Contours of movements

by Jonny Baker

When I first joined CMS, the team I was in had been set up to bring about change. Part of our conversation was about what was the best way to describe CMS that would call her to be her best self. The thing we stumbled across was an old CMS carrier bag that had a logo and the words “a movement of people in mission” which we abbreviated to MPM. Since that time, I have been interested in movements, what they are, how they are catalysed and animated, and how they might grow. Yet, it is surprisingly hard to find a coherent work drawing together insights on movements. Where people claim to do that in the missions world, it never seems to quite do what I am looking for but rather is lured into something formulaic which feels more like pyramid selling: follow this simple formula and don’t detract from it and you will see huge multiplication. That may work for some reductive version of the gospel but not really if you are interested in contextual mission that hopes to see imaginative engagement with the gospel that gets opened up creatively in response to the Spirit in a range of contexts.

What I think many of us have worked with over the years are clues, fragments, that come from writing on emergence, religious life and dissent, systemic change in organisations, network theory, biblical studies in areas such as the prophets, Gospels and the book of Acts, social movements, and mission studies stories and articles. Often, they are stumbled across and experienced as a sort of sense-making. I have experienced that on multiple occasions where someone has passed an article to me or I have stumbled across it through a blog and I have felt described in a way that made sense of what I saw or was experiencing intuitively.

People keep asking me to write a piece on movements, what they are and how they work. And I have never quite known how to approach that. I have settled in a place of reflecting that a collection of insightful fragments that contain different insights and nuances is good or as good as we are going to get. It is enough. It is especially good if those fragments are shared and held in conversation with others who share the same desire or quest. Movements are so dynamic that it would probably be a bit strange if they could be systematised into a formula we could all use – that wouldn’t be very movement-like! All that to say that here are a few fragments which I have come across which are on emergence, desire, dissent, innovation, small worlds and fringe dwelling.

Emergence

One very fertile area of writing and thinking is in emergence. Emergence often looks to the way creatures relate and self-organise in the natural world, such as ants, swarms or murmurations, where perhaps the most significant thing is the importance of relationship. We have been so taken with this that, in setting up the rhythm of life for the Aspen community, we draw on the image of a murmuration. In her book, Emergent Strategy, Adrienne Maree Brown says, “My dream is a movement with such deep trust that we move as a murmuration the way groups of starlings billow, dive, dance collectively through the air – to avoid predators, and it seems to pass time in the most beautiful way possible.”¹

When we did some research for Aspen around what pioneers might be looking or hoping for in a community, the word that came to the fore was “connect”. In other words, people can feel alone or isolated but know the experience of connecting with others is energising and important. ‘Connect’ is now one aspect of Aspen’s rhythm and this is how we draw on the murmuration in Aspen’s founding document: “In a murmuration the dynamic movement happens because each bird has a set of relations to six or seven neighbours. As long as a bird moves with them it works. Each member is encouraged to identify six or seven (the number is not important – it could be more or less) other pioneers/changemakers and to be intentional about connecting with them. Be free to do that how you like – in a group, by visiting individually, or whatever. We encourage a couple of things. The first is that in a murmuration each time it moves it will be a different set of relations. So that set of connections can be for a year and then a new one the next and so forth or at least some mix of the two. Secondly, with our value of ubuntu at the centre of belonging, we invite you to make sure some of those connections embody difference.”²

Adrienne Maree Brown looks at six elements of movements.³ For example, one is fractals – a similar pattern that you see at different scales. What you practise at the small scale sets the pattern for the whole system so it’s a challenge to embody and become the new community we want to see. Another is that emergent systems are interdependent and decentralised: leadership, power and other functions are distributed. It reminds me of the book Starfish and Spider⁴ which caught the imagination in this regard as a fragment several years back.

My strongest experience of feeling that what I was intuitively doing was being described was when I read Margaret Wheatley’s article on the “Lifecycle of Emergence”,⁵ which I came across through a friend in Australia’s blog in 2007. (I mention that because it is indicative of how emergence works in practice through informal connection.) She writes about how networks become communities of practice which can become systems of influence, not through organisational control but through emergence. The article opens like this: “Despite current ads and slogans, the world doesn’t change one person at a time. It changes as networks of relationships form among people who discover they share a common cause and vision of what’s possible. This is good news for those of us intent on changing the world and creating a positive future. Rather than worry about critical mass, our work is to foster critical connections. We don’t need to convince large numbers of people to change; instead, we need to connect with kindred spirits. Through these relationships, we will develop the new knowledge, practices, courage, and commitment that lead to broad-based change.”

