Some kind of community of people orbiting around a podcast: church in the new environment | Tim Nash and Jonny Baker [ANVIL vol 35 issue 3]

Anvil journal of theology and mission

Some kind of community of people orbiting around a podcast: church in the new environment

A conversation between Tim Nash and Jonny Baker


Jonny Baker and Tim Nash discuss the Nomad podcast, tracing the ways that it has developed into an online, and in some places physical, community.

They reflect on the ways that this has become church, or something church-like, for many, making some interesting observations and developing some innovative ideas around the theology of church.

Jonny: Could you tell us what Nomad is? [1]

Tim: At its heart, Nomad is a podcast. For the last decade we’ve been uploading interviews with theologians, activists and contemplatives. And we’ve acquired quite a large audience of listeners around the world. Everyone involved in Nomad had inherited a fairly conservative evangelical faith, and for one reason or another had grown disillusioned with it. But the Christian faith was just too much in our blood to walk away from it, so Nomad became the means through which we’ve been looking for signs of hope. People often refer to the Nomad podcast as an interview show, but that’s not really the heart of it. It’s more a record of the faith journey of the hosts. We speak to people because we hope that can speak into an area of our faith we’re genuinely wrestling with. So you can track my journey over the years from conservative evangelical to whatever I am now. In fact, someone recently discovered the podcast and started working their way backwards through the archive. They said how interesting it was witnessing my deconstruction in reverse! They said it was like watching a “spiritual Benjamin Button”! Perhaps that’s one of the reasons Nomad is quite popular. People can relate to our open, honest exploration. In fact, a lot of people say that it’s our post-interview chat that they find most helpful. In my experience the church hasn’t been all that good at creating spaces for questions and doubts, whereas we think that’s where you find the good stuff!

Although the podcast is still at the heart of Nomad, an online (and, increasingly, offline) community has emerged. We have a closed Facebook group where people share stories, unpack episodes, and support and encourage each other. We also have another, similar, group, but where the focus is on reading books together. We provide devotional and contemplative resources for our supporters that have a more holistic feel, which balances the more cerebral nature of the podcast. And we’ve got a listener map on the website where people can register and connect with other listeners in their area. Groups of people are starting to meet all over the place to discuss episodes of the podcast and support and encourage each other (at the last count we’ve got 1,000 people and 21 groups registered, and I’ve lost count of the number of emails I’ve had of people sharing stories of the friendships they’ve made. I’ve also made some wonderful friendships over the years). Back in 2017 we also spent the weekend with 80 listeners, for food, conversation, music, meditation and some live podcasting, and we’re doing that again in the not-too-distant future. So, I think that’s pretty much what Nomad is. It’s some kind of community of people that is orbiting around a podcast.

Jonny: You began your involvement when you were employed as a Venture FX pioneer with the Methodist Church. What was it about it that made you think it was worth getting involved in as part of your pioneering?

Tim: For about seven years Nomad was just a hobby in the sense that I fitted it in around everything else. But a few things happened a couple of years ago that changed that. We were having lunch with a guest after we’d interviewed him, and he challenged our selfdeprecating description of Nomad and said that Nomad was a really important part of a lot of people’s faith journey.

He then suggested that we might want to consider drawing people together in an offline gathering. That’s what prompted us to put on the Nomad weekend. And the weekend was incredible. It just flowed. There was so much energy, so many natural connections, and a tangible sense of shared journey. It was like 80 people breathed a collective sigh of relief as they realised they weren’t alone on their journey. That’s what prompted us to set up the Facebook groups and the listener map, so that we could facilitate more of these connections. So I began to realise that Nomad was becoming more than just a podcast. Around this time the community that my wife and I had pioneered in Nottingham was coming to a natural conclusion, and so I was wondering whether my time as a pioneer was also drawing to a close. I was sharing this with my management group, and they made the point that Nomad was a pretty exciting pioneering experiment and had the potential to develop in really interesting ways, so suggested I focus all my energy on that.

