rock, and petra means rock or rocky foundation. Christians have reflected on this verse in different ways. It is reasonable to hear Jesus affirming Peter personally and giving him a distinctive role among the disciples. It is also reasonable to see the rock as Peter’s confession: the Church is built upon the recognition that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the living God. These two meanings do not need to be separated sharply. Peter is given a role precisely as the one who confesses Christ; his strength does not lie in self-importance, but in the truth to which he points.

Yet at the same time, Jesus might even be again making a contrast between the rock of the disciples come Apostles and the massive rock at the entrance to the cave as the site of pagan worship. Maybe the rock of the Christian faith is a sure foundation that even speaks to places of false worship and false faith. This could be so, but we do not know.

Further, in a rare situation in this Gospel, is the word translated “church”, ekklēsia. It does not mean a building, a denomination, or an institution in the modern sense. It means an assembly or gathered people. In the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, ekklēsia was often used for the assembly of Israel, the people gathered before God. Jesus is therefore speaking of a people called together around himself: a community formed by confession, worship, discipleship, mercy, forgiveness, and mission. It is again a deeply provocative word pointing out difference. The aetiology of this word was the name of the town councils of rich Greek ports - and who were on these rich greek speaking Roman port councils. No surprise, rich men. So who will be part of these new Christian ekklēsias? Women, children, slaves, the poor and a host of people excluded and marginalised in the Roman Empire, who become a visible expression of the invisible Kin-dom of God. It seems that Jesus again continues to use the context of this city to express contrast between the myth of redemptive power and violence and the ways of the Kin-dom and mission of God.

Matthew is the only Gospel writer to use the word ekklēsia, and he uses it only twice: here and later in Matthew 18, in a passage about reconciliation and communal responsibility. That is significant. The Church is not named as a private spiritual experience. It is a radical gathered body. It is the people who learn to belong to Jesus, and through him, belong to one another.

Yet the Church must never confuse itself with the Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom of Heaven, or basileia tōn ouranōn, is the reign or sovereign rule of God. It is not primarily a place we go after death. It is the active, restoring, liberating, and reconciling rule of God breaking into the world through Jesus.

The Church is not the Kin-dom in its fullness. The Church does not own the Kin-dom or control it. Rather, the Church is called to be a sign, servant, and foretaste of God’s Kin-dom. It is called to point beyond itself to the sovereignty of Jesus the Christ. When the Church welcomes the stranger, seeks justice, forgives, worships truthfully, cares for the poor, and lives in love, it bears witness to the Kin-dom. When it becomes preoccupied with status, control, exclusion, or self-preservation, it forgets the true Messiah on whose confession it stands.

Jesus promises that “the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.” Hades is the realm of death. The image is not necessarily one of the Church aggressively attacking the world, but of death itself being unable finally to overcome the people gathered around the risen Christ. The Church is founded upon the Messiah who will pass through death and be raised. It is also the Messiah who is sovereign even in cities like Caesarea Philippi.

This promise is especially important because the passage is immediately followed by Jesus beginning to speak of his suffering and death. Peter’s confession is true, but it is not yet complete in his understanding. Jesus is Messiah, but not in the way many expected. His kingship or rather kin-ship will be revealed through self-giving love. His victory over evil will not be achieved through domination, but through the cross and resurrection.

That is also why the Church’s life must take the shape of Christ. The Church is most faithful not when it seeks to be powerful in the world’s terms, but when it becomes a community of humble service, courageous truthfulness, costly love, and resurrection hope.

Jesus gives Peter “the keys of the kingdom of heaven.” Keys are symbols of stewardship and responsibility. They are not given for exclusion or private control. They are given to open what belongs to God. The language of binding and loosing had a recognised Jewish background, referring to discerning how God’s people should live: what should be permitted or forbidden, released or held. In Matthew 18, this responsibility is extended to the wider community in the context of forgiveness, reconciliation, and care.

The Church is therefore entrusted with a serious task: to discern, under Christ, what leads towards life and what binds people in death; what opens the way of the Kin-dom and what closes it; what needs forgiving, healing, challenging, or releasing. This authority is never detached from the character of Jesus. It is exercised faithfully only when it remains close to the crucified and risen Messiah.

There is a deeply contemplative invitation here. Before Peter is told what he will do, he is invited to see who Jesus is. Before the Church is named, Christ is confessed. Before the keys are given, revelation is received.

In a culture that often measures worth by activity, visibility, and achievement, this order matters. The Church begins not with a strategy but with contemplation: with attending to Christ. The question “Who do you say that I am?” comes before the question, “What shall we do?”

Perhaps, then, this passage invites us into a holy stillness. We can sit with Jesus at Caesarea Philippi. We can let the crowd’s answers fall away: prophet, teacher, moral example, spiritual guide, political symbol, cultural memory. We can listen again for the question addressed personally to us: “But who do you say that I am?”

We may not always have Peter’s clarity. There may be seasons when our answer is hesitant, partial, or burdened by doubt. Yet even then, we can remain before Christ. We can ask God the Father the Creator to reveal God the Son the Redeemer to us afresh. We can let the confession rise slowly from within us: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

And we can ask what it means to belong to the Church not merely as an institution, but as a people gathered around that confession. We are called to be living stones, not enclosed walls; a community that opens the doors of the Kin-dom rather than guarding them anxiously; a people whose common life makes visible the mercy, justice, and reconciling love of Christ.

The question at the heart of the Church is therefore not ultimately about the Church. It is about Jesus. Who do you say that I am?

May we have the wisdom to listen. May we receive the revelation rather than try to control it. May we confess Christ with Peter. And may we become, by the power of the Spirit, a people through whom the living God’s Kin-dom of heaven becomes more visible in the world.

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Homily compiled to reflect the readings for today: Genesis 45: 1-15, Matthew 15:21-28 and Acts 2:14-21,33-35.

Today’s readings are about hard borders that we humans create between insider and outsider; between injury and reconciliation; between who we think should belong and how different God’s purposes are, where God’s mercy is far wider than our borders.

Today’s Gospel brings us to a difficult encounter. Jesus has travelled to the region of Tyre and Sidon, beyond the familiar boundaries of Jewish people. A Canaanite woman comes to him, crying out for her daughter, who is suffering terribly: “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me.”

It is a deeply human prayer. She is a mother in anguish. She cannot protect or heal her child. All she can do is call for mercy.

Perhaps many of us know something of that prayer. It may be the prayer we have made for someone we love: “Lord, have mercy.” It may be a prayer shaped by illness, bereavement, anxiety, fractured relationships, or a world that seems too troubled to carry. It is not a polished prayer. It is the prayer of someone who has reached the point where only God can help.

Two days ago was the second anniversary of my father’s death, so this same prayer is in me. So I connect deeply this gutsy prayer from a desperate unnamed woman.

So she appeals to Jesus. At first, Jesus says absolutely nothing. The silence is painful and terrible. The disciples are irritated by her persistence. “Send her away,” they say. She is loud; she is inconvenient; her need has become disruptive. Then come Jesus’ words about the children’s bread and the ‘dogs’. Words that are shaming and very difficult to hear and which we should not rush past or explain away. These are uncharacteristically prejudiced and hard shaming words from Jesus, and it would be wrong to pretend otherwise.

The woman belongs to a people whom the Jewish people had long regarded as sinful outsiders and enemies. In the world of the time there were real boundaries of ethnicity, religion, history, power, and suspicion. Even though Judea was ruled by the Roman Empire it was a hotbed for intolerant coexistence and ethnic hatred. There were people assumed to belong and people aggressively excluded.

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We know something of this world. We see this not only in the terrible wars and conflict in the middle east, but also here in Hamilton. We ourselves are not immune. We too can become very accomplished at deciding, sometimes without saying aloud, who is good enough, respectable enough, settled enough, or like us enough to be welcomed without question. We do it in our neighbourhoods, in our politics, in our churches, and sometimes even within our own families. Currently it is immigrants, asylum seekers and Muslims who have come to Canada who are treated as threatening outsiders.

You may not of seen it, but Hamilton was named as the hate-crime capital of Canada. Here mutual hatred and intolerant co-existence are rife. Similarly, you can hear this in the disciples. They are in a region they are not supposed to be, encountering a woman they are not supposed to engage with, who has the audacity to ask Jesus for healing and outrageously keeps persisting. So they want to do the religious ritual purity thing modelled down the centuries by keeping boundaries, and send her away – keep her and her kind out.

But remarkably, this woman will not be sent away. She kneels before Jesus and says simply, “Lord, help me.” Then, with incredible courage, she answers his hard saying: “Yes, Lord, yet even dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”

She does not come from or ask for privilege. She, in her marginalised excluded state, where her humanity is so impoverished that we do not even know her name, appeals to God’s abundance. She trusts that there is mercy enough in this God that even the hated and those kept at the edge will not be forgotten. Miraculously this woman recognises Jesus as the Jewish Messiah before the Jews and disciples have. An outsider has named insider wisdom – something that was unspeakable and should never be named. She risks her life just saying these words. She prophetically names what the new Kingdom of God is going to be about.

And Jesus says to her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” Her daughter is healed.

This is not a story in which the woman is merely a passive recipient of the loving restorative purposes of God. She speaks, persists and refuses the place of exclusion. Her faith draws us into the widening horizon of God’s mercy. The Gospel makes clear that the grace of Christ cannot be contained within the boundaries by which human beings impose on one another.

The question comes close to us: who are the people whom we are tempted to send away? Not perhaps by using those words, but by making them feel that they must wait, explain themselves, prove themselves, or become more like us before they may be allowed to belong.

You the cathedral church have a critically important ministry to people this desperate Canaanite woman. I know as the diocesan community missioner, that there are many people who come into this cathedral carrying grief, trauma and loss. There are visitors here who have not crossed the threshold of a church for years and are unsure whether they will be welcomed. There are people who have been wounded by Christians, people who live with poverty, addiction, mental illness, loneliness, displacement, or fear. There are people whose background, culture, race, disability, identity, or experience has taught them to expect that religious people and spaces will not make room for them to belong.

The Canaanite woman asks us whether they will find in us the disciples’ exclusionary impatience, or the loving mercy of Jesus. I am extremely grateful for the leadership of Dean Tim and the now several corporation leaders who have faithfully sought to live out God’s unbounded loving mercy at some cost and difficulty, because the values of the Kingdom here, of loving mercy to others like the Canaanite woman, cut against our Canadian boundary driven society. This is a critical mission, and one that is not easy to sustain with much nimbyist criticism from neighbours.