It is a very short piece in which she describes four steps – Name, Connect, Nourish and Illuminate – which perhaps in relation to the missions world we are in is something like this:

• Name – identify/see contextual missional practice on the margins.
• Connect – connect those edge practices together, whether through gatherings and spaces where people collide, connectors who say to people “you should meet so and so”, or connecting online.
• Nourish – add value to the networks with encouragement, by participating in them, by helping share learning, training and perhaps putting resource into capacity through some people to animate it.
• Illuminate – tell the stories so that the word gets out and the emergence expands.

There is a lot more that could be said within each of these four but that is the lifecycle she names. See the Berkana Institute to dive deeper.⁶

Desire

I was very struck by Tina and Tim’s conversation on movements in this issue of ANVIL. It struck me that what they were describing was a naming of how they see movements emerge in response to desire. It probably caught my attention because I am very influenced by Ignatian spirituality which pays attention to the significance of God-given desire and longing as a sign of the Spirit’s movement which is something to notice and follow. Somewhat tentatively I emailed Tim and Tina saying what I thought I was hearing. I thought it worth adding here as a new fragment into the mix in case it is helpful to others. You will have to watch their video to understand the dancer reference.

• Desire – someone has a desire on the edges through seeking to join in with the Spirit. That desire gets named gradually and some practice is embodied in a place (the lone dancer).
• Connect – common desire gets discovered through connecting and listening to the desire of others. Through what can feel random, you find others who have the same desire. It feels magical. (A few more dancers join.)
• Communication – connecting is helped by champions, advocates, comms, getting out and about, colliding with others whom God has prepared. It takes work and belief that something more than doing just your own local practice is worthwhile.
• Articulate – share and work together on practice, language, models, stories, making sense that can only come after a few years of learning and iteration. All this builds up a toolkit. (The dance moves are looking good.)
• Amplify – get amplified through particular moments in publishing or gatherings that broaden the reach of connection. Amplification is still fundamentally relational through particular connections. (A crowd is now dancing, and some are going to start dances in other places.)
• Keep doing it – keep connecting, keep communicating, keep experimenting, keep learning, keep gathering.

Dissent

When I was writing a design brief to help us think about how we would discern the shape of the Aspen community, I was at St Beuno’s in North Wales which is an Ignatian retreat centre hosted by a Jesuit community. It felt such a gift to be doing that work in such a community. While I was there, I took the opportunity to have a look through the library to see what I could find on spread-out ecclesial communities or religious congregations. To my delight, I found a shelf of books. Gerald Arbuckle highlights the significance of religious congregations within the Catholic church’s ecclesiology. As spread-out communities gather around a particular purpose they are prophetic, calling the rest of the church backwards to revisit the heart of the gospel and forwards in mission.⁷ He names this as dissent, by which he means the proposing of alternatives to business as usual and those who find the path for that and those who can advocate for it within the structures.

There are a couple of pieces of thinking in the missions world that conclude something similar. One is Ralph Winter’s discussion of sodal and modal expressions of church.⁸ The modal is the local gathered and the sodal the one spread out, gathered around a purpose. He says that the energy of the church in mission needs both. A second piece is Beth Keith’s research into pioneer ministers set in conversation with Jeremiah’s call where she shows that those able to generate genuinely new practice and not get stuck are those who belong to a sodal community.⁹ It is these threads that persuaded me over that last decade that we were being invited by the Spirit to give birth to an ecclesial ecumenical community such as Aspen. It is exciting that it now exists in the world.

But back to St Beuno’s library. I found myself laughing out loud at the familiarity of the experience of the religious in the Roman Catholic Church. They carry a burning passion for something new and invariably are exasperated at the resistance they encounter from the powers that be. Here are a few quotations. I have replaced the word “religious” or “congregation” with “pioneer” to make the resonance explicit. Get in touch if you want the fuller version.