Jonny: The podcast interview with Steve Aisthorpe was really interesting and made me sit up and pay attention. [2] He wrote Invisible Church, in which he explores the practice of Christian faith beyond the edges of attendance at a Sunday congregation. [3] The interview really lifted the lid off a new kind of practice of Christian faith. We are used to statistics on church attendance that tell a story of decline and church in crisis. Those that no longer attend are assumed to have lost faith. But his research shows that there are a large number of those who no longer attend church who are simply making faith in other ways. He estimates that there are twice as many practising Christians not in church as those who do attend. [4] There is a different story here that is not being told – church is alive and well but has shifted or moved. We have had similar research before through Gone But Not Forgotten by Leslie Francis and Philip J. Richter, [5] and A Churchless Faith by Alan Jamieson, [6] but the scale of what Steve is talking about is something new. From what you have said about Nomad and the journey listeners are on, I imagine a lot are in that sort of space. How are people making sense of their faith in that space?

Tim: Nomad’s audience did seem to deeply resonate with the Steve Aisthorpe interview. There seemed to be a collective sigh of relief, as if Steve was legitimising what a lot of them have been doing. Actually I would imagine that the majority of Nomad’s listeners still attend some form of “traditional” church, but as Richard Rohr put it, they feel on the edge of the inside. Many attend simply because they want their children to grow up in a faith community, many because they can’t face the fallout of leaving, and many because they like the idea of being part of a local faith community. But all feel uncomfortable with it for some reason or another (which is why they often stumble across Nomad). But of course a lot have left church altogether and are experimenting with new things.

For those people who are still part of a traditional church community, the faith journey they are on is largely taking place outside that church community. So there’s a lot of talk in the Listener Lounge, for example, about finding God in nature, pilgrimage, contemplative practices, home/family-based rituals, etc. And as Steve Aisthorpe found, among those who have left church, there’s definitely no lack of energy or commitment for the faith journey and for the idea of a faith community. There is inevitably a lot of pain, introspection and perhaps even cynicism towards past experiences of church (Evangelicalism in particular), but people are still committed to the journey, their commitment to Nomad being just one expression of that.

The only nervousness I sense about exploring faith outside traditional church is children. I can’t tell you how many people have said to me and how many conversations I’ve witnessed in the Listener Lounge where people have said they’d leave church today if it wasn’t for their kids. People are keen for their kids to feel part of a faith community, to make friends with other kids, to be mentored by other adults and to be exposed to the Christian story in creative ways.

Traditional church, on the whole, is seen as still being pretty good at that stuff. And even though parents might not be that comfortable with some of the theology, that’s seen as something that can be talked through and unpicked back home. Perhaps that’s why Messy Church has proved so popular.

Jonny: I was interested in Dave Blower’s album and the related Nomad discussion about it that you published as a podcast, which was around one world or era collapsing and another waiting to emerge, and that we are living in this in-between space where the old ways are collapsing but we aren’t yet sure what the new ways are. [7] That got a lot of resonance with your committed subscribers. Is that what is going on with those who choose to leave church to follow Christ?

Tim: I think a lot of this relates to the collapse of the old ways. It seems that in the light of the collapsing political/religious/climate systems, the more conservative expressions of faith/church are doubling down on certainty and aren’t creating spaces for an open and honest wrestling with the big questions.

Again, I guess that’s why Nomad’s popular, because we’re not seen as having a particular agenda; there are no pre-prepared answers. We’re happy for people to disagree with us or our guests; we’re just trying to bring a variety of voices to the conversation.

Jonny: I recently presented a paper at a conference on mission in a digital age and the issue I explored was the translation of the gospel across cultures. [8] It takes imagination to translate afresh in different times, cultures and contexts. And it takes some attention to the cultural processes and ways of communication as well as some inventiveness. While it’s obvious when you think about it that there are multiple takes on the gospel and church across cultures, the church still has a tendency to absolutise its own way of doing things, but it is essential that the church keeps translating afresh.