This is where the reading from Acts opens the story still further. Peter stands before the crowd at Pentecost and interprets what has happened: this is the promise of Joel being fulfilled. God says, “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.” Sons and daughters shall prophesy. Young and old shall see visions and dream dreams. Even servants and slaves are included in the outpouring of God’s Spirit. Critically God is concerned with everyone - All flesh.

The Spirit is not poured out upon the impressive, or the secure, the educated, the powerful, or the religiously fluent. God’s life is given where we least expect it. God speaks through daughters as well as sons, through the young as well as the old, through those whom the world overlooks and despises as much as those whom it honours.

Peter goes on to say that the crucified Jesus has been raised and exalted after his own experiences of terrible exclusion and abandonment. The one rejected by human beings has been made Lord; and from that place of resurrected restoration, he pours out the Holy Spirit.

This is incredibly important. The risen Christ does not establish a smaller, narrower and respectable religious elitest club. He creates a transformed people whose life is opened out by the Spirit of God.

Genesis gives us another image of this holy widening. Joseph finally reveals himself to the brothers who betrayed him. It is an extraordinary moment. For years he has carried the memory of their cruelty: the pit, the sale, the separation from his father, the life he did not choose. Now he has power. His brothers are vulnerable. He could have punished them out of a worldly spirit of vengeance and hatred – so how the world is today -where even deluded Christian nationalists in various denominations focus on hate and exclusion with not the slightest openness to the loving restorative purposes of God. So easily this could have been Joseph’s story, he could have made is brothers remain at a distance. Instead, Joseph weeps and says, “Come closer to me.”

This has to be one of the most moving invitations in Scripture. Come closer. Not because what happened did not matter, because it mattered deeply. Reconciliation is not denial, and it is not pretending that harm was harmless. Joseph’s tears tell us that. But he sees that God has not abandoned him within the story of trauma. God has worked, even through what was intended for evil, to preserve life.

Then Joseph embraces his brothers. He speaks with them. He makes a future possible where there had only been fear.

Perhaps this is the particular work of mercy in our own time. We live in a world so practised in suspicion, accusation, and estrangement. We learn to protect ourselves by hardening the borders of our hearts. We can remember the wound long after we have forgotten its full cause. Some wounds are real and need truth, patience, accountability, and healing.

Yet the Gospel asks whether we will allow Christ to make us a people capable, when the time is right and grace has done its work, of saying: “Come closer.”

I believe you the cathedral have a particular calling here. This building speaks of history, beauty, memory, worship, and continuity. These are gifts. They lift the heart beyond the smallness of the present moment. They remind us that we belong to a communion larger than ourselves, and to a God whose praise has been sung through many generations.

However, unlike so many cathedrals I have experienced in England, you have not been tempted to allow beauty to become a barrier and for to become a fence. You have wonderfully resisted the danger of becoming a monument rather than a threshold; a building admired from a distance rather than a living house of prayer where people discover that they are seen, welcomed and loved. Through the Cathedral Café, through the midweek Eucharists and bible studies, you have kept allegiance to Christ, and given room for people like the Canaanite woman to belong, even when it has not been easy.

The vocation of this wonderful cathedral has not simply been to preserve a sacred space. It has sustained a calling to be a visible generous community of the heart of God, in the centre of the city of Hamilton. A place of relational love amongst the dysfunctionality, hopelessness, crime, danger and antisocial behaviour. I have seen that you have strived to be a place where the lonely may find companionship, where strangers may become guests, where questions are not feared, where those carrying pain are received tenderly, and where people of every background may encounter the living Christ.

That welcome must be more than a sign on a door. It is expressed in the way we speak to the unfamiliar face; in the patience with which we listen; in your concern for the poor and displaced; in your refusal to make anyone feel that they are merely tolerated. It is expressed now in your worship, your service, and your life together tell people: “There is room for you here.”

That does not mean that you can meet every need by in your own strength. Nor does it mean that welcome is sentimental or easy. The Canaanite woman’s story is not easy. Joseph’s tears are not easy. Pentecost is not controllable or tidy. Yet the Spirit does not leave us as we are. The Spirit gives us courage to listen when someone calls out, to repent of the ways we have excluded, to make room at the table, and to notice where God is already at work beyond our familiar boundaries.

And perhaps the most important question for us today is this: where are the borders within me? Who do I find difficult to welcome? Whose cry do I hope someone else will deal with? Where has old hurt made me guarded? Where has fear made me believe that mercy must be rationed? Why have I circumed to the lie that there is only so much attention, dignity, forgiveness, or belonging to go around?

The good news is that the mercy of God is not a scarce resource. In Christ there is enough. The Spirit is poured out upon all flesh. The table of God is larger than our imagination. The God who says to Joseph’s brothers, “Come closer,” is the same God who hears the Canaanite woman’s cry and answers her faith.

Ultimately we express this when we come to the Eucharistic table. We do not come because we have earned our place. We come because Christ has invited us. We come with our need, our gratitude, our questions, our failures, and our hope. All are invited. Having received God’s loving mercy, we are sent out to become signs of that mercy in the world.

So may we, this cathedral Christian community be a place where no one is treated as a crumb; where the Spirit’s gifts are recognised in unexpected people; where the wounded are met with tenderness; where reconciliation is patiently sought; and where the welcome of God becomes visible in our worship, our service, our words, and our lives.

Amen.

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Picture of the Revd Deacon Stephen La Salle who as a distinctive deacon inspires me in the way he lives out this vocation very deeply in presence to Smithville, Ontario in the Anglican Diocese of Niagara where I work. Picture includes some members of the Parish Church.

There is nothing like a crisis that forces people to get back to the heart of things. I believe sometimes cultural changes brings opportunities or recoveries. Like all religious traditions facing the reality of the contemporary world now dictated by a particular all-embracing form of capitalistic market societies, the Anglican Church stands at a pivotal moment in its history. We are living through the death blows of Christendom, the collapse of inherited assumptions about Christian belief and belonging, and the emergence of an increasingly post-Christian and post-secular culture. Many of the patterns of ministry that served the Church well for centuries are proving less effective in a world where most people no longer possess even a basic understanding of Christianity, and where many hold negative assumptions about the Church shaped by history, culture and personal experience.

This changing context calls for more than a form of new managerialism or new programmes or better strategies. It calls for the recovery of forgotten gifts that have always belonged to the Church. Among the most important of these I believe is the distinctive vocation of the permanent or distinctive deacon.

The Anglican Church has never abandoned the ancient threefold order of ministry. We continue to affirm the apostolic ordering of bishops, priests and deacons. Yet while we have preserved the order, we have often lost sight of the distinctive vocation of the diaconate and its missional orientation. In many places the deacon has become little more than a transitional stage before ordained priesthood or a liturgical assistant whose ministry is largely exercised within the sanctuary. The tragedy is not simply that we have too few permanent deacons who understand what being a deacon is about. The deeper tragedy is that we have forgotten why the Church has always needed them.

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If the Church is serious about renewal in a post-Christendom context, then reclaiming the missionally orientated permanent diaconate is not an optional extra. It is an essential part of recovering the missional identity of the whole Church.

The biblical foundations for this vocation are compelling. While scholars continue to debate the precise origins of the diaconate, Acts 6 provides an important picture of the Church recognising the need for leaders who could ensure that the Gospel was embodied in practical, relational and missional ways. The appointment of the Seven was not simply about administration but about enabling the Church to flourish in both contextual mission and loving service as outreach. Stephen and Philip, often associated with this early ministry, were not merely organisers of charitable work. They preached Christ, crossed cultural boundaries, exercised missional ministries and became bridge-builders between the Church and those beyond its immediate community, locality or parish neighbourhood

The New Testament also speaks of deacons in Philippians 1 and 1 Timothy 3 as a recognised and valued order of ministry within the early Church. Increasingly, biblical scholarship has challenged the assumption that the Greek word diakonossimply means “servant.” Rather, it carries the sense of one who acts as an authorised vocational ministry. This is significant. It suggests that the deacon is not simply called to humble loving service - although service remains central - but to represent Christ and the Church faithfully within the world by being relationally immersed in the world.

This image beautifully captures the distinctive vocation of the deacon. The deacon stands at the threshold between Church and the local community or neighbourhood. The deacon gathers the needs, hopes and questions of the community or neighhourhood and brings them before the praying Church. At the same time, the deacon carries the Gospel of Christ beyond the gathered congregation into the places where people live, work, struggle and search for meaning. The deacon inhabits the boundary, constantly moving between worship and missional witness, between altar and local marketplace, between the life of the Church and the life of the community.

Sadly, this rich vocation became increasingly obscured during the long centuries of Christendom.

As Christianity became culturally dominant, the Church no longer understood itself primarily as a missional community living relationally among people unfamiliar with the Gospel. Parish life increasingly revolved around caring for an already Christian society. The priest naturally became the dominant model of ministry because the central task was pastoral oversight of a largely Christian population. Within this context the deacon gradually lost a distinctive identity. Rather than remaining a missional bridge between Church and the local community or neighbhourhood, the deacon became either an apprentice priest or a permanent worship liturgical assistant. The ministry of the threshold slowly disappeared because, within Christendom, the threshold itself had largely disappeared.

Many Anglican churches still carry this inheritance. Permanent deacons are often poorly understood because the Church continues to imagine ministry through a Christendom lens. We ask how deacons can assist priests rather than asking what a distinctive missional vocation God has given to the diaconate. As a result, we often end up creating what might be called a “pseudo-priest” - someone who performs selected liturgical functions but whose unique charism remains underdeveloped. I see the debates going on in the Anglican Church of Canada and they play out exactly this problem.

Yet history has shifted once again.

The collapse of Christendom means that the Church now finds itself in a missional context remarkably similar in many respects to that of the pre-Christendom early Church. In most places now, contemporary multicultural society can no longer be assumed to possess any Christian memory. Many people have never entered a church. Others have consciously left. Still others carry painful memories of the Church and understandably approach Christianity with caution or suspicion. The contextual of a threshold then has returned.

This is precisely why the distinctive diaconate matters once more.

The renewal of a more missional parish life increasingly depends upon becoming what has been described as a mixed ecology Church - one that values inherited congregations whilst also cultivating new Christian communities through contextual mission. Such a Church recognises that there is no single pathway into Christian faith, some people remain open to exploring Christianity through existing parish communities, others require entirely new forms of Christian community that emerge through long-term contextual mission within their own cultures and networks.

Within this mixed ecology, the permanent deacon has a uniquely important vocation.

I have increasingly come to distinguish between two complementary forms of missional engagement. The first is what I describe as healthy relational outreach. This is the ministry of building genuine relationships within the local community with those who remain open to Christianity or to exploring church life. These are often people who are spiritually curious, the open de-churched, or those who have never belonged to a church but do not regard Christianity as alien or threatening. Through friendship, hospitality, listening and compassionate service, they can be gently invited to discover the life of the worshipping community.

