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Wilding the Church
Ref lections on the Process of Wilding as a 
Metaphor for the Church as a Co-agent in 
Mission with the Holy Spirit in a Secular Age

Paul Bradbury
Paul Bradbury is an ordained pioneer minister in the Church of England based 
in Poole, Dorset. He is the founder and leader of Poole Missional Communities, 
which plays host to a number of fresh expressions of church and pioneer mission 
initiatives. He is an associate tutor with Church Mission Society and is a DTh 
research student with the University of Roehampton. 
Contact: bradburp@roehampton.ac.uk

Abstract

In recent years numerous wilding projects have emerged, 
many inspired by Isabella Tree’s bookWilding (Tree 2018). Wilding 
tells the story of the transformation of the estate at Knepp from 
intensive arable farm to biodiverse woodland and scrub. Wilding 
is a process that offers a new paradigm for land management, in 
which nature leads and human agency facilitates. Here I argue that 
wilding offers a rich metaphor for a new paradigm of ecclesial 
imagination in a secular age. This new “ecclesial imaginary” places 



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32

the Church as a co-agent with the Holy Spirit, participating in the 
emergent life generated through the power of the Spirit. The use 
of this metaphor in nature conservation is described and its theo-
logical validity explored. The article ends with some preliminary 
reflections on the potential of this metaphor to move the Church 
toward a more fruitful disposition in its mission in a secular age.

Introduction

Wilding is a movement within the world of conservation which 
advocates a radically different way of addressing the challenge of 
reversing the decline in biodiversity. In recent years its approach 
has gained considerable traction across the world. Wilding rests 
on a principle of giving nature freedom to “take the lead,” allow-
ing areas of land to “rewild” without a preconceived end result. 
Human agency is facilitative rather than directive. This is in sharp 
contrast to standard conservation projects where habitat restora-
tion toward target species in decline is driven by science and hu-
man intervention.

I first explored wilding through engaging with the story of 
the wilding project at the Knepp Estate in Sussex, a story told in 
Isabella Tree’s book Wilding (Tree 2018). At Knepp declining yields 
of wheat, despite numerous technical innovations and amalgama-
tions with neighboring farms in search of economies of scale, led 
to the reluctant decision in 2000 to stop arable farming and begin 
a process of rewilding. This process, still ongoing, involved leav-
ing land fallow and introducing “keystone species,” such as large 
grazing mammals that mimicked ancient indigenous species, in 
order to facilitate a nature-led process of environmental renewal. 
There was no specific end in mind, no aim to return particular spe-
cies or produce particular outcomes. A key principle of wilding is 
that “the process is the outcome” (Monbiot 2013, 83). The story is 
replete with surprise as unanticipated species come to make their 
home at Knepp, often in habitats which modern experts assumed 
were unsuitable. Twenty years later Knepp and the story told by Is-
abella Tree is a source of inspiration and expertise for landowners 



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and land managers worldwide. The concept of managing land for 
biodiversity as well as for products for human consumption is now 
part of UK government legislation.1

The Church in the West currently finds itself in the midst of a 
fundamental transition in the social paradigm in which people live. 
Its forms, practices, and procedures are those that developed pre-
dominantly in a premodern and modernist age (Murray-Williams 
2004; Murray-Williams 2011; Tickle 2012; Duerksen and Dyrness 
2019). Its inability to adapt sufficiently to cultural change and its 
tenacious commitment to some patterns and structures that served 
it well in a now-disappearing paradigm leave it in a situation not 
unlike Knepp in 2000—facing declining “yields” (based at least on 
its own metrics, attendance and giving) despite numerous rounds 
of amalgamations (e.g. Church of England parishes merged into 
ever larger benefices) and technical innovation programs (e.g. 
Challenge 2000, the Decade of Evangelism, Myriad).2 The Church 
is facing a failure of its own imagination, stuck in a particular way 
of seeing itself and the world, and historically invested in a mis-
sional disposition toward the world that is no longer apt.