If that attention to culture is not there, it leads to a lack of self-awareness of one’s own culture, which in turn can lead to a colonisation when the gospel is shared. We confuse our cultural way of doing things with the gospel and impose it on others so they get more than they bargained for. In many ways that is why some people are very wary of the idea of mission even. I think our imagination can be more colonised than we like to think it is. Nomad is a good example of translation in a digital age.

This issue of Anvil is about church and mission. The lived practice of people who are in the Nomad community seems to be that their experience of church is constructed from multiple connections and multiple places – they may go to a local gathered church but they might also connect at a festival or with friends over a meal, and they connect via the podcast and conversation about it. When we hear the word “church” we tend to imagine a local gathered group organised in particular ways, and it has members who meet at a particular times to do particular things. But I am wondering if we need other ways of imagining that.

Church is after all something constructed, something that we make in cultural forms. One of the ways of talking about church in the New Testament is around gathering (ekklesia). But it is also described more organically as a body with various parts, or as a people, a set of relationships. I have also thought about it as a network of relational connections to Christ and to one another drawing on network theory. [9] I am beginning to wonder if the word “church” is best reserved for the wider set of relations in the body of Christ with multiple groups and congregations and communications and connecting points, all of which sit within a wider church ecology. It is unhelpful that “church” has collapsed into a local congregation that gathers in one particular way. In fresh expressions, mixed economy has been a helpful phrase but still often relates to a mix of gathered forms. We definitely want those gathered forms within the whole but I am imagining something much richer and more diverse as the mix. Within that space Nomad is part of the church ecology or environment, a node on the network of Christ where Christ is being communicated. The digital environment enables connection and communication in ways that were unimaginable when I was a teenager. I am quite happy with your own description of being a podcast and a community orbiting around a podcast and not on a mission to prove you are more.

But is it possible that this is what church looks like in the new environment for quite a lot of people?

Tim: Yep, I think you’ve nailed it, Jonny. This kind of idea has been expressed in Nomad’s Listener Lounge time and time again. And it’s my experience and understanding as well. Regardless of how I might define Nomad, people often say that for them it is an expression of church. But so is Greenbelt, and so is the book club they’re a part of, and so is meeting with a friend for a pint, and so might be going on a pilgrimage with a group of strangers, and going through the liturgy in a local Anglican church… I think a great example of this is the story Edwina Gateley told on Nomad, [10] when she came across a group of women sitting on some steps on a Chicago street. She sat down with them, and one of them asked if she’d like to share a donut with them, and then after that asked if she’d like to share some ginger beer. And Edwina realised that this was a Eucharistic moment. It was an ecclesial moment. I found that story so moving, and so inspiring. Church is emerging all over the place, if I have eyes to see it.

It’s an obvious biblical reference, but I love the verse “when two or three are gathered in my name, there I am with them” (Matt. 18:20). I grew up hearing it used almost as a consolation when hardly anyone turned up for a prayer meeting! But now I see it as a really inspiring call to awareness. When we’re recording a podcast, engaging in a post in the Listener Lounge, reading a book with other listeners in the book club, meeting up with some local listeners for a meal or (something new we tried in August) all coming online at the same time for a David Blower gig in the Listener Lounge, am I staying open to the presence of Jesus, to see in this a potential for church to emerge? For many of us, this is such a liberating idea.

And actually, strange as it may seem to many people, I think the internet lends itself really well to this. There’s something about the distance between us online, and perhaps the disembodied nature of it, that allows people to really quickly open up and share quite personal and deep struggles. There have been a number of occasions where someone has shared their pain, and the community has gathered around them offering sympathy and prayers. And on more than one occasion people have reached out through a private message and have subsequently formed a really supportive longterm friendship.