The second form of missional engagement is contextual mission among those who are largely unbridgeable through inherited parish life. These are people whose cultural assumptions, life experiences or social locations mean that traditional church is not a meaningful point of engagement. Here the task is not simply outreach but the patient and humble work of accompanying people over many years as entirely new ecclesial communities emerges out of contextual mission within their own contexts.

Both forms of missional activity are essential, but they are not the same thing.

The very real danger of Christendom is that many parish churches remain ‘attractional’ and then do ‘disconnected’ or ‘manipulative’ outreach as the ONLY missional activity they understand which will not work because such parish churches do not understand that such approaches are controlling. In fact such activities can do more harm than good because they do not listen or engage with local people outside of church.

But, getting back to the distinction, a healthy missional parish church will need a balance of missional activity - healthy outreach and contextual mission. Neither approach is sufficient on its own.

Priests, missioners, lay leaders and deacons all have vital contributions to make. Yet I believe healthy relational outreach lies at the very heart of the distinctive diaconate.

The permanent deacon is uniquely placed to help the parish church to become attentive to its neighbourhood. The deacon equips congregations to notice where God is already at work beyond church walls. The deacon cultivates relationships, encourages hospitality, forms partnerships within the community, accompanies those exploring faith, and helps create natural bridges between everyday life and the worshipping community. This is not simply loving service, nor is it a recruitment programme for church attendance. It is the ministry of recognising that the Holy Spirit is already present and active within the life of the community and helping the Church participate faithfully in God’s loving mission.

This understanding of the diaconate also challenges the whole Church to recover a deeper theology of mission. Mission does not begin with our activity. It begins with God’s activity. The Father God the Creator continues to send the Son God the Redeemer, and the Father and the Son continue to send the Holy Spirit, God the Life Sustainer and Unsettler, into the world. The Church is invited to participate in that divine movement. The deacon reminds the whole Church that we do not carry God into the world. Rather, we discover the God who has already gone before us.

For this reason, the renewal of the permanent diaconate is not simply about filling another ecclesiastical office. It is about recovering a way of seeing. Deacons help the Church lift its eyes beyond its own concerns and rediscover the missional horizon that has always been part of its identity. They remind ordained priests that the altar points towards the world and the Eucharist is the missional feast that commissions the entire body of Christ into missional engagement into the world before it regathered next Sunday as well as the call to a missional rhythm of life for the week ahead. Deacons remind congregations that worship flows naturally into missional engagement and living. Deacons and missioners remind bishops that the health of the Church is measured not only by what happens within our buildings but also by how faithfully we participate in God’s mission beyond them.

We desperately need such leaders, both deacons and missioners in this work.

We need women and men of deep prayer, contemplative attentiveness and theological maturity. We need leaders who can discern where the Holy Spirit is already moving within neighbourhoods, schools, workplaces and communities. We need people who are naturally relational, gifted at building trust, able to accompany those exploring faith, and committed to helping parishes become outward-looking communities rooted in hope rather than fear. We need deacons who are neither frustrated ‘pseudo-priests’ nor liturgical assistants, but joyful ministers of thresholds between Church and Parish Neighbourhoods.

I do believe, that the future renewal of the Anglican Church will not come through recovering forms of Christendom and the delusion that still holds in larger Anglican parish Churches that they can make Christendom informed Churches continue to work in this mode of being. Nor will it come simply through reorganising parish structures or introducing new programmes particularly the harmful obsession with detached outreach. It will come through rediscovering our identity as a people sent by the Triune God into the world. Bishops, priests and deacons each have a distinctive contribution to make to that missional vocation.

Perhaps the time has come for the Anglican Church in its various national and provincial forms, to rediscover that the ancient order of deacons was never a historical accident or merely a stepping stone to ordained priesthood. It was, and remains, one of God’s gifts to the Church for precisely the kind of missional age in which we now find ourselves.

If we are serious about renewing the Church for a post-Christendom world, then we must once again discern, form, deploy and celebrate the permanent diaconate - not as a diminished priesthood, but as the Church’s distinctive ministry of the threshold, calling the whole people of God to participate more deeply in the mission of Christ.

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The Canaanite Woman asks for healing for her daughter by Ilyas Basim Khuri Bazzi Rahib, a Coptic monk from 1684 in Egypt, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. Credit also goes to the website textweek.com.

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The Canaanite Woman asks for healing for her daughter by Ilyas Basim Khuri Bazzi Rahib, a Coptic monk from 1684 in Egypt, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. Credit also goes to the website textweek.com.

I have already explored this text recently for a mid-week Eucharist with Homeless and Marginalised people, which you can find here. So with this reflection I want to take a slightly different perspective looking at the why of Jesus is crossing into lands that Jews really did not go, with someone that Jews should not associated with, and some of the underlying contemplative implications of this.

Matthew 15:10–20, 21–28 is difficult, and as I said in my previous reflection on this text, Jesus’ responses sound prejudiced. Some have said this was Jesus making a point, but I am not so sure, we will never know. For this reflection I want to look at the underlying connection the gospel writer appears to be making. Jesus is in a place he is not supposed to be talking to a woman he should not be talking to, with the disciples who don’t want to be there and wanted to send her away.

We must not rush past this significance. This is Jesus opening up a new way of being beyond the usual borders of the old covenant and now, in much confusion to the disciples, is opening up the new covenant of God and the DNA of the Kin-dom of God. In this encounter between Jesus and the Canaanite women we enter a conversation marked by silence, apparent refusal, persistence and, finally, an extraordinary declaration of faith. The passage is difficult precisely because it does not allow us to make Jesus immediately comfortable. It asks us to stay with the tension and to discover what happens when faith refuses to be silenced.

Jesus begins by saying, Listen and understand. The Greek is akouete kai syniete. The first word, akouō, means to hear or listen, while syniēmi means to understand, comprehend or put things together. Jesus is therefore asking his hearers to do more than hear an intellectual religious teaching. He is asking them to perceive what is really happening beneath the surface - the inner meaning, the inner landscape of human beings. This is important because the controversy appears at first to be about food and ritual washing, but Jesus is actually exposing a much deeper question about where holiness is located.

The issue is the relationship between what is external and what is internal. Jesus says that it is not what enters the mouth that defiles but what comes out of the mouth, because what proceeds from the mouth comes from the heart. The Greek word for heart is kardia, and it means far more than our modern understanding of the heart as the place of feelings. The kardia is the centre of the human person, the place where thought, desire, intention and will converge. Jesus is therefore moving the conversation from external observance to the deepest place of human identity.

Yet Matthew then does something remarkable. Having told us that what matters is what comes from within the heart, he immediately takes us outside of the Jewish geographical and religious boundaries. Jesus withdraws to the region of Tyre and Sidon. This is not an incidental detail. Tyre and Sidon represent Gentile territory, outside the traditional boundaries of the Jewish people. The story moves from a discussion about purity and belonging into an encounter with someone who, by almost every conventional measure of the time, stands outside.

Matthew deliberately calls her a Chananaia, a Canaanite woman. The term is historically charged. By the time Matthew wrote his Gospel, a Canaanite was not simply an everyday ethnic designation. It reaches back into Israel’s memory of ancient enemies and evokes the long history of conflict between Israel and the peoples of the land. Matthew could have simply called her a Gentile woman. Instead, he chooses a word that places her firmly on the other side of the historical boundary - a perceived enemy.

She is therefore not simply A stranger. She is THE stranger. Yet she knows who Jesus is.

She cries out, Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David. The Greek is eleēson me, kyrie, huie Dauid. The title Son of David is extraordinary on her lips. She is a Gentile woman, and yet she recognises Jesus through the messianic language of the Jewish people living in Judea. She does not possess the right background, the right religious identity or the right place within the covenantal story as it has traditionally been understood. And yet she addresses Jesus as though she already knows something about him that others are struggling to recognise.

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Her first prayer is eleēson, have mercy. It is the word that Christians have prayed for centuries in the Kyrie eleison. There is something beautifully primitive and grounding about her prayer. She does not begin with a theological explanation and does not offer an argument about why she deserves an answer. She does not claim entitlement. Instead, she simply names who she thinks Jesus is and cries out for mercy.

And then Jesus says nothing. Matthew’s Greek is stark: ouk apekrithē autē logon. He did not answer her a word. The silence is important. We should resist the temptation to hurry past it.

There are moments when the experience of prayer is precisely like this. We cry out to God and there is no immediate answer. We ask for healing and the illness remains. We pray for someone we love and their circumstances do not change. We ask God to show us the way and the path remains obscure. We call upon God and encounter silence. Clearly here the Canaanite woman knows what it is to pray into silence, but she does not give up or leave.

The disciples then intervene. Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us. The Greek apolyson, meaning to send away, dismiss or release. Again, the religious impulse to create boundaries, to keep ritually pure and distant, to keep away. Their concern is consistent with a focus on the external egoic self rather than the internal landscape of the true self. For them she is making a sinner making a scene, disturbing the group, shouting, and will not stop. Yet the Gospel invites us to notice the difference between the woman and the disciples. The disciples want to exclude. The woman wants her daughter to live.

Sometimes the cries of people in pain are experienced by those who are comfortably in control as unhelpful interruptions. Sometimes the Church is tempted to manage the disturbance of difficult outsiders rather than listening with compassion to their cry. Sometimes we become more concerned with keeping religious events and moments peaceful rather than hearing what is happening outside the walls of the church or the comfort of keeping religious separation. But this woman refuses to become quiet simply because her need makes other people feel uncomfortable.

Jesus then says that he was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. The verb apestalēn comes from apostellō, meaning to send with a commission. Jesus’ earthly ministry is rooted in the story of the Jewish people. He has come as a Jewish Messiah. The particularity of this matters. The covenant matters and the story matters. This is important because Christian universality is not achieved by pretending that particularity does not matter. Jesus does not begin with an abstract spirituality detached from history. He comes from somewhere. He belongs to a people. He inhabits the Hebrew Scriptures and hopes. His mission has a particular shape before it becomes universal.

But the story suggests that God’s particularity is not the opposite of God’s universality. It is the means by which universality arrives. The mission to Judea will eventually become the mission to all peoples. The story has not yet reached the end of the Gospel.

The woman, however, is not interested in theological timetables. Her daughter is suffering. She comes and kneels before Jesus. Matthew says prosekynēi autō, that she bowed before him and worshipped him. And she says simply, Lord, help me. The Greek is kyrie, boēthe moi. There is almost nothing left to say. Lord, help me. Perhaps this is one of the deepest prayers in the whole Gospel. It is not sophisticated or eloquent or theological. It is desperate and trusting at the same time.