In this paper I want to reflect on wilding with reference to 
the Church. A conversation in this area has developed over re-
cent years, accelerated by the recent publication of Rewilding the 
Church by Steve Aisthorpe (Aisthorpe 2020). Aisthorpe argues for 
a recommitment to a fundamental love of Christ alongside our 
love of the Church. Aisthorpe’s perspective is primarily Christo-
logical. He brings a key insight from the wilding metaphor in his 
argument for the reintroduction of Christ as a “keystone species” 
within the environment of the Church. Referring to Christ as “the 

1. “The Agriculture Bill sets out how farmers and land managers in Eng-
land will be rewarded in the future with public money for ‘public goods’—such 
as better air and water quality, thriving wildlife, soil health, or measures to 
reduce flooding and tackle the effects of climate change” (Gov.uk 2020).

2. Challenge 2000 was an ecumenical congress held in Birmingham in 
1992 which set a goal of planting two thousand churches by the year 2000. 
The Decade of Evangelism was introduced as a resolution at the 1988 Lambeth 
Conference. Myriad was recently launched by the Bishop of Islington with a 
goal of planting ten thousand churches in ten years.



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Great Interferer,” he states, “saying ‘yes’ to Jesus is to introduce into 
the environment of our lives a species so other and so powerful 
that total transformation is inevitable” (Aisthorpe 2020, 53). My 
perspective is more pneumatological, a complementary perspec-
tive to Aisthorpe, focusing primarily on an ecclesiology that might 
be reimagined by learning to participate with the wild creative gift 
of God’s missionary Spirit.

Why the Metaphor of Wilding?

Aisthorpe’s book is just one example of the degree to which the 
metaphor of rewilding is capturing the imagination of the Church 
at present. In my own work engaging in networks of mission en-
ablers and church planters across the country this metaphor is 
generating considerable interest and discussion. Is this significant? 
Or nothing more than a passing trend?

Sally MacFague argues that the power of metaphorical lan-
guage lies in its invitation to a dialogical approach to exploring 
reality. Metaphors describe how reality both “is and is not” like the 
metaphorical field in question. A metaphor which gains in popu-
larity may become a dominant metaphor, whose power to explain 
reality provides some degree of a model for our experience and 
our engagement with the world (McFague 1982).

The power of wilding as a metaphor lies in its connection 
with the recent growth in more organic and relational ways of un-
derstanding organizations. Organizational theorists have drawn 
on work in the sciences to radically alter how organizations are 
understood, shifting our conception from Newtonian machines 
toward that of “complex adaptive systems” (Uhl-Bien, Marion, and 
McKelvey 2007). This developing “complexity theory” (Waldrop 
1993) has been driven by a perceived failure in the Newtonian 
paradigm’s ability to do justice to the experienced reality of orga-
nizations. Complexity theory recognizes the relational nature of 
organizations as the sum of conversations between interdependent 
and interrelated individuals drawn toward a common purpose. 
Further, it sees change as a characteristic of the system, through 



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the system’s ability to learn and adapt to changes in the environ-
ment around it. Complexity theory thus embraces the possibility 
of emergence and “self-organization” as the system welcomes new 
ideas and recalibrates in response to information from the milieu 
of the world (Doornenbaal 2012; Moynagh 2017; Rooms 2019).

Wilding’s emphasis on the interrelatedness of our environ-
ment, on emergent change as a property of the system, and on 
human agency in humble solidarity with the complexity of the 
natural world, all relate closely to the perspective of complexity 
theory. Wilding’s growing influence on contemporary ecclesiology 
may also be a function of a similar perception of the limitations of 
previously dominant mechanistic metaphors for our understand-
ing of the Church and of its ability to make better sense of our 
experience of the complex and interrelated world in which the 
Church sits.

Whilst recognizing that all metaphors run the risk of lur-
ing us into making the world in their image, wilding offers to the 
Church a metaphor that invites a shift in paradigm, in particular a 
shift in paradigm away from Newtonian cause-and-effect concep-
tions and toward more relational and porous understandings of 
the essence of the Church and its relationship with the world.