Jonny: Different traditions hold up different things as essential or at the heart of church. I wonder what they look like when held up next to Nomad. Let me give a few examples for you to hold up against Nomad. One way of doing that in evangelical circles, which it sounds like you are in, would be to think that church should have a mix of mission, community and worship. [11] Nomad has those, I think. The community is interesting in that you do have a core committed set of members in the Listener Lounge, 1,000 people on a map and 21 groups, and a much wider fringe. I suspect baptism has not been discussed that much and you wouldn’t need to be baptised to be a member, so there are differences, of course.

Another way of conceiving of church would be a place where there is a ministry of the Word and sacraments around which people gather, and some traditions would emphasise one more than the other. Depending on the tradition, one or other might be held up more as a mark of the church. Nomad has an amazing ministry of the Word, I think, if that is taken as teaching and learning and reflecting on discipleship in the light of the Scriptures and the tradition. You have got some top theologians and communicators with some wonderful interaction and conversation. Avery Dulles explores the idea of church as herald and maybe Nomad isn’t far off that. [12] There is wonderfully creative play on that by Andrea Campanale and Mike Moynagh in the book Missional Conversations, where they conceive of church as conversation. [13] It is interesting that you do have small groups who gather for meals and conversation. It’s probably not communion, though perhaps it is not that far off Jesus’ table fellowship with sinners. Perhaps those tables are places where Christ is being remembered.

Perhaps the simplest or most minimal essence of church that you have already referred to is Jesus saying that where two or three are gathered, he is there in the midst of them. I was reminded by a member of the Disability & Jesus network recently that if that didn’t include the possibility of online, then many of their members would not be able to gather. [14]

Or we might think of church as one, holy, catholic and apostolic as articulated in the creeds. Mission-shaped Church used this as a way of exploring how fresh expressions might be church. [15] The catholicity is about the wider set of relationships and connections. I wonder how Nomad fits with that way of conceiving of church.

A more recent discussion around church has been that of liquid church and ecclesiology by Pete Ward. [16] He suggests we need to think about church in ways that take the fluid nature of culture seriously. Liquid church is where Christ is communicated and people connect to Christ and one another. Solid church in contrast reduces church to gathering, and it has a gravitational force about it that pulls in on itself. The Nomad community fits with this liquid form of church. I think more attention and research could be done into the actual lived practices of people who are listeners or members or both. Ward focuses in on Jesus Christ who is the gospel and quotes Ignatius, who says that wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the church. [17] I look at Nomad and I think it is fair to say that there is the church in some form at least. I wonder where you discern that Jesus is present in Nomad.

Tim: Nomad may well have elements of mission, community and worship, but we didn’t plan it that way. At no point have I, or the other members of the team, had a conversation about what Nomad is, and whether it’s a church or not, or what elements of church we’re trying to develop. The various elements of Nomad have emerged organically. For example, I asked David if he was up for being a co-host. He’s a musician, so he soon asked if he could produce some more devotional content. We didn’t think that Nomad needed worship. It was similar when Jemimah joined, and she set up a book club. It was at the Nomad weekend that people said how much they appreciated the sense of community, so I did spend some time wondering how we could facilitate that. And subsequently I built the listener map and set up the Listener Lounge. I see the Listener Lounge as the heart of Nomad’s community as that’s where I see the support, encouragement and friendships forming. In August we gathered people online at the same time for a live gig in the Listener Lounge. It was an experiment in gathered online community and it was great. It made me wonder whether in the future we might explore some sort of shared sacrament, although I’d tread very carefully with that. David’s probably got a better handle on the offline community side of Nomad than me. He’s been touring his new album and has so far done about a dozen gigs across the country, and it’s largely been local gatherings of Nomad listeners.

I can see that Nomad has that mix of community, mission and worship, but I would think that community is very much at its heart. I get messages every day saying that Nomad feels like their home/tribe/church. Even people who aren’t on the map or in the Lounge say that it feels like their community. I guess listening to our voices month after month creates a deep sense of familiarity, and safety, especially so as we share very personally and honesty.