There are times when contemplative prayer becomes exactly this: Lord, help me. The prayer does not explain everything, demand certainty, or attempt to control God. It simply places the need before Jesus the Messiah. Yet even after this prayer, Jesus responds with the most difficult saying in the passage: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

Matthew uses the word kynaria, a diminutive form of kyōn, quite literally “dog,” which can refer to small or household dogs. Scholars have rightly noted that this is different from the more derogatory imagery associated with stray or scavenging dogs. Nevertheless, I do not think we should try to make these words comfortable as they clearly were not. The words remain difficult. Jesus appears to place this woman outside the immediate sphere of his mission with denigrating metaphorical language.

The contemplative reader has to resist the temptation to explain Jesus too quickly also. We can spend so much time trying to make this encounter comfortable that we fail to hear the woman herself. The fact we do not even know her name is also an affront, she is actively being dehumanised here. Yet, she does not walk away. She does not allow silence, apparent rejection or the words that have been spoken to end the encounter. Instead she responds, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”

The Greek nai means simply “yes.” “Yes, Lord.” There is incredibly and astonishing courage in those words. She does not deny the distinction Jesus has made. She does not attempt to say that she is equal to a Jewish woman. Instead, she seeks and trusts for abundance within the metaphor itself. Even the dogs eat the crumbs. She believes that the mercy of Jesus is so abundant that even the smallest fragment of it is enough to bring healing to her sick daughter.

The word Matthew uses for “crumbs” is psichia, meaning very small fragments of food. She remarkably asks for crumbs, and she believes the crumbs will be sufficient. This is perhaps the most beautiful movement in the passage deeply resonant with Jesus’ teaching of the beatitudes. Such faith and humility. She does not need to possess everything in order to trust in the restorative and loving purposes of God. She does not demand that the whole structure of salvation history be rearranged before her daughter can receive mercy. She simply believes that the mercy of Jesus is so abundant that even the smallest fragment of it is sufficient.

This becomes a profound contemplative insight. We often imagine that we need God to give us the whole answer. We want to know where our lives are going, why suffering happens and what God is doing. We want certainty about the future and clarity about the present. We want the whole loaf. The woman teaches us another kind of faith. Sometimes the crumb is enough. A word of Scripture can be enough. A moment of peace can be enough. A small act of kindness can be enough. A glimpse of beauty can be enough. A brief awareness of God’s presence can be enough.

Faith does not always receive the whole answer. Sometimes it receives enough grace for the next step.

Then Jesus speaks: “Woman, great is your faith!” The Greek is ō gynai, megalē sou hē pistis). The adjective megalē means great, large or extraordinary, while the noun pistis means faith, but also carries the sense of trust, fidelity or faithfulness. Jesus is not praising her because she has passed a theological test. He is recognising a quality of faithful trust that has persisted through silence, apparent rejection and uncertainty.

Her faith has not been easy. It has been tested by silence, disappointment, boundaries and the possibility that Jesus might say no. Yet she perseveres. This may be the most important contemplative insight in the passage. Faith is not always the experience of certainty. Sometimes faith is the decision to remain: to remain when prayer is unanswered, when God seems silent, when our understanding is incomplete, and when the path ahead is unclear.

The Canaanite woman’s faith is not a triumphant faith that possesses all the answers. It is a persistent faith that refuses to walk away from Jesus. Matthew says that her daughter was healed “at that moment.” The Greek verb is iathē, from iaomai, meaning to heal. The woman came asking for mercy and received healing, but something else has happened as well. The boundaries of the Gospel have expanded. The woman who appears at the edge of the story turns out to be central to its revelation. The person who appears to stand outside becomes the person whose faith Jesus celebrates. The Gentile historic enemy becomes a witness to the Kin-dom. The Canaanite woman becomes a teacher of the Church before the Church has begun.

This is why the passage cannot simply be reduced to a story about an individual woman getting her prayer answered. Matthew is telling us something about the Kin-dom of God. The Kin-dom is not a possession that can be controlled by those who believe they already belong to it. The loving restorative purposes of God continually exceeds the boundaries within which human beings try to contain it. The story begins with Jesus talking about what comes out of the heart and ends with a Gentile woman revealing what faith looks like. Perhaps Matthew wants us to see the connection. The true question is not simply who is inside and who is outside. The deeper question is what is happening in the heart.

The religious insiders may have the correct traditions and the correct boundaries, yet they struggle to recognise what God is doing. The outsider comes with nothing except desperation and trust, and Jesus calls her faith great. The Gospel therefore becomes a warning against confusing familiarity with faithfulness. It is possible to be very close to the structures of religion and still fail to recognise God. It is possible to stand far outside those structures and yet recognise Jesus as the Christ or Messiah.

This is one of the reasons this passage has such significance for the Church in a post-Christendom and post-secular age. We can easily assume that those who are familiar with Christianity are necessarily closer to Jesus, while those who are unfamiliar with Christianity are somehow further away. Matthew gives us a story that challenges that assumption. The person who appears to be furthest from the religious centre becomes the person through whom Jesus reveals something profound about faith.

This does not mean that inherited Christianity is unimportant. Quite the opposite. Jesus’ own ministry emerges from Israel’s covenantal story, Scripture and worship. The Church does not need to dumb-down on its inheritance. We need to know it, cherish it and live it. But we must never mistake the inheritance for the boundary of God’s activity. The Canaanite woman reminds us that God is already ahead of the Church. Jesus is not confined to our buildings, the Spirit is not restricted to our programmes, and faith does not always arrive wearing the clothes we recognise.

Sometimes the person who has never attended church teaches the Church something about longing for God. Sometimes the person who has left Christianity asks the question that exposes something we have stopped seeing. Sometimes the person who stands outside our assumptions reveals the Kin-dom more clearly than those who have been inside for generations. The question for the Church is therefore not simply how to get people back inside. The deeper question is whether we are willing to go outside with Jesus and discover where the Spirit is already at work.

This is where the passage becomes an invitation to mission and contemplative prayer. We can imagine ourselves sitting quietly with the Canaanite woman, not rushing to resolve the story but allowing its movements to become our prayer. We can hear her first cry, Have mercy on me, and allow ourselves to remain with it. We can bring before Jesus the things we cannot fix, the people we cannot heal, the questions we cannot answer and the circumstances we cannot control. We can then hear her second prayer, Lord, help me, and allow that simple sentence to become our own. Finally, we can sit with her Yes, Lord, recognising that this is not a naïve agreement with everything that happens but an act of trust in the midst of uncertainty.

Perhaps this is what mature faith sounds like. It is not certainty, control or possession of all the answers. It is the courage to remain before Christ. The Canaanite woman teaches us that faith can survive silence and, more than that, that faith can deepen within silence. She does not receive an immediate answer, yet she keeps turning towards Jesus. Her faith is not extinguished by God’s apparent absence. She discovers that even a crumb of grace is enough to sustain hope.

Perhaps this is also a word for the Church. We are living through a time when the inherited forms of Christianity no longer carry the cultural authority they once possessed. The Church can experience this as loss, threat and uncertainty. We can become tempted either to defend our boundaries more aggressively or to abandon our inheritance altogether. The Canaanite woman offers another way. She remains rooted in the encounter with Christ while refusing to accept that the mercy of God is confined by the boundaries others have drawn.

That may be one of the deepest challenges of this Gospel. The woman does not ask Jesus to become less Jewish, nor does she ask Israel to abandon its story. Instead, her presence reveals that the story of Israel is always moving towards a mercy that cannot finally be contained within Israel’s boundaries. The particularity of God’s covenant becomes the vehicle through which God’s universal mercy is revealed. The table does not become smaller because she approaches it. It becomes larger.

This is also why the passage should challenge the Church whenever we assume that familiarity with our structures is the same thing as proximity to Christ. Our buildings, liturgies, theological traditions, patterns of ministry and institutional histories are precious gifts, but they are not ends in themselves. They exist to bear witness to Christ. If they become barriers that prevent us from hearing the cries of those beyond them, then the Church must ask whether it has confused the forms of the Gospel with the Gospel itself.

The Canaanite woman does not destroy the inherited story. She reveals its abundance. She does not abolish the table. She reveals how much mercy the table contains. She does not diminish Israel’s vocation. She helps reveal its ultimate horizon: a mercy wide enough for all nations. Her faith therefore becomes a gift to the Church, reminding us that Christ may be recognised in unexpected places and that the Spirit is already at work among people whom we have not yet learned how to recognise.

The contemplative invitation of this Gospel is therefore to remain open. We are invited to remain with Jesus when the answer does not come immediately, to remain attentive to those who cry out from beyond the boundaries of our spiritual life, and to remain humble enough to recognise that God may be teaching the Church through people whom the Church has not yet learned to listen to. The Canaanite woman does not come to Jesus with certainty. She comes with trust. She does not know how the encounter will end. She simply knows that Jesus is where she must turn.

Perhaps that is where the Gospel finally leaves us. We do not need to possess the whole answer before we can pray. We do not need to understand everything before we can trust. We do not need to know exactly what God is doing before we can remain faithful. Like the Canaanite woman, we can come with our need, our uncertainty and our unanswered questions and say, “Lord, have mercy on me, Lord, help me and Yes, Lord.”

The faith that would not be silenced is ultimately a faith that trusts the abundance of divine mercy. It is a faith that refuses to believe that God’s grace has run out at the boundary of what we can understand. It is a faith that discovers that the smallest crumb can carry the abundance of the Kin-dom. And it is a faith that teaches the Church to look again, to listen again and to cross again into places where Christ may already be waiting for us.

The Canaanite woman came from outside the boundaries of Israel’s religious imagination, but she did not come from outside the mercy of God. That may be the final word of this Gospel for the Church. People may be outside our structures without being outside God’s love. People may be outside our worshipping communities without being outside God’s activity. People may have no Christian vocabulary and yet carry a profound longing for God. People may have rejected the Church while remaining open to Christ. The Church’s calling is not simply to defend its boundaries or persuade everyone to enter them. It is to follow Jesus beyond them.

And so the prayer with which we leave this Gospel is not a demand that God give us the whole loaf. It is the quieter and more trusting prayer of the Canaanite woman: that whatever grace God gives us, however small it may appear, we might have the faith to receive it. For sometimes a crumb is enough, and sometimes, when we remain long enough, we discover that what we thought was only a crumb was already the abundance of God.

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Taken as an extract from a larger photo by Sandro Gonzales to be found on Unsplash

One of the greatest confusions in the contemporary Church is the tendency to treat outreach and contextual mission as though they are the same thing. They are not. They are related, and both are deeply important, but they are fundamentally different responses to different missional contexts and needs. If we fail to recognise this distinction, we risk misunderstanding why so many churches faithfully serve their communities yet see little or no renewal in congregational life. This distinction matters profoundly within Anglican parish life. If we are serious about the renewal of our parish churches, and more importantly if we are serious about participating in the Missio Dei - God’s restorative missional purposes in the world - we need both healthy outreach and contextual mission. One without the other will always be incomplete.