Wilding can act as a powerful metaphor toward a renewed 
“ecclesial imaginary.” I use the term “ecclesial imaginary” as short-
hand for the way in which people imagine their world and context 
as members of the Church. For the vast majority of people this 
imaginary is not articulated or explicit but carried through cultur-
al forms and practice. The term is a development of Charles Tay-
lor’s “social imaginary” from his hugely influential book A Secular 
Age (C. Taylor 2007). Taylor describes a social imaginary as “the 
way in which [people] imagine their social existence, how they fit 
together with others, how things go on between them and their 
fellows, the expectations which are normally met, and the deeper 
normative notions and images which underlie these expectations.” 
He further describes it as “how ordinary people ‘imagine’ their 
social surroundings.” For Taylor this “social imaginary” is often 
not expressed in theoretical terms; it is carried in images, stories 



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36

and legends, etc., and as “that common understanding which 
makes possible common practices, and a widely shared sense of 
legitimacy” (C. Taylor 2007, 171–72). An “ecclesial imaginary” is 
therefore the way in which the relationship between God as mis-
sionary agent and the Church is imagined. It is how the normative 
expectation of church in relation to God and the world is held in 
our imagination and expressed in our language and practice.

In this paper I explore this renewed ecclesial imaginary 
through a conversation with Taylor’s thesis in dialogue with Jürgen 
Moltmann’s three ecclesial paradigms (Moltmann 2011). Molt-
mann’s work offers an ecclesiological perspective on the paradig-
matic shifts in Western culture so powerfully articulated by Taylor. 
This conversation then opens up a space in which the metaphor 
of wilding can be explored theologically, before describing how 
the metaphor can enable the Church to start to inhabit a renewed 
ecclesial imaginary.

The Secular Age—Taylor’s Articulation of a 
New Cultural and Religious Paradigm.

The sense of a fundamental shift in the social and cultural para-
digms of the West is by no means new. The Church has, however, 
been relatively slow to respond, either in reconceiving its identity 
and purpose or in reimagining the forms and posture it might 
take. Decline in religious affiliation in the West has been well 
documented (Brierley 2000; Goodhew 2016; Brown and Wood-
head 2016) and, despite significant efforts from church institutions 
in the form of investment and strategy, appears largely irrevers-
ible. The popular secularization story of decline, arguing for the 
eventual disappearance of religion, has, however, been largely 
dismissed in favor of a story that starts to articulate a change in 
the religious disposition of the West. It is not that religion is de-
clining, but that people are expressing faith in different and novel 
ways. Taylor paints the popular secularization story as a “subtrac-
tion narrative” whereby the decline of religion is the sloughing 
off of religious baggage with a consequent liberation into the 



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freedom of religion-less humanity. His counternarrative is one of 
addition, a tracing of the ways in which the Enlightenment and 
Reformation(s)3 made it possible for humans in the West to con-
sider life without a conception of God and within an “immanent 
frame” that is of human flourishing within a purely material world. 
For Taylor, the persistence of religion vindicates this addition nar-
rative, for it points to the insufficiency of the secular vision for 
human flourishing and to the fundamental nature of humanity, 
not as beings within an immanent frame, but beings with a sense 
and need for the transcendent. We are “homo quaerens”—people 
who search4. However, the expression of our search in this new 
secular age is different. Taylor describes the “nova effect,” an ex-
plosion of religious expression which is diverse, novel, and largely 
individually oriented. He further describes the new paradigm as 
the “age of authenticity,” characterized by a social imaginary of 
“expressive individualism” (C. Taylor 2007, 473). In this paradigm 
“the injunction would seem to be: let everyone follow his/her own 
path of spiritual inspiration. Don’t be led off yours by the allega-
tion that it doesn’t fit with some orthodoxy” (C. Taylor 2007, 489). 
This therefore invites the question: How can the Church respond 
faithfully to this radical change in the social imaginary and faith 
expression of people in a secular age?

Missio Dei,  Moltmann, and Metaphor—Towards 
an Ecclesial Imaginary for a Secular Age

It is the development of the theology of the missio Dei that lays the 
ground for a renewed ecclesial imaginary and that offers a more 
faithful conception of the Church’s posture in a secular age. John 
Flett traces the development of the theology of missio Dei to the 

3. Taylor prefers to describe the immense changes of the sixteenth-century 
Reformation as “Reformations,” arguing that the social and cultural changes 
generally associated with the Protestant Reformation had equally long-term 
effects on Catholicism, for example.