Similarly, with seeing Nomad as a ministry of the Word – I can see that that is true, but interestingly I get message after message saying that it’s the chat between the hosts that people really appreciate – the silliness, laughter, personal reflections and the application of what we heard in the interview. I’m sure a lot of people do just tune in for the interview, but the dedicated Nomad followers seem to appreciate the pre- and post-interview chats as well. I think it’s because this is where community/home/tribe is found. So, clearly, I resonate with the idea of church as conversation. I’m quick to correct people when they describe Nomad as an interview podcast; it isn’t – it’s a conversation. The interview is there to stimulate a conversation between the hosts, and to stimulate a conversation with the listeners that may happen with a partner, friend, a small group of listeners or in the Listener Lounge. And yes, Christ would be remembered at these gatherings, in as much as that at the heart of the Nomad journey is figuring out what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

I do also like the idea of catholicity with Nomad being part of a wider set of relationships and connections. My guess is that a lot of listeners would resonate with this. As important as Nomad might be to them, I doubt very much that it is everything to them. In the Listener Lounge they are often sharing other resources, and experiences mediated through other connections and relationships. Nomad is just one well where people stop to take a drink.

Where do I discern Jesus present in Nomad?! I think I see Jesus when I hear about how listeners’ understanding and experience is expanded – for example, with the episodes we’ve done on various forms of contemplative prayer recently. This has brought so much joy and liberation to people. And similarly, episodes that have picked apart penal substitution and original sin seem to have deeply affected people. As they have me. So many people, especially those brought up in a rather narrow evangelical, or charismatic, environment, have said something like, “Why has no one told me about this before!” It’s helped them connect with God in a radically new way. I think I also see Jesus in the friendships that are forming. And this is happening all over the world. Someone emailed a while back saying they had to move to another country because their partner had taken a new job. They left their community behind and moved to a small town where they didn’t know a soul. They had a look on the listener map and saw there was someone in a neighbouring village. They met up, hit it off, and have become close friends! Or someone recently shared some personal struggles in the Listener Lounge. There was lots of support and encouragement, as you’d expect. But behind the scenes, someone in another country privately messaged this person because they’d been through a similar experience. And now they regularly message each other with words of prayer and support. I could give you so many other examples. It just blows me away.

As I said before, I take very seriously the idea of “when two or three gather” being the bottom line when it comes to church. It that sense, while I wouldn’t definitively say that Nomad is a church, I would say that church can happen within Nomad – just as I’d say that church can happen within the church building down the road, but doesn’t necessarily happen there.

Jonny: The way we have imagined church is so tied to solid forms of church that I think we need some different metaphors to open up our imagination. I have been thinking about woodland as a metaphor. In a woodland you want some big standards – oaks or beech or wild service trees that seed lots of other trees and are at the top of the canopy. Then you have a middle layer – hazel or hawthorn under oaks for example, and then you want shrubs and then smaller plants – wonderful bluebells and the like that appear in different seasons. You might also have woodland such that there are a few different areas or zones with a bit of a different mix of trees. If you want to regenerate the woodland, the simplest way to do so is to let light in by thinning or making a clearing. This process of letting light in is extraordinary – what seemed dormant bursts into life. There is a seed bank in the soil and seeds distributed by animals (through bird poo, for example, or squirrels burying nuts) so you don’t even need to plant things. For biodiversity and resilience it helps to have a mix of large, medium and small tress and different spaces. You definitely don’t want a monoculture because if, say, a disease or pest attacks it, you could lose everything in one go. Woodland is also an environment that is abundant rather than scarce – one beech tree might produce 30,000 seeds, and the soil contains so much by way of possibility for life to emerge.