It is impossible to understand our current missional situation without first acknowledging the long shadow of Christendom. For centuries the Church occupied a position of immense cultural privilege particularly in the West. Christianity shaped public life, education, politics and social morality, and there was much within that inheritance that was good and life-giving. Yet alongside these gifts were deep distortions. The Church too often confused the Kin-dom of God with institutional power. Mission became entangled with colonialism, evangelism frequently became manipulative, and Christian faith was too often experienced through coercion, guilt, control and exclusion rather than invitation, freedom and love. Many people today carry wounds from that history, while many others have inherited a cultural memory of these abuses even if they have never personally experienced church. It is therefore entirely understandable that many contemporary Christians recoil from anything that appears to resemble older forms of abusive evangelism. They genuinely desire to love their neighbours without hidden agendas, to serve generously without manipulating people into church attendance, and to witness through compassion rather than control. This instinct is not only understandable but often Christlike.

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Yet there has been an unintended consequence. Many churches have concluded that the safest way to avoid manipulation is simply never to speak about Jesus, never to mention faith, and never to invite people into Christian community, and of even deeper concern, not really engage in prayer let alone contemplation. Here, service becomes disconnected from discipleship, compassion becomes disconnected from witness, and church becomes almost invisible. This is not contextual mission and, ultimately, it is not even healthy outreach. I often call this disconnected outreach.

Many parish churches invest extraordinary amounts of energy serving their communities through food banks, community cafés, warm spaces, toddler groups, refugee support, debt advice, breakfast clubs, gardens and countless other acts of practical compassion. These ministries are beautiful expressions of Christian love. They embody something of Christ’s concern for those on the margins and provide tangible hope to people experiencing hardship and loneliness. The difficulty does not lie in these ministries themselves but in the way they often become disconnected from the Christian community that gives birth to them. People receive excellent care but may never discover why Christians serve in the first place. Church members quietly hope that those they meet might somehow find their way into a Sunday worship service, yet no invitation is ever offered because invitations themselves have become regarded with suspicion. In attempting to avoid the mistakes of Christendom, many churches have unintentionally abandoned the confidence to bear witness at all. Such outreach undoubtedly blesses communities, but by itself it rarely contributes to the renewal of the Church because people are never invited to encounter the life of Christ or become part of a Christian community.

Healthy outreach moves significantly beyond this disconnected model while still avoiding any potential manipulation. It continues to serve generously and honours people’s freedom, but it also recognises that authentic relationships naturally create opportunities for deeper conversations about faith. Healthy outreach assumes that within every parish there remain people who are genuinely open to Christianity. Some are what researchers describe as the open dechurched, those who once belonged to churches but drifted away through disappointment or changes in life, yet who still retain affection for Christian faith. Others are the open never-churched, people with little previous experience of church who nevertheless remain curious about spirituality, community or the person of Jesus. These people are not hostile to the Church. They are simply waiting for relationships of trust in which genuine invitation feels natural rather than coercive. Healthy outreach creates spaces where friendships deepen, questions are welcomed and Christian faith is encountered through authentic lives. At the appropriate time, people are invited - not pressured - to explore worship, contemplative prayer, various disciple courses including ‘being with’, small groups or other forms of Christian discipleship. In many parish contexts this approach can genuinely contribute to congregational renewal because there remain people who are willing to cross the bridge into existing church life.

The challenge, however, is that this group is becoming an ever smaller minority. Across Canada, the United Kingdom and much of Western Europe, the majority of people are no longer simply unchurched; they are culturally distant from Christianity itself. Many have never attended church. Many know almost nothing of the Christian story. Others carry deeply negative assumptions about Christians and churches, seeing them as judgemental, irrelevant, anti-science, politically compromised or morally unsafe, and in the UK, misogynistic and homophobic. Whether these stereotypes are accurate is almost beside the point because they shape people’s willingness even to enter a church building. Inviting such people to Sunday worship is rather like inviting someone who has never played football to attend the annual general meeting of a football club. The invitation itself makes little sense because there is no relational or cultural bridge. These are what I have come to think of as the unbridgeable, not because they are unreachable by God but because existing church structures no longer provide meaningful pathways into Christian life.

It is precisely here that contextual mission begins. Rather than asking how we persuade people to attend church, contextual mission asks how God is already present within a community and how we are being sent to participate in what the Holy Spirit is already doing. This is a profoundly different imagination of mission. Missioners, pioneers and missionally minded people entering another culture do not begin by inviting people into unfamiliar institutions. They first learn the language, listen deeply to missional contexts, parish neighbourhoods, build relationships, share life and seek to understand the hopes, fears and longings of the people among whom they live and work. Only then do they begin to express the Gospel in ways that make sense within that culture. Increasingly this is the missional situation facing our parish churches. The culture beyond our church buildings has become, in many places, genuinely cross-cultural. The missional frontier is no longer overseas; it is across the street, even within our own families and friendships.

Contextual mission therefore takes time. It unfolds over years rather than months. It is rooted in deep listening, shared life, hospitality, presence and trust. Rather than attempting to draw people into existing congregations, it patiently allows new expressions of Christian community to emerge within the culture itself. These may become fresh expressions of Church, new monastic communities, neighbourhood missional communities, communities among artists, young adults, migrants, those living in poverty or people exploring spirituality outside institutional religion. They are not outreach projects. They are genuinely the beginning of missional communities that are beginning the journey to grow into being authentic ecclesial communities born within particular cultures through long-term relational presence.

This is one of the most demanding challenges facing the Church today because contextual mission requires an entirely different set of gifts, skills and understandings from those developed during Christendom. It calls for women and men who are deeply rooted in Christ while remaining profoundly open to others. It requires contemplative depth rather than institutional anxiety, listening more than speaking, hospitality more than control, curiosity more than certainty, and relationships before programmes. Above all, it requires Christians who genuinely understand themselves as people who are sent into the world rather than people waiting for the world to come to them. Sadly, these capacities are often underdeveloped. Many clergy have received excellent theological education but very little formation in cross-cultural relational mission. I have met too many clergy who are passively resistant to facing this, and sometimes even directly aggressively resistant. Often in my Anglican tradition, the clergy are politically progressive and open, but ecclesiologically conservative and closed. Likewise, many congregations have spent decades learning how to maintain church buildings rather than inhabit neighbourhood life. It is therefore unsurprising that contextual mission to such as these, often feels overwhelming. Outreach is easier because its structures are familiar and its outcomes more immediately visible and controllable. Contextual mission is slower, messier, less predictable and often costly. Yet if we are serious about the renewal of the Church, it is indispensable.

Despite these challenges, I remain profoundly hopeful. The dominant cultural narrative assumes that ours is a post-secular age in which people are no longer interested in God. I do not believe this to be true. People may reject institutional religion, distrust churches and question simplistic answers, but beneath these realities lies an extraordinary spiritual hunger. The uncertainties of life in late modernity, the loneliness of digital culture, the fragmentation of community, climate anxiety, economic insecurity, political instability, mental ill-health, drug addiction, homelessness and the overlapping crises that increasingly characterise our world have not diminished humanity’s search for meaning. If anything, they have intensified it. Across our postmodern and increasingly postsecular societies people continue to ask ancient questions about identity, belonging, suffering, hope and purpose. The Church possesses extraordinary treasures with which to respond: the contemplative tradition, communities of belonging, sacramental life, practices of forgiveness and reconciliation, hospitality, justice, prayer and above all the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The question is not whether the Gospel remains relevant. The question is whether we are willing to leave familiar patterns behind in order to embody that Gospel within the cultures where people actually live.

The renewal of parish churches will not come simply through better publicity, more attractive worship, improved websites or more efficient programmes. Neither will it come through abandoning all forms of outreach, for healthy outreach remains an essential expression of Christian love. Rather, renewal will increasingly depend upon recovering our identity as a missional people. The future belongs to churches capable of holding together faithful mixed ecology parish ministry with courageous contextual mission and healthy outreach, churches that continue serving and loving their neighbourhoods through healthy outreach while confidently inviting those who are open to explore Christian faith, and churches that are equally willing to send women and men beyond familiar ecclesial boundaries to cultivate entirely new Christian communities among those for whom traditional church is no longer relevant or imaginable.

This is demanding work. It asks much of clergy and lay leaders alike. It requires formation, resilience, humility, courage and above all a deep contemplative rootedness in Christ. Critically, it requires clergy and lay people to let go of being control freaks. Yet this is not the first time the Church has faced profound cultural crises. The first Christians lived without Christendom. The monastic movements renewed the Church after the collapse of the Roman Empire. The mendicant orders emerged amid the growth of medieval cities. The protestant revival and the Oxford Movement each renewed Anglicanism in very different contexts of social change. Again and again, the Holy Spirit has led the Church into unfamiliar territory. Our own moment is no different. The collapse of Christendom, the critique of Enlightenment certainties, the emergence of postmodernity and the realities of our postsecular age do not signal the end of God’s mission. They mark the beginning of another missional chapter.

Our calling is neither to retreat nostalgically into the past nor to surrender to cultural pessimism. It is to become once again a people who know what it means to be sent: a contemplative people whose lives are rooted in Christ, a hospitable people who listen before they speak, a courageous people who build bridges where none currently exist and who patiently cultivate new Christian communities out of contextual mission that may take years to grow. The Church has never ultimately depended upon cultural privilege. It has always depended upon the faithfulness of the One who promised, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.” It is from that promise that we find both the courage to engage in contextual mission and healthy outreach and the hope for the renewal of the Church.

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This guided contemplative practice follows the contemplative reflection published yesterday focusing on the Gospel text for this Sunday. If you have not read this reflection, you can read it here.

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The Canaanite Woman asks for healing for her daughter by Ilyas Basim Khuri Bazzi Rahib, a Coptic monk from 1684 in Egypt, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. Credit also goes to the website textweek.com.

This is the homily I gave today at the Anglican Hamilton Cathedral for those who are homeless or disadvantaged.

Today’s Gospel is not an easy story. A mother comes to Jesus because her daughter is suffering terribly. She is desperate. She cries out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me.”

I know many of us gathered here today know what it means to feel desperate: to need help, to be worried for someone we love, to feel totally isolated and fearful, to feel that nobody is listening. This woman in the gospel story is not asking for something extra. She is asking for mercy.