4. This phrase comes from a podcast interview between Nick Spenser and 
Charles Taylor (Reading Our Times 2020).



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missionary conferences of the first part of the twentieth century 
(Flett 2010). The debates responded to the challenge to the West 
of its missions as no more than colonial expansion. This challenge 
raised the question of the nature of mission. What is the theologi-
cal substance of mission? Is mission intrinsic to the nature of the 
Church? Is mission intrinsic to the nature of God? The theology 
of missio Dei works to situate the mission of the Church within 
the nature of God and to collapse any notion of a rift between the 
immanent and economic Trinity. The life of God contained within 
the Trinity is a self-giving flow of reconciling love. Thus, God’s 
nature is not contingent on mission, or any work of the Church. 
God’s nature, which is mission, is sufficient in and of itself. Mission 
is not a second step for God, and nor is it a second step for the 
Church.

Jürgen Moltmann has articulated three paradigms in the his-
tory of the Church which relate closely to cultural paradigms of 
Western history described by Charles Taylor (Moltmann 2011). The 
“hierarchical paradigm” describes what we might commonly call 
Christendom, a “monarchical episcopacy” clearly and powerfully 
ordered by the vertical relationship between God, the Bishop and 
the Church. This ecclesial structure is firmly embedded in society 
through the anointing of the monarch or ruler by the Church as 
a divine ruler and servant of the state within the wider normative 
structures of Christendom. The Reformation begins to usher in 
what Moltmann describes as the “Christocentric paradigm.” The 
Church increasingly looks less to the vertical authorities of the epis-
copacy and the monarchy for unity, authority, and legitimation and 
instead gathers these around Christ as the head of the Church. The 
congregation or community of the faithful, gathered around Christ, 
through his word and sacrament, constitutes the major form for this 
ecclesial imaginary. Thus, a developing separation is made from the 
world, a growing emphasis on individual choice and membership 
in the fellowship of the church, and a growing sense of the Church’s 
agency in the world as a means of extending the lordship of Christ. 
This more assertive church imaginary relates closely to Taylor’s defi-
nition of the modernist age as the “Age of Mobilisation.” Pre-modern 



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Christendom and its embedded enchantment of all life is in retreat. 
God may be present in divine design or order but the cosmos has 
been disenchanted and the previously reliable status quo disrupted. 
The void must be filled by institutional effort and assertion into the 
public space (C. Taylor 2007, 445–72).

Moltmann, however, believes that “the new age of the Church 
will be the age of the Holy Spirit” (Moltmann 2011, 24). Moltmann 
describes this predominantly as a democratizing movement of the 
Spirit whereby every member of the Church acquires their agency 
and “through the experience of the Holy Spirit the all-equalizing 
brotherhood of Christ fans out into a multicolored diversity of 
charismata” (Moltmann 2011, 26). This is a Church that trusts in 
the power and authority of the Holy Spirit and thus makes space 
for every individual to have the power of agency and to bring their 
experience of faith in an active and participative way into the life 
of the Church.

Moltmann’s paradigmatic shifts in the ages of the Church are 
an ecclesial perspective on Taylor’s articulation of the transitions 
in the wider culture of the West. The present “secular age” Taylor 
dubs the “Age of Authenticity,” characterized by the understanding 
that it is the role of the individual to realize their own way of being 
human. The constraints of religion or social convention are thrown 
off. Choice is the ultimate value and tolerance the only virtue. 
Christianity’s liberalizing and individualizing impulse through the 
democratizing and empowering work of the Spirit finds things in 
common here, while at the same time recognizing the dark side 
of liberalism’s deification of choice and aversion to constraint. For 
our purposes here I want to note the complementarity of these 
paradigmatic shifts in the Church and in wider Western society 
and to probe what this means for a church whose routinized pro-
cesses and structures can be belligerently resistant to the sort of 
agility needed to respond to wider cultural change.