These first two are really simple short summaries of these kinds of communities…

“The dynamic of the pioneer charism is the call to a work in the world. It is primarily a mission, and from this flows a community and a sense of identity. The foundational spiritual experience bears these marks – the sequela Christi as a call to ministerial service, the acceptance of a mission, the gathering of companions, and the emergence of a new path of Christian discipleship.”¹⁰

“We require leaders giddied with charismatically inspired creative imaginations… For them the general formula for any innovation: a willingness to question the status quo, pragmatic imagination, an idea, initiative, courage, and a few friends to help the project off the ground.”¹¹

Pioneering (or prophetic or apostolic) ministry is perhaps focused more on the incoming future than the preservation of the past. It sees creative and as yet unimagined possibilities for how the gospel might unfurl and is able to form people for that. This is essential for the wider church but also can create tension…

“When thinking of the church’s primary task of preaching the kingdom within an ever-changing world we need apostolic creativity of quantum leap proportions. In other words, renewal of existing pastoral strategies is insufficient. Rather we require radically different and as yet unimagined ways to relate the good news to the pastoral challenges of the world… Thus pioneers or ‘apostolic quantum leap’ persons are needed within the church to critique or dissent from the conventional and ineffective pastoral wisdom of the present. Without these courageous people the church simply cannot fulfil its mission.”¹²

“We must form a people who follow the Jesus who walked from Galilee to Jerusalem touching the unclean, consorting with sinners, contending with the teachers, giving the hungry food he did not have, talking to the rich on behalf of the poor and praying on mountaintops, in synagogues, and deep in desert places on his way to cleanse a temple – not to traffic in the trivia of maintaining the superficial and empty trappings of religion at any cost.”¹³

“We must form for the prophetic rather than for the obedient, for the pastoral rather than for the ecclesiastically proper. We must form for prophetic presence, not for institutional development that insulates us from the life of others.”¹⁴

And I loved the challenge in these last quotes for pioneers to take responsibility for living out their calling, rather than to be worried about pleasing or gaining approval from the modal or denominational forms of church. It’s precisely why this second kind of structure is needed to help look after this gift and call and it is critical to stay true to that call.

“There is an urgently felt need for pioneers themselves to reclaim their own story, and take on those daring and controversial initiatives that will re-ground a more authentic vision for the sake of the world.”¹⁵

“It may be precisely when we become the good children of Mother Church that we run the risk of becoming its underdeveloped children as well – loving and lovable, perhaps, but dependent and depressingly unimaginative at the same time; open to direction, yes, but closed to the Holy Spirit at the same time. In an age long past business-as-usual, we must teach again that pioneers are meant to be the wake-up call of the Church.”¹⁶

“The close liaison with the official Church often alienates us from those very people whom we feel the call to accompany in a special way. I refer to the millions of marginalised women and men for whom the Church no longer offers either meaning or hope; or the millions who feel they have outgrown the need for formal religion but still search for spiritual meaning. In many cases we encounter these people and engage more dynamically with them outside, rather than within, an ecclesiastical context…. Reclaiming our mission at the heart of the world is in no way a denial or rejection of our alliance with the Church. What it does necessitate is a very different way of being Church.”¹⁷

Innovation

Movements usually occur within a wider system or organisation. An area with lots of pieces of wisdom to offer is innovation, systems change, which invariably also requires culture change. There is a lot in that space and the theory is a lot easier than the practice. A well known example is the bell curve of change that relates a theory of how the diffusion of innovation happens.¹⁸ It is a simple idea that change begins with a small group of innovators (or pioneers?), but for it to happen more, it needs to diffuse across wider groups. The group most likely to pick it up are early adopters but it is when the practice begins to move into the early majority that you can reach a tipping point where the whole system begins to change. I first came across this in discussion with Stephen Croft when he was leading Fresh Expressions and he drew the bell curve on a piece of paper over coffee at Greenbelt festival and said he saw what I was doing with CMS was in the front end of the curve but he was more focused on the early adopters and early majority, which was really helpful. In the book Rescuing the Gospel from the Cowboys, Richard Twiss researches a movement of contextual practice in First Nations people in North America and he uses this theory to make sense of that.¹⁹ As an aside, I found it interesting in that case that so many of the innovators went on to study, to make sense of what they were doing and offered thought leadership to the wider movement.