I have begun thinking about church as an ecology or environment like a woodland. By church I do not mean “a church” – I am thinking about everything that is connected to Christ. In that environment are denominations, festivals, bookshops, retreat centres, podcasts and their associated communities. Standards at the top of the canopy might be a big city-centre church or cathedral or a festival or a CMS or a Nomad, or Stormzy singing “Blinded by Your Grace” at Glastonbury; then there are lots of mid-size groups and things and lots of small groups – people meeting in ones and twos, sharing meals in homes or praying via a WhatsApp group. And judging by Steve Aisthorpe’s research that we discussed earlier, a large part of that environment is invisible to the church’s way of counting attendance – perhaps as much as two thirds of it might be. The environment is abundant. The seeds of the gospel are out there in multiple places, such that if you were to make a clearing, it is a safe bet that something new would be seeded.

In the church ecology, it will flourish if it is diverse and if there are clearings from time to time. Growth is not a technical or mechanical process of models that can be delivered. It is more likely to take place by paying attention to what’s going on and working with what’s there, and trying to add diversity or reintroduce some ancient species and so on – leadership is more like gardening or woodland management. And you don’t want a monoculture. In this environment, Nomad is part of the ecology of church – a gift offered – that brings life, joy, liberation, faith, hope, community – the kinds of things you are describing. It’s generative seeding of new groups, ideas, relationships and conversations. It’s not “a church”, but as I said before, I think the word “church” is best reserved for the whole anyway. Denominations can get very anxious about growth but I think this more ecological view where a denomination is just part of the wider ecology might enable them to relax a bit, especially if we can trust that God might be the one who is at work regenerating in places we are not even looking. What may be most critical is letting God’s light in.

This does not mean that traditional models don’t have their place. They do and can be a great gift, seeding all sorts of things. But the environment is a lot more fluid. Membership can be challenging – people don’t join like they used to. One of the challenges that is really an amplification of what is happening in the wider culture is that self is located at the centre of everything. I am choosing how to make a life and follow Christ through assembling various pieces in an environment that will probably change over time. There’s something creative about that, but how does it relate to authority and tradition? And ironically it requires some communities committed to the local, and to depth of commitment for the individual to draw from. Perhaps discipleship now could be conceived of as discovering the basics of the Christian faith in a gathered Christian community or congregation for five to ten years. Part of that will be learning practices to help navigate the new environment. But a somewhat heretical thought is that a new normal expectation could be that after that time you would move out into the wider world, drawing on the resources and communities in the wider ecology to fuel a life of mission, returning perhaps to that community from time to time. That’s more like the monastic communities where you would experience formation into the life of the community, then be sent out and then return to the mother house every so often. I think this is something of what is going on for a lot of people, regardless of whether the wider church has noticed or likes it.

I was interested in the particular concern in the Nomad community of raising kids and how faith and tradition gets passed on. We need spaces in the woodland that do that well. How do the new forms relate to the wider church? I like the connection to the Methodists through your board, for example, who are there in the background, hopefully offering support and wisdom.

Tim: That’s a beautiful image and so much more lifegiving and inspiring than the usual businessy language of networks, etc. It’s very important too, in our time of climate crisis, that we come back to nature to learn about life.

I love the idea of clearing spaces for new growth. I feel that is true not only for the ecological whole, but also when we zoom closer in. I often say that Nomad is essentially about creating and facilitating a space, and simply seeing what emerges there. And I’m sure other communities would say the same – like Greenbelt, for example. Who would doubt nature’s ability to grow new and beautiful things? So why do we doubt the Spirit’s ability to do that?

More negatively, though, a lot of people in the Nomad community would say, and I seem to recall Steve Aisthorpe picked up on this as well, that one of the main reasons people leave a church is precisely because it doesn’t clear a space for new growth. Rather than a woodland, church can feel more like a factory farm! It can feel restrictive, limiting, oppressive even, and it’s only by leaving that people can find the space they need to grow. I agree with your “heretical” statement about the importance of moving on. Steve Aisthorpe said that church needs to help people leave well. I’m sure there must be examples of churches that do this, but I haven’t come across one. I’m sure some people must leave churches on good terms, but just imagine if a church environment existed where a member felt entirely free to approach the leadership to say they felt it was time to move on, and the leadership guided them through that process, giving them signposts to new and nourishing resources and communities. It’s a beautiful picture.