The premodern era saw the emergence of the parish as the 
fundamental unit of social organisation in Christendom, a form 
which has been remarkably resilient to social change (Rumsey 
2017). The modernist age saw the emergence of the congregation, a 



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voluntary association of believers, as the primary form of church life 
(Duerksen and Dyrness 2019). This form has become normative in 
our experience and in our imagination. However, as Duerksen and 
Dyrness assert, the Church is not an entity that sits above cultural 
contingency. The Church is an emergent phenomenon whose forms 
develop through the conversation between Scripture, tradition, and 
context. Our frequent error is to mistake established forms as nor-
mative not just for our context and time but for the Church’s nature:

Quite often the particular expression of an ecclesial 
marker becomes frozen in time, disassociated from the 
cultural, social, and political influences that generated its 
emergence. Over time, the context in which those mark-
ers gained their particular salience fades from view, and 
the practices themselves come to be seen as pure markers 
of the church (Duerksen and Dyrness 2019, 149).

In the same way that liberalism and the secular age have cre-
ated a new social imaginary, the Church is being invited into a new 
ecclesial imaginary. It is an imaginary oriented around the missio 
Dei in which the Church takes an ec-centric place in the context of 
society, a humbler and more collaborative posture, that seeks to 
participate with the already-present-and-active Holy Spirit in the 
building of the kingdom of God and that embraces emergence in 
the development of its forms and ministerial life (see Fig 1). 

Figure 1: Christocentric and Charismatic Paradigms in Mission



Paul Bradbury—Wilding the Church

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Our struggle to fully inhabit any new paradigm of ecclesial 
life is thus a struggle to shift our ecclesial imagination toward a new 
paradigm. Furthermore, it is language that helps articulate that 
imaginary, a language that draws almost exclusively on metaphor. 
As McGilchrist (2009, 179) argues: “All understanding, whether 
of the world or even of ourselves, depends on choosing the right 
metaphor. The metaphor we choose governs what we see.” Thus, 
we turn now to examine the theological resilience of wilding for 
the life of the Church in a secular age.

Theological Reflections on Wilding

Knepp’s transformation strikes a chord in the wider world not least 
because it represents a very different anthropological stance to the 
land and environment. The land is no longer a utility, an object 
whose value is purely in its potential and ability to provide a yield, 
a product. The environment has a value in and of itself; it is not 
for anything but is allowed to be. Human agency can thus explore 
a new relationship alongside and in conversation with rather than 
over the environment on the basis of its prior being. This relation-
ship is mutual and explored by conversation in which humility and 
an openness to discovery is embraced.

Judeo-Christian anthropology has been accused of bolster-
ing an anthropocentric and utilitarian attitude to creation (White 
1967). Genesis 1:28 along with a tradition of interpretation that 
assumes a language of subjugation and rule play a key part in this 
narrative.

Rowan Williams (2000), however, argues that the creation 
narrative’s historical context is that of exile, a context in which 
dominance and agency have all but disappeared. For Williams 
the exilic language of Second Isaiah and, in particular, God’s sum-
moning of creation to enter into the life of God represents a truer 
understanding of the creation narrative. Williams (2000, 68) cites 
in particular Isaiah 48:13 (ESV): “My hand laid the foundation of 
the earth, and my right hand spread out the heavens; when I call 
to them, they stand forth together.” Similarly, Richard Bauckham 



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(2000, 45, emphasis mine) reasserts the Christian tradition of 
humans “joining in the praise offered by other creatures.” This tra-
dition is represented by liturgical texts such as the Benedicite, a 
Greek addition to the book of Daniel, which in the Protestant tra-
dition is placed in the apocrypha but which (at least in the Church 
of England) continues to have a prominent place in the liturgy. 
The tradition of the Benedicite is firmly within the biblical tradi-
tion of creation’s praise, e.g. Isaiah 41:10; Psalm 69:34, 96:11–12, 
103:22, 150:6; Phillipians 2:10; Revelation 5:13. As Bauckham as-
serts (Bauckham 2002, 47), “The Benedicite makes no theological 
statement not already made in Psalm 148.” The Benedicite calls 
on all creatures, heavenly bodies, weather phenomena, other liv-
ing creatures and (only in conclusion) human beings to join in 
the song of praise to God. This tradition provides “the strongest 
antidote to anthropocentrism in the biblical and Christian tradi-
tion” (Bauckham 2002, 48). Worship of God the creator therefore 
provides the context in which humanity’s relationship with fellow 
creatures and the environment can enable a creaturely solidarity 
that mitigates against hierarchy, anthropocentrism, or anything 
becoming the object (or idol) that validates or affirms our identity 
and our agency by means of exploitation and utility.