At first, Jesus does not answer her. The disciples want to send her away. It seems to me they often want to send them away if you remember Sunday’s Gospel of the feeding of the 5 thousand. But Then Jesus speaks words that sound really harsh and disrespectful: he says that the children’s bread should not be thrown to the dogs. You don’t get more shaming or exclusionary than that. These words have always shocked me.

We should not pretend those words are easy to hear. The woman was a foreigner, someone from outside the community. In her world, as in ours, people were often divided into “us” and “them”: those who belong and those who are pushed aside; those treated as important and those treated as if they do not matter.

What is remarkable, is that this woman who Jesus has just likened to being a dog, will not accept being pushed away. She will not be denigrated, She will not be talked down to. And with incredible calm She says, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”

It is a remarkable answer. She does not give up. She does not collude with misogyny, racism, and classism, and instead talks to Jesus adult to adult. How incredibly remarkable, as I would be angry and cross. Instead, a woman where we do not even know her name, chooses to trust that there is enough mercy in Jesus, even for her. And Jesus sees her faith, and I think he must realise that he has just colluded with the dualism and has said something hard, and in response to her refusal to be treated bady, He says, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And Her daughter is healed.

This story tells us something important about God. God’s mercy is bigger than the boundaries people make, even Jesus. Jesus’ table however is wider than we imagine. No one is beneath God’s notice. No one is outside God’s compassion.

Sometimes life can make us feel like we only deserve crumbs: a little kindness, a little dignity, a little hope. We may have been ignored, judged, or made to feel unwelcome. But the good news is that, in God’s eyes, we are not crumbs. We are beloved children. We are all loved by God, none of us are not good enough to be able to receive the love of God. Even when Jesus has said something harsh!

And this story also asks something of us. Who do we overlook? Who do we try to send away because their need makes us uncomfortable? Who is waiting outside the circle, hoping simply to be heard?

Jesus listened to this woman. He responded to her courage and faith. May we also individually and collectively choose to do the same: a place where people are welcomed, where nobody has to prove they deserve care, and where there is room at the table for everyone.

When we come to God, we do not come because we have earned a place. We come because God is merciful. We come hungry—for food, for peace, for healing, for hope—and God meets us with love.

So what are the application points of this text? Well I think there are three

God hears people who feel overlooked.
The woman is ignored and treated as an outsider, yet Jesus finally hears her. No one is invisible to God.

Faith can be honest and persistent.
She does not give up when the answer is not immediate. Faith is sometimes simply continuing to pray: “Lord, have mercy.”

God’s welcome is wider than human boundaries.
Jesus’ compassion reaches beyond the divisions between insiders and outsiders. We are called to make room for everyone.

So today, let us remember the woman who would not be silent. Let us remember that faith can be as simple as saying, “Lord, have mercy.” And let us trust that Jesus hears that prayer.

Amen

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In Matthew 14:22–33, we know the familiar Biblical account of Jesus sending the disciples ahead in a boat while he goes up the mountain alone to pray. The sea becomes rough, the wind is against them, and they spend the night struggling to make any progress. Then, in the darkest part of the night, Jesus comes towards them, walking on the water.

This is a story for anyone who has known what it is to keep rowing and still feel as though they are going nowhere. The disciples are not disobedient, Jesus himself has sent them into the boat, but they find themselves battered by waves and opposed by the wind. It is a gentle but important truth: being where God has called us to be does not always mean that life will feel calm or even safe.

Matthew says that the boat was many stadia from land, meaning a long way from the shore. The disciples are not close to an easy escape and they are out in the deep, exposed, tired, and fearful. Believe me I know what this is like. Recently in my kayak I was caught battling against the wind and sudden waves that blow up on Lake Ontario, and it can be frightening when you notice you are making little to no progress but you are exhausted with making such physical effort. It can be very frightening.

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We may know that place: a season when the shore seems far away; when security, health, home, money, friendship, or confidence feel beyond reach. There can be a particular loneliness in struggling through the night, sometimes called a dark night of the soul.

Meanwhile, Jesus is on the mountain praying. He is not indifferent to their danger. His prayer is part of his love for them. Before he comes to them in the storm, he is turned towards God the Father the Creator reflecting his dependence on the relationships of the Holy Trinity.

I am reminded that contemplative prayer does not mean escaping the pain of the world, it means being rooted deeply enough in God to meet the pain of the world with love.

Jesus comes “in the fourth watch of the night.” In the Roman way of marking time, this was roughly between three and six in the morning: the hour when night feels longest and human strength is lowest. Matthew seems to deliberately invite us to notice this. Jesus does not always come according to our preferred timetable, yet he comes. Sometimes he comes at the hour when we have exhausted our own resources and can no longer pretend that we are in control.

When the disciples see him, they do not recognise him. They think he is a ghost, and they cry out in fear. The Greek word for fear here is phobos, from which we get the word ‘phobia.’ It is not mild concern. It is the fear that takes hold of the whole person, the fear that imagines danger before it can recognise love.

How often can fear do this in us? We may pray for God to come close, yet when Jesus comes in an unfamiliar form, we do not recognise him. Often we want to be rescued from difficulty. A challenging conversation, an unexpected person, a small opening of hope, a call to take one faithful step: these may not look like the rescue we expected. Fear can make us mistake a presence of the love of God for a new unknown threat.

Jesus speaks straight into their terror: Take heart; it is I; do not be afraid. The Greek phrase translated ‘take heart’ is tharseite. It is an imperative to be courageous, to take confidence, to let your heart be strengthened. Jesus does not shame them for being afraid, but instead he gives them a word to stand on. Courage is not the absence of fear, it is hearing the voice of Jesus the Christ within fear and allowing that voice to become more real than the storm.

Then comes the deepest phrase of all: ‘It is I.’ In Greek, it is simply egō eimi: ‘I am.’ Of course, it can mean, ‘It is me’, however it also strongly carries an echo of God’s self-revelation to Moses: ‘I AM’ or Yahweh. On the waters of chaos, in the middle of the night, Jesus speaks the divine name. He is not merely saying, ‘Do not worry, it is me Jesus.’ He is, I believe, revealing that God as the ‘I AM’ who is Jesus is present with them in the storm.

This does not mean that the wind immediately disappears. The disciples still have waves around them. But the most important reality has changed - Jesus is there.

In contemplative prayer, we may not receive quick answers or a sudden removal of every trouble, but we learn, slowly and deeply, that we are not alone. Beneath our anxious thoughts, under the chaos of life and what may happen next to us, God is present: egō eimi - I Am.

Peter responds with a bold and vulnerable request: Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water. He does not ask Jesus to make the sea calm first. He asks to come nearer to Jesus. That is the heart of prayer: not simply wanting a safer life, but wanting Jesus Christ himself.

Jesus answers Peter with one word: Come. The Greek is elthe - literally come here. It is simple, direct, and personal. The invitation does not explain the storm. It does not give Peter a map or a guarantee. It gives him Jesus’ word. Peter steps out, not because water has become naturally safe, but because he has heard Jesus call him and he instinctively trusts.

For a moment, Peter walks towards Jesus. Then he notices the wind.

The Greek here states that, seeing the wind, he became afraid.
blepōn de ton anemon ischyron ephobēthē.

This is so human. He had already seen the wind, the storm was there before he stepped out from the boat, but now the storm becomes the centre of his attention, and Jesus as the ‘I AM’ is moved to the edge of it. When fear fills the whole horizon, we begins to sink.

Peter’s prayer as he sinks is one of the shortest and truest prayers in the Gospels: “Lord, save me!” There is no polished language, no explanation, no attempt to look strong. In Greek: Kyrie, sōson me - Lord, save me. It is the prayer of a person who knows they cannot save themselves. It is a prayer we can pray when words fail, in grief, panic, temptation, illness, exhaustion, or despair.

Matthew tells us that Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught Peter. The word is eutheōs in Greek means at once or straightaway. Earlier, Jesus came in the late hours of the night, now, when Peter cries out, his hand is immediate. Jesus may not always prevent us from entering difficult waters, but he does not stand at a distance when we begin to sink.

Jesus asks Peter, You of little faith, why did you doubt? The Greek word for doubt is edistasas, related to distazō. It suggests being divided, standing in two minds, wavering between trust and fear. Jesus is not crushing Peter with criticism, he is gently naming the divided heart. Peter has faith - he stepped out of the boat - but it is a fragile faith, pulled in different directions distracted in this situation by the storm.

Perhaps this is a word for us too. We need not wait until our faith is perfect before we come to Jesus. Peter’s faith, courage and trust of Jesus was mixed with fear, hesitation, and doubt. Yet Jesus still called him, received his cry, and took hold of him. The loving restorative purposes of God are not reserved for those who never waver. Instead they are given to those who turn towards Christ, even with trembling hands.

When Jesus and Peter get into the boat, the wind ceases. The disciples worship Jesus, saying, Truly you are the Son of God. The story ends in worship, not because the disciples have become fearless heroes, but because they have seen who Jesus truly is. The storm has revealed something about Jesus to be the Christ that calms the sea: he comes near, he speaks peace, he calls, he saves, and he holds.

This passage invites us to sit quietly with a question: where is the storm in me today? Perhaps it is obvious; perhaps it is a low, constant unease. We do not need to deny it or make it sound holy. We can bring it honestly before God. Then we can listen for the voice of Jesus: Tharseite. Egō eimi. Mē phobeisthe. Take heart. I Am. Do not be afraid.

Perhaps we may hear, beneath all the busyness and bustle of our lives, one more word: Elthe. Come. Come as you are, come with your questions, your weariness, and your fragile faith. Come, not because you are strong enough to cross the water alone, but because Jesus the Christ is there, his hand already reaching towards you.

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One of the greatest privileges of my job as the community missioner over the past year has been accompanying the discernment, formation and commissioning of a new and first generation of volunteer Commissioned Lay Missioners within the Anglican Diocese of Niagara. Looking back, I can honestly say that this has been the most hopeful and life-giving aspect of my work. It has renewed my confidence that the Holy Spirit continues to call ordinary Christians into extraordinary participation in the Missio Dei. Where mission is understood in terms of restoration. Restoring all things back into relationship with the Triune God. Where being a Lay Missioner is an important vocation we are only just recognising in our increasingly post-christendom post-secular Canadian context.

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The Anglican Church of Canada stands at a significant moment in its history. Across the Diocese of Niagara we long to see our parishes renewed, not simply by attracting those who already have some connection with church, but by learning again how to participate in God’s mission among those who have long since left Christian communities and those who have never had any meaningful experience of the Church at all. Many people today carry deep misunderstandings, painful memories or negative stereotypes about Christianity. Others simply regard the Church as irrelevant to the questions and longings of contemporary life.

Such people are not reached primarily through programmes or publicity. They are reached, I believe, through relationships.