I take your point about the possible dangers of people not being signed up in the old way. Of course, I’m sure that there is an element of self being at the centre of the journey (we all struggle with that to one degree or another). But I think Steve Aisthorpe’s research shows that people are leaving groups not because of a lack of commitment, but on the contrary – it’s their commitment to the journey that is leading them to make the (often very painful) decision to move on. I hear this in the Nomad community too.

I think one of the big challenges is how all these different expressions of church relate. In your woodland model, there is a beautiful interdependence. But what does that look like for the church? How do a big city centre church, a Jesuit retreat centre and a small WhatsApp group relate? Perhaps they don’t need to, but the beauty of the woodland model you described is the interdependence.


About the authors

Tim Nash is a pioneer minister with the Methodist Church who spends most of his time producing the Nomad podcast and overseeing the online and offline communities that are emerging from it.

Jonny Baker is director of mission education at Church Mission Society. He specialises in gospel and culture and applying creativity to worship. He is author of The Pioneer Gift and Pioneering Spirituality.

More from this issue

Notes

[1] See Nomad, https://www.nomadpodcast.co.uk.
[2] “Steve Aisthorpe – The Invisible Church (N179)”, Nomad, 20 August 2018, https://www.nomadpodcast.co.uk/steve-aisthorpe-the-invisible-church-n178/.
[3] Steve Aisthorpe, The Invisible Church: Learning from the Experiences of Churchless Christians (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 2016).
[4] According to his research 21 per cent of people in Scotland are practising Christians, while 7 per cent attend church.
[5] Philip J. Richter and Leslie J. Francis, Gone But Not Forgotten: Church Leaving and Returning (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1998).
[6] Alan Jamieson, A Churchless Faith: Faith Journeys Beyond the Churches (London: SPCK, 2002).
[7] “David Blower – We Really Existed and We Really Did This (N197)”, Nomad, 21 May 2019, https://www.nomadpodcast.co.uk/david-blower-we-really-existed-and-we-really-did-this-n197/.
[8] CODEC’s annual symposium, “Missio Dei in a Digital Age”, hosted at St John’s College, Durham on 23–24 April 2019 ; a book of papers from it is forthcoming.
[9] Jonny Baker, “Prophetic Dialogue and Contemporary Culture,” in Mission on the Road to Emmaus: Constants, Context and Prophetic Dialogue, ed. Cathy Ross and Stephen B. Bevans (London: SCM Press, 2015), 208.
[10] “Edwina Gateley – Missionaries, Mystics and Mother God (N189)”, Nomad, 21 January 2019, https://www.nomadpodcast.co.uk/edwina-gateley-missionaries-mystics-and-mother-god-n189/.
[11] See for example Robert Warren, Building Missionary Congregations (London: Church House Publishing, 1995).
[12] Avery Cardinal Dulles, Models of Church, second revised edition (New York: Bantam Doubleday, 1991).
[13] Andrea Campanale and Michael Moynagh, Missional Conversations: A Dialogue between Theory and Praxis in World Mission, ed. Cathy Ross and Colin Smith (London: SCM Press, 2018), 128–46.
[14] See Disability & Jesus, accessed 3 October 2019, http://www.disabilityandjesus.org.uk.
[15] Graham Cray et al., Mission-shaped Church : Church Planting and Fresh Expressions of Church in a Changing Context (London: Church House Publishing, 2004).
[16] Pete Ward, Liquid Church (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2002) and Liquid Ecclesiology: The Gospel and the Church (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2017).
[17] Ward, Liquid Ecclesiology, 40.