The second fragment which is also coded into a diagram is the two loops theory which has proved very helpful. It comes from Margaret Wheatley (again) and Deborah Frieze, first sketched out in their book, Walk Out Walk On.²⁰ Tim Soerens and Tina reference it in their video conversation in this edition of ANVIL. It is how an emergent system grows out of an established system. Contrary to a theory of ever-evolving change, this suggests something more disruptive that is about a new paradigm. All systems stagnate, things die and new ones emerge. We all recognise this process. Pioneers engage in practice connecting and building communities that are able to develop into the emergent system. Some people are helped to make the move across from the old to the new by paying attention to that transition point and working as transition guides. Others simply don’t want to make that move and are wedded to the established. There is not space here to build on it but see the footnote for some links. They all include versions of the diagram.²¹

Small worlds

Small world theory comes from the study of networks and how they work in practice. Often, we assume that networks operate through every member connecting to every member. But in practice this never happens. What actually happens is that people connect to a relatively small number of people (their small world). But as long as that small group has one or two people who also connect to people in the wider network in another small group, it’s only one step removed to reach anyone else in the network through the connector. This is how most networks work – a mix of dense and sparse connections rather than everyone linked to everyone. Those people who focus externally are connectors. Most people are quite happy existing in a small world but connectors often hold an astonishing level of connectivity across small worlds. Six degrees of separation works because these people create huge shortcuts and it’s often these connectors that people start thinking about unconsciously when looking for that connection.

Another interesting insight from the theory is that energy is multiplied in the network through connection with difference. Energy tends to dissipate if you have too much sameness so movements need clear purpose but connection with difference. You can look it up to find out more.²² There is a good summary in Clay Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody.²³

This led me to ponder the kinds of gifts or people that make movements function well. We might ponder what the equivalent of Paul’s fivefold ministry in Ephesians might be for movements. To save us some work, Dustin Benac did some research into two movements in North America, one of which was the Parish Collective, and published it in his book, Adaptive Church.²⁴ He draws a diagram following his research of six modes of leadership or being-with that he reflects are at play in movement teams. They are: champion, catalyst, connector–convenor, guide, caretaker and surveyor. It was obvious to me that movements need champions, catalysts and connectors but perhaps the roles of caretaker, guide and surveyor are less visible but equally important. They are not necessarily six different persons in a team but more like six things that need attention.

Fringe dwelling

Perhaps it might help to add an example on movements from the Bible as a last fragment. In Fringe Dweller together with David Cotterill, we look at 40 encounters in the Gospels between Jesus and those at the fringes.²⁵ One of the things I have pondered since it has been published is that Jesus is catalysing movements at the fringes or at least it seems that way. Let me give three examples.

The first is amongst tax collectors. This is perhaps the most surprising and I had not thought about this before. To most people the idea that a mission movement could take place among a group who were seen to be collaborators with the Romans is inconceivable. But Jesus calls Levi-Matthew to follow him. He has seen and names something. It turns out that Levi-Matthew is a networker and connector who throws parties and invites Jesus into that space round the table. Zacchaeus is a tax collector who joins the movement and it is possible that it is through the network of tax collectors he has heard Jesus is coming so goes out to meet him. Tax collectors are present in the crowds: for example, when Jesus tells the story of the prodigal son. Jesus has a reputation for hanging out with tax collectors and sinners so it is a regular thing that they were around. Levi-Matthew becomes one of the apostles so an insider to that group is in the leadership of the wider movement as it grows.

The second is Samaritans. Jesus is intentional about connecting with them. In the encounter with the woman at the well, he is invited to stay for two days in Samaria. Rather than invite them to Jerusalem to learn the Jewish faith (which due to history would have been too traumatising), he begins an insider movement inside the Samaritan religion with the woman at the well as an apostle to the Samaritans. It takes time to develop the work and on one occasion when Jesus tries to visit a Samaritan village, he is turned away. It takes a long time to change the disciples’ perceptions from wanting to rain down fire from heaven to seeing that God is at work in the Samaritans beginning a mission movement. One of the ten healed from leprosy in the borderlands between Israel and Samaria is a Samaritan who goes to his people to share good news. In a piece of thought leadership Jesus reframes the perception of Samaritans in the story of the good Samaritan. By the time we get to Acts, Samaria is named as one of the areas of the Spirit’s activity that the apostles will join in with as they follow the Spirit’s becoming across borders.