For too long much of our energy has understandably been focused on what might be called the “bridgeable”, those who remain open to attending a traditional church service or responding to familiar invitations. This remains an important ministry. Yet at the same time, the vast majority of our neighbours now belong to what missiologists increasingly describe as the “unbridgeable”: people for whom the cultural, emotional and spiritual distance from church has become so great that they are unlikely ever to walk through our doors unless Christians first learn to cross the threshold into their lives outside church buildings engaged in local parish neighbourhoods. In the Gospels this apostollos, being missionally sent.

Contextual mission begins precisely here. It asks us first to listen before speaking; to become students of our neighbourhoods before attempting to change them; to recognise where God is already at work beyond the walls of our churches; and to cultivate relationships of trust that make the Gospel visible long before it is articulated in words. This kind of mission cannot simply be added as another parish programme. It requires people who are deeply rooted in prayer, emotionally mature, curious about others, and willing to spend a long time building authentic relationships within their local communities.

This is why, for me, Commissioned Lay Missioners are becoming strategically important to the future of our Diocese.

My hope is not simply to appoint volunteers with another title. Our hope is that every Commissioned Lay Missioner becomes a catalyst for helping a parish rediscover relationally, its neighbourhood and apostolic mission. They encourage congregations to move from maintaining church life to participating more intentionally in God’s life already unfolding within their communities. They help parishes notice where loneliness, isolation, spiritual hunger and spiritual need already exist, and then accompany local people in ways that are incarnational, relational and deeply attentive.

This is not about creating another committee. It is about nurturing missional disciples who can help cultivate a missional imagination throughout the whole parish.

Over the past year our formation training, a certificate in Mission Practice, (a 2 year learning pathway), has intentionally embraced a praxis-based approach to learning. Rather than simply studying mission in theory, participants are learning by engaging in contextual mission, reflecting theologically on their experience, receiving supervision and mentoring in collaboration with the parish Rector and clergy, and returning again into practice with greater wisdom and confidence. This rhythm of action, prayerful theological reflection and renewed action echoes the pattern of discipleship we see throughout the Gospels, where Jesus forms his followers not simply by teaching them but by sending them.

The result has been deeply encouraging. I have watched individuals grow in confidence, theological depth, spiritual maturity and practical wisdom. They have become more attentive listeners, more discerning practitioners and more courageous witnesses to Christ’s love within their own communities. Their generosity, humility and commitment have continually inspired me.

The challenge, however, remains significant. Jesus’ words remain as true today as when he first spoke them: “The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few.” (Matthew 9.37)

The opportunities for contextual mission across the Diocese are immense. Every parish sits within a unique mission field rich with relationships waiting to be formed and stories waiting to be heard. Yet we need more labourers. We need Christians whose faith is deep enough to move beyond maintaining church structures and who are passionate about joining God’s mission in the neighbourhood beyond the colonialist focus of getting more people ‘in’. We need people with emotional intelligence, humility, resilience, theological imagination and the interpersonal gifts necessary to build genuine relationships across difference. We need women and men who recognise that mission is less about having the right answers and more about faithfully accompanying people as they discover God’s presence already at work in their lives.

My hope is that many more lay Anglicans across the Diocese will prayerfully consider whether God might be calling them into this vocation. Not everyone is called to ordained ministry, but every baptised Christian is called to participate in some role concerning God’s mission. For some, becoming a Commissioned Lay Missioner may be precisely the way in which that calling can be recognised, nurtured and fully deployed in collaboration with the rector and the wider diocese in a mixed ecology parish.

As I reflect on the past year, I feel profound gratitude. It has been a joy to accompany such gifted and faithful people. Their courage, generosity and commitment have continually reminded me that the future of the Church will not be secured simply through better strategies or more efficient structures, through ensuring that we just have ordained priests, but rather, through communities of disciples willing to leave familiar ground, listen deeply, love generously and join Christ where he is already present in the life of the world.

That, surely, is the heart of contextual mission. And it is why Commissioned Lay Missioners are not simply an optional addition to diocesan life, but in my view, an essential part of how we faithfully participate in God’s renewing mission in the Niagara region and diocese today.

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This Contemplative Practice follows the written contemplative theological reflection for yesterday, which you can read here. This practice seeks to support the individual with time for being still and creative imagining an encounter with Jesus.

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Music is entitled Careful by Pufino available through Uppbeat
Photo by mostafa meraji on Unsplash

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Photo by mostafa meraji on Unsplash

There is an old story about a church coffee hour where two long-standing members had managed to avoid speaking to one another for nearly twenty years. Every Sunday they arrived at exactly the same time, received Communion from the same priest, sang the same hymns, recited the same Creed, and then spent the coffee hour engaged in an extraordinary feat of Christian choreography - carefully circling the room so as never to come within two metres of each other.

Eventually someone asked one of them, “What started the disagreement?” He frowned and said, I honestly cannot remember.

Perhaps that is one of the most truthful things about us. We can remember the wound long after we have forgotten its cause. We become practised at living behind little borders: the border of old hurt, the border of fear, the border between ‘our sort of people’ and those whom we find harder to welcome.

And into those borders come today’s readings. Jacob crosses a river and finds himself wrestling through the night. Paul looks at the painful division between his own people and the Church, and writes with almost unbearable sorrow. Jesus crosses by boat to a deserted place, only to find a crowd already waiting. In each reading, grace meets people at a boundary - not to make the boundary invisible, but to open a way through it.

Genesis gives us one of Scripture’s strangest and most beautiful nights. Jacob is alone at the Jabbok. He is on his way home after years away, and he is about to meet Esau, the brother from whom he stole both blessing and birthright. Jacob has sent his family and possessions across the river. Now there is nothing left with which to bargain, impress, or protect himself. Only Jacob remains - and a mysterious man who wrestles with him until daybreak.

Who is this stranger? The story will not let us settle the question neatly. Jacob says, ‘I have seen God face to face’; yet what he receives is not an explanation, but a wound and a new name. He limps away blessed. That is not the kind of blessing most of us would choose. But it is a profoundly honest one. Jacob cannot return to his old life unchanged. The blessing comes when the old identity - the grasping Jacob, the one whose name carries the sense of supplanter - is no longer enough. ‘You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel,’ says the stranger: one who struggles with God.

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There are times when faith is not certain. It is refusing to let go of God in the dark. ‘I will not let you go, unless you bless me.’ It is a prayer for anyone who has come to the edge of themselves: anyone carrying grief, fear, regret, illness, or a broken relationship. Jacob discovers that God is not absent from the struggle. God is there in it - sometimes confronting us, sometimes remaking us, always drawing us towards a future we could not reach by our own strength.

Paul knows something of that struggle. In Romans he does not speak coldly about those outside the Church. He writes of great sorrow and unceasing anguish for his own people. He lists their gifts with reverence: adoption, glory, covenants, worship, promises, patriarchs. This is not the language of contempt. It is the language of love that refuses to erase a people’s holy story in order to make a theological point.

That matters. Christians have too often read passages like this as permission to look down upon Jewish people, as though God had simply replaced one people with another. Paul does nothing of the sort. He mourns because he loves. He insists that Israel’s gifts are real and precious, and that from Israel comes the Messiah, ‘who is over all.’ Grace does not cross the border by despising what lies on the other side. Grace honours the story, the pain, and the particular people whom God has loved.

Then, in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus withdraws by boat to what the Koine Greek calls an erēmos topos, an empty or deserted place. He has just heard of the death of John the Baptist. I would have expected Jesus might seek silence, solitude, and room to grieve, but the crowds find him. They cross their own distances on foot and arrive before him.

What happens next is the hinge of the story. Matthew says that Jesus ‘had compassion’ on them. The Greek word is splagchnizomai. It comes from splagchna, meaning the guts, the place where we feel things before we can tidy them into thoughts. This is not the mild sympathy of someone standing at a safe distance. It is a compassion that moves Jesus from deep within himself. He sees the crowd’s need, heals their sick, and stays with them as evening comes.

The disciples see a problem. The place is deserted. The hour is late. Send them away, they say, so that they may buy food for themselves. In a way, this is a perfectly sensible proposal. There is not enough here, let everyone fend for themselves elsewhere.

Jesus answers with a sentence that unsettles every sensible church committee: ‘They need not go away; you give them something to eat.’ In Greek it is direct and emphatic: dote autois hymeis phagein - Give them, you yourselves, to eat. This is not: arrange for someone else to do it or explain why resources are limited. Instead, you give them something to eat.

The disciples reply with the familiar poverty of imagination, the logic of scarcity: five loaves, two fish. Not enough. Perhaps that is where many of us begin. We look at our energy, our money, our patience, our congregation, our ability to change the world - and we see five loaves and two fish. We see the need and feel immediately the border of what we cannot do. Many of us do not question this border.

Jesus does not deny the smallness of what they have. He simply says, ‘Bring them here to me.’ Then he tells the crowds to sit down on the grass. Matthew uses a word related to reclining at table: they are not a disorderly mass receiving emergency rations; they are becoming a gathered people, guests at a meal. Jesus takes, blesses, breaks, and gives - the familiar rhythm reflected in the Eucharist. The disciples receive from his hands and give to the crowd.

The result is not non-trusting scarcity but instead God’s abundance. There is more than enough. Twelve baskets of klasmata - fragments, pieces broken off - are gathered afterwards. Nothing is wasted. The word matters because grace often comes to us in fragments: a small act of courage, an unexpected conversation, a meal shared, a place made at the table. In Jesus the Christ, the fragments are not beneath notice. They are gathered up.

This is not merely a charming miracle about a large picnic. It is a revelation of the Kin-dom: a world in which grief does not have the last word, in which the empty place becomes a table, and in which the people whom we are tempted to send away become the very people with whom Christ makes a feast.

That is why the title ‘When Grace Crosses the Border’ belongs to these readings. Jacob crosses the river toward the brother he fears, and leaves the night with a new name. Paul crosses the painful border of religious difference with tears, not triumphalism. The crowd crosses into the deserted place, and Jesus refuses to send them away hungry. In every case, the movement begins in God’s heart: a heart that wrestles, grieves, is moved with compassion, and feeds.

Churches and Cathedrals can be places where those crossings become visible. We cherish beauty, memory, music, and order. They are gifts, but every church faces the temptation to turn those gifts into fences: to become a monument rather than a doorway, a museum rather than a table. The question is not whether we have enough to meet every need. We do not. The question is whether we will bring what we have to Jesus, and trust him enough to stop sending people away.

Who are the crowds at the edge of our vision? Those grieving in isolation. Those living with addiction, poverty, mental illness, or homelessness. Refugees and newcomers. Young adults who suspect that the Church has no life-giving word for them. People hurt by Christians. Those whose lives or loves have caused them to feel that they must stand outside the border, waiting to discover whether there might be room.