The wilding movement may well have found its milieu in 
a secular age seeking to affirm the unity and connectedness of 
all things, and may be more comfortable with a (G/g)od-within 
panentheist perspective. However, Christian anthropology argues 
for the distinctiveness of creatureliness as fundamental to a non-
exploitative posture towards creation. It is only in relation to the 
intrinsic self-giving nature of God, who needs nothing in return to 
affirm God-self, that creatures are free to be creatures, and humans 
to be human. Only in this freedom as distinct creatures are we able 
to love and give without instrumentalizing any act in service to an 
agenda (R. Williams 2000, 67–75). It is within the self-giving flow 
of the life of God that humanity finds its truest relationship with 
creation.

Affirming, from the perspective of Christian anthropol-
ogy, a position of solidarity in relationship to creatures and their 



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environment expresses itself in a posture of humility in terms 
of humanity’s engagement with creation. From the moment the 
Knepp estate invited an expert in to come and observe the trees 
of the estate, those at Knepp embarked on a journey of humble 
discovery, embracing a lack of knowledge, open to surprise. They 
were joined by a host of researchers from the world of conserva-
tion who named, counted, sampled, and joined them for confer-
ences and conversations as they sought to understand the narrative 
unfolding before them.

It is the embracing of uncertainty and unknowing and of the 
hospitality of creation that provides particular theological reso-
nance with the shift described between the mobilised and applied 
model of church engagement with the world in a modernist con-
text and the emergent paradigm of the secular age. The Gospels 
provide ample support for a posture of open engagement in the 
act of being sent into the world.5 Likewise, as the Church emerges 
in Acts there is little sense of a community clear about its identity 
and scope, rolling out a plan or applying a strategy. The very iden-
tity and mission of the Christian Church is discovered through 
conversation between the Jewish tradition of its early adherents, 
their contexts and the experience of the death and resurrection of 
Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit (Bevans and Schroeder 2004, 
30–31).

Clare Watkins’s work, as part of the Theological Action 
Research Network,6 has developed an ecclesiology that is deeply 
conscious of the theological nature of practice and experience and 
therefore of the provisional and vulnerable nature of church. She 
expresses this posture in terms of “fragility,” arguing for its adop-
tion as a “virtue” needed for the development of church life. Wat-
kins roots this posture in a willingness to embrace the “negativity” 
of theology, a stance which is not simply an accommodation to a 

5. See for example, Jesus asking for a drink from the Samaritan woman at 
the well (John 4:7), his conversation with Canaanite woman (Matt 15:21–28), 
the sending of the twelve in a position of dependence on the hospitality of 
others (Matt 10:9–11; Luke 9:3–5, 10:4–8).

6. https://theologyandactionresearch.net/.



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postmodern sentimentality but a more truthful self-understanding 
which mitigates against world-shirking or world-dominating fun-
damentalist positions. Watkins describes a “double negativity,” that 
is, an apophatic disposition both in terms of the intrinsic nature of 
God and the revelation of God through practice (Watkins 2020). 
However, such a stance is not Wittgensteinian, that is, taking us 
to a place of silence. On the contrary, it invites conversation, or 
more specifically a conversational mode of theological discovery 
in both philosophical and practical spheres. The Church is thus, 
in its truest expression, “a community of discerning conversation” 
(Watkins 2020, 247) engaging in the world without imposition 
and entering into a praxis of conversation in solidarity with other 
human beings and creation.

Engaging with the world in the humbler posture of a con-
versation partner opens up a more centripetal perspective. The 
margins become important places where new avenues of life and 
vitality emerge. At Knepp it was commonly understood that the 
estate lay on marginal land for arable farming, but until the deci-
sion to rewild, engagement with the land continued with an ap-
proach modelled on more suitable land elsewhere. Eventually the 
reality of their context had to be faced. Marginality in the process 
of rewilding was reframed as an asset. Furthermore, the marginal 
habitats which were created, as former arable land became scrub 
edging onto ancient woodland and a river course, became the 
context in which biodiversity thrived. The margin rediscovered its 
character as a locus of emergence and innovation.