A third is the mission movement in the Decapolis on the other side of the lake. The man from Gerasa freed from his occupation by Legion is sent to be an apostle to his own people in Gentile Syria rather than go back with Jesus to be a disciple in the Jewish culture and religion. Jesus circles back there after the encounter in Sidon and Tyre with the Canaanite woman whose daughter is healed. (Perhaps she becomes an apostle to the Canaanites and a movement starts in Lebanon too?) When he arrives, there are 4,000 people gathered so the man from Gerasa has been quite the apostle, it turns out. And a movement is underway on the other side of the lake.

Clearly there are a lot of gaps in the stories so we are left to puzzle over this but what I take away from Jesus’ movement-catalysing ministry is the need to be intentional, to get out of the comfort zone, to be with those who are pushed to the fringes and notice where God is at work and who God is calling. The key to the movement seems to be those indigenous leaders who are insiders in their culture, who become apostles to their own people, whom Jesus comes back to from time to time to encourage and do some teaching with, but he largely leaves them to get on with it. And he stops them from getting too much of his own culture in the process, which would be very easy to do.

Keep moving I have been revisiting the notion of movements for two reasons. One is that in CMS, the strategic direction is to catalyse and collaborate in mission movements round the world in response to discerning where God is calling CMS to participate in God’s mission at the edges. The second is that we have launched Aspen as a spread-out ecclesial community. As discussed elsewhere in this issue of ANVIL, this is a response to what God is calling us to in this season of the movement that has emerged of mission in post-Christian Britain and other contexts over the last 30 years. We are in a new season of emergence. Things never seem to stay still but keep moving. These fragments have been extremely helpful to us in our conversations, thinking and practice.

About the author

Jonny Baker is the director of mission in post-Christian Britain at Church Mission Society (CMS).

More from this issue

Notes

1. Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy (Chico: AK Press, 2017) 71. ↩︎
2. Aspen founding document. ↩︎
3. Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy. ↩︎
4. Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom, The Starfish and The Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organisations (New York: Portfolio, 2006). ↩︎
5. Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze, ‘Using Emergence
   to Take Social Innovation to Scale‘, https://www.margaretwheatley.com/articles/using-emergence.pdf ↩︎
6. The Berkana Institute, https://berkana.org/ ↩︎
7. See especially Gerald Arbuckle, Refounding the Church (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1993) and Gerald Arbuckle, Out of Chaos: Refounding Religious Congregations (New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1988). ↩︎
8. Ralph D. Winter, ‘The Two Structures of God’s Redemptive Mission‘, https://munsonmissions.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/606d6-two-structures-gods-redemptive-mission-winter.pdf ↩︎
9. Beth Keith, “To Pluck up and Pull Down, to Build and to Plant”, in Jonny Baker and Cathy Ross (eds) The Pioneer Gift: Explorations in mission (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2014) 117–140. ↩︎
10. Gemma Simmonds, A Future Full of Hope (Dublin: Columba Press, 2012) 141. ↩︎
11. Gerald Arbuckle, Refounding the Church, 6. ↩︎
12. Ibid, 22. ↩︎
13. Joan Chittister, Fire in these Ashes (Kansas City: Sheed & Ward, 1995), 171. ↩︎
14. Ibid, 172. ↩︎
15. Diarmuid O’Murchu, Reframing Religious Life, (Slough: St Pauls) 132. ↩︎
16. Joan Chittister, Fire in these Ashes, 165. ↩︎
17. Diarmuid O’Murchu, 131. ↩︎
18. See Wikipedia, ‘Diffusion of Innovations‘, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations ↩︎
19. Richard Twiss, Rescuing the Gospel from the Cowboys (Lisle: IVP, 2025). ↩︎
20. Deborah Frieze  and Margaret Wheatley, Walk Out Walk On (Oakland: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2011). ↩︎
21. Article: Alex Derr, ‘What is the Two Loops Model? Leveraging Community Networks for Transformative Change’, https://visiblenetworklabs.com/2024/08/16/what-is-the-two-loops-model/. Video: Deborah Frieze, ‘Two Loops: How Systems Change‘, https://walkoutwalkon.net/walking-out-on/video-two-loops-theory-of-change/ ↩︎
22. This wikipedia entry is pretty comprehensive: ‘Small-world experiment‘, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_experiment ↩︎
23. Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody (London: Penguin, 2008). ↩︎
24. Dustin Benac, Adaptive Church (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2022) chapter 7. ↩︎
25. Jonny Baker and David Cotterill Fringe Dweller (Getsidetracked, 2026) – available from https://www.getsidetracked.co ↩︎