The Gospel does not ask us to manufacture abundance out of thin air. It asks us to practise the compassion of Jesus and be open to God: to see from the guts, to offer what we have, to make room, and to trust that God’s blessing changes the arithmetic. The disciples did not create the bread. But they did carry it. They did not own the feast. But they became its servants.

On Sunday, where we once again come to the Eucharistic table, we come as Jacob came: not self-sufficient, but needing blessing. We come with Paul’s hope that God’s faithfulness is wider and deeper than our arguments. We come with the crowd into the deserted place, hungry for more than we can provide for ourselves. And Jesus meets us there.

He takes what is small. He blesses it. He breaks it. He gives it. Then he sends us out - not to guard grace behind a border, but to carry it across, always across, always in loving compassion. Thanks be to God. Amen.

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Downtown Dundas at one of the many summer festivals.

I gave this homily on Sunday 12th July in support of a mission initiative in the Parish of St James Dundas and in support of Rebecca the Licensed Lay Missioner and Leslie the Parish Rector. It is I hope an example of what can be said when linking Jesus’ parables with mission.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

It is wonderful to be with you this morning to celebrate the work of Rebecca Vendetti your missioner here in Dundas, but I want to start with a story.

Recently my neighbour proudly announced to his other neighbour that he had bought the finest grass seed money could buy. He prepared the soil perfectly. He watered it every day. He fertilized it carefully. Then, every morning, he would go outside and stare at the lawn.

After a week, his neighbour asked, “Has it grown yet?” The man replied, “No.”

The neighbour asked, “Have you stopped staring at it?” He said, “No.”

“Well,” the neighbour smiled, “perhaps that’s the problem. Grass doesn’t grow because you watch it. It grows because life is doing its hidden work.”

There is something profoundly Christian about that – life is doing its hidden work.

We live in a world that wants instant results. We measure success by numbers, by visible achievements, by growth that we can count. But the Kingdom of God does not usually work like that.

Seeds grow quietly. Roots develop invisibly. Transformation happens beneath the surface long before anyone notices it. That is why Jesus tells this remarkable story.

Most of us have heard the Parable of the Sower many times. Usually we are encouraged to ask, “What kind of soil am I?”

And that is certainly part of Jesus’ teaching. But today I want us to notice something else first.

Before Jesus talks about the soil, he talks about the sower. The hero of the story is not the soil.

The hero is the sower. And what kind of sower is this?

Well, frankly, if you were running a farming business, you probably wouldn’t hire him. He throws seed everywhere. On the path. On rocky ground. Among the thorns. On the good soil.

There seems to be no careful calculation. No market research. No strategic analysis. No attempt to maximise efficiency. He simply scatters seed everywhere.

At first glance it almost seems wasteful. But Jesus is telling us something profound about the nature of God and mission. God is extravagantly generous.

God never begins by asking whether someone deserves grace.
God never waits until someone’s life is perfectly prepared.

God simply keeps sowing love. Keeps sowing hope. Keeps sowing mercy. Keeps sowing the invitation to life in Christ. The Kingdom begins not with human readiness but with divine generosity.

That changes how we think about mission. Many people imagine mission means taking God somewhere God is absent. But the Church has always taught something much more beautiful. Mission begins with God. Before the Church moves, God has already gone ahead. Before we speak, the Holy Spirit has already been whispering. Before we arrive, Christ is already present. Mission is joining in with what God is already doing.

The Latin phrase is Missio Dei—the mission of God. It is God’s mission before it is ours. The Church simply has the privilege of participating in it. That means our task is not to manufacture faith.

It is not to convince reluctant people. It is not even to make the Kingdom grow. Our task is much simpler. Scatter the seed and Trust God with the harvest.

This is one of the reasons I love being an Anglican. Because our understanding of a parish is wonderfully expansive. A parish is not simply a congregation. A parish is a neighbourhood. The parish is a group of streets. Every apartment. Every café. Every school. Every retirement home. Every park. Every family. Every person who lives within its parish neighbourhood.

When the Church speaks of “the parish,” we are talking about everyone who lives or works in this neighborhood whom God has entrusted into your care - not only those who sit in these pews on a Sunday morning.

That is a breathtaking vision. Because it reminds us that our calling is much larger than maintaining a church building. Our calling is to love a neighbourhood. To pray for a neighbourhood. To serve God in a neighbourhood.

Mission then is joining in with God is already doing in your parish of Dundas. You as a parish church have a missional responsibility to sow seeds in this neighbourhood.

To discover where God is already at work in a place, and critically, lean into helping those who have left Church or never gone to church to explore the Christian faith.

That is exactly why I find so much hope in what is happening here at St James as you have begun to sow missional seeds. Many of you will know the wonderful ministry that Rebecca Vendetti is leading as your Licensed Lay Missioner under Leslie’s leadership. Trail and Table and Messy Church are an important mission to families and people who do not know Jesus or are getting to experience God who do not go to church.

It is not an extra programme for churched kids. It is an expression of the very heart of the Gospel.

Think about where Jesus carried out most of his ministry. Not in synagogues. Not in religious buildings. He met people beside lakes. On dusty roads. Around meals. In people’s homes. On hillsides. In marketplaces. While walking together.

Jesus constantly entered the everyday spaces where people already lived. He met people before they ever became disciples. He loved them before they understood who he was. He belonged with them before they believed. That is by definition contextual mission.

It asks a simple question:

Where are people already gathering in the neighbourhood?
And how might we meet them there with the love of Christ?

That is exactly what Trail and Table and Messy Church seek to do. Families walking together. Children exploring creation and God. People sharing food. Conversations developing naturally. Friendships forming. Faith emerging gently rather than being forced.

That is not a watered-down version of church. It is deeply rooted in the way Jesus himself lived and ministered.

Sometimes churches become anxious about ministries like this. We ask questions such as:

“When will they start coming on Sundays?”
“Is this really church?”
“Will it make a difference?”

Those are understandable questions. But they are not the questions Jesus asks in this parable.

Jesus simply asks:

“Are you sowing?”

Because only God gives growth. Sometimes we can become so focused on counting fruit that we stop scattering seed. The Kingdom is not built by anxiety. It grows through a faithful missional generosity.

One of the most hopeful things about this parable is that the soil is not fixed. We often read this story as though people are permanently rocky ground or permanently thorny soil. But anyone who gardens knows that soil changes. Stones can be removed. Ground can be cultivated. Compost enriches poor earth. Weeds can be cleared. The Holy Spirit is the great gardener.

Many people arrive carrying disappointment. Some have been hurt by churches. Some have been told they don’t belong. Some have never heard the Gospel in a way that makes sense in today’s world. Some carry grief. Many carry loneliness. Many simply don’t think church has anything to say to them.

But hearts change. Lives change. People change. Because God’s Spirit keeps cultivating the soil.

Sometimes our role is not to harvest. Sometimes it is simply to help prepare the ground through friendship, listening, kindness and hospitality.

We often speak today about becoming a Mixed Ecology Church. That phrase simply means recognising that there is more than one faithful way of being Church. It means celebrating the gathered congregation around Word and Sacrament. And at the very same time celebrating fresh expressions of church among those who would never ordinarily walk through these doors.

It is not one replacing the other. It is both flourishing together. Sunday Eucharist matters deeply. So does Trail and Table and messy church.

Your worship in this beautiful church matters. So do conversations on a woodland path.
The altar matters.So does the picnic table.
Traditional worship and fresh expressions are not competitors.
They are companions. Both are part of the one Body of Christ. Both proclaim the same Gospel. Both are nourished by the same Holy Spirit. Both belong to the same mission of God.

I want to say something directly to you as the people of St James Parish Church. Rebecca’s ministry is not Rebecca’s ministry alone. It belongs to all of you. Every prayer you offer. Every volunteer who serves. Every word of encouragement. Every conversation where you celebrate this ministry. Every financial gift that makes it possible. Every welcome extended to someone new. All of these are acts of sowing. Because when one part of the Body is sent, the whole Body is sent. This is not outreach happening over there somewhere. This is St James living out its vocation as the Church in this parish, to engage in contextual mission in its parish neighborhood.

And perhaps that is where Jesus gently challenges all of us today. Not everyone is called to lead a fresh expression of church. Not everyone will help at Trail and Table. But every Christian is called to become a sower. To scatter seeds of kindness. Seeds of forgiveness. Seeds of welcome. Seeds of compassion. Seeds of invitation. Seeds of hope.

Some of those seeds will appear to disappear. Some conversations will lead nowhere. Some invitations will be declined. Some efforts may seem unnoticed. As it was with Jesus, so it will be with us. But Jesus never tells us to measure success by immediate results. He asks us to measure faithfulness by whether we keep sowing.

As I reflected on this Gospel, I wondered what Jesus might say if he walked through Dundas today.

I suspect he would not begin by asking, “How many people came to church on Sunday?” I think he might ask different questions.

Who did you welcome?
Who did you listen to?
Who did you notice?
Where did you see me already at work?
Did you scatter the seeds I entrusted to you?
How are you supporting your missional ministries of the gospel like Rebecca who are sowing missionally?

Because somewhere in Dundas there is someone who feels forgotten.
Someone who thinks church is not for them.
Someone who has quietly given up hope.
Someone who is carrying a burden no one else sees.
Someone searching for meaning.
Someone longing to belong before they are ready to believe.

That is why Trail and Table matters. That is why parish matters. That is why mixed ecology matters. Because it says to every person in this community:

“There is a place for you.”

Not because you have everything together. Not because you already believe. Not because you know how church works. But because Christ has already gone ahead of us and is calling each person by name.

So let us continue to gather faithfully around this altar. But let us also be willing to scatter generously beyond these walls. May St James continue to become the church God is calling it to be:

A church rooted in prayer.
Grounded in Scripture.
Centred on the Eucharist.
Open to the Spirit.
Loving its parish neighbourhood
Supporting Rebecca and Leslie in this shared mission.
Joyfully embracing both inherited church and fresh expressions.
And courageously joining God’s mission wherever God is already sowing seeds of hope throughout Dundas.

For ours is not the task of making the Kingdom grow.
Our calling is simply to sow faithfully.
The harvest belongs to God. And thanks be to God, the Sower never stops scattering seed.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

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Photo by Jack Seeds on Unsplash

A Contemplative Practice based on yesterday’s reflection on the lectionary text for Sunday. See here if you have not read.

Music background: Stories in Sound by Brock Hewitt on Uppbeat

Final song: O God Will You Restore Us, Songs of Lament and Hope, Vol 1 by Bifrost Artists

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