Steve Aisthorpe notes the edges of a field yield up to 25 per-
cent less than the center, a statistic that drives the move toward 
the scrubbing of hedgerows to create larger fields (Aisthorpe 2020, 
197). This downplaying of the innate gift of margins therefore has 
its logical consequences. Conversely, when the edges are seen as 
crucially valuable places for emergence, innovation, and diversity 
a different attitude and approach to them is taken.

Theologically speaking the value of marginality is a rich 
theme. The story of the people of God takes place in the tension 
between a settled destination or locus for the presence of God 



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45

acting as a focal point for his people and their common life and 
the revitalizing life of a nomadic and marginal existence. The Old 
Testament narrative reflects most critically perhaps on the exile as 
that marginal period of Israel’s story which nevertheless “evoked 
the most brilliant literature and the most daring theological ar-
ticulation in the Old Testament” (Brueggemann 1997, 3). Like-
wise, as the Church emerges from the ministry of Jesus (a figure 
from the margins of a marginal Roman territory), the narrative 
of Luke-Acts describes a movement constantly emergent through 
new experiences of liminality as the conversation between the 
tradition of Judaism, the revelation of God, and the contexts into 
which the message of the gospel was brought takes place (Bevans 
and Schroeder 2004, 10–31).

Marginality is a strong theme in Al Barrett’s work, which 
draws on the work of socio-political writer Romand Coles. Coles 
uses the term “ecotone” to refer to the boundary between different 
ecological communities. He draws the distinction between econ-
omy rooted in the words oikos (home or habitation) and nomos 
(law) with “ecotone” where tonos brings in the notion of tension. 
Thus ecotones are “special meeting grounds” that “often harbor a 
greater variety and density of life than either of the two distinct 
communities alone.” (Barrett 2017, 145) Embracing this marginal-
ity for Barrett, as a vicar on an outer urban estate, represents a 
turn from assertive ecclesiocentric missiologies such as “resource 
church planting,” or radical visions of transformative eucharistic 
communities, towards a greater openness to voices at the edges. 
This has the effect of “inviting the ‘centers’ of the Church to learn 
from, and be transformed by, a passionate (and non-penetrative) 
engagement in the abundant resource-full ‘edges’” (Barrett 2018, 
89).

It is precisely at the point at which an assertive and program-
matic approach to land management is dropped that significant 
new voices start a new conversation at Knepp. Isabella Tree begins 
her story not with the decision to sell the farm machinery and 
cease arable farming, but with the visit of a tree expert. Ted Green 
“came to stand still under the canopy of the old oak” (Tree 2018, 



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46

15). The visit became in retrospect “an epiphany” (Tree 2018, 32) 
as the results of Ted Green’s attentiveness led to a reappraisal of 
their engagement with the land and with nature in relationship 
with it. This epiphany worked to de-objectify the land and provid-
ed the first step toward a new relationship of co-agency between 
the farm, the land, and nature, a relationship in which nature was 
consciously given space and time and to take the lead.

Knepp’s story therefore plays out as a parable of the kingdom, 
of the eschaton coming to meet us by the Holy Spirit, and of the 
posture the Church is invited most fruitfully to take in this unfold-
ing narrative.7 It helps reimagine the primary role of the Church 
not to expand into the world, or as the solitary builder of the king-
dom, but as a living witness of and participant in the eschatologi-
cal vision which the Spirit is realizing. The “purpose of the Church 
is not the Church itself,” rather “the point of the Church is to point 
beyond itself, to be a community that preaches, serves and wit-
nesses to the reign of God” (Bevans and Schroeder 2004, 7). This is 
a missional ecclesiology where, as former missionary and Bishop 
John V. Taylor (1972, 133) put it, “our theology would improve if 
we thought more of the Church being given to the Spirit than of 
the Spirit being given to the church.” This in turn provides a more 
ec-centric locus for the Church by placing the Church as co-agent 
with the Spirit in the flow of the emergence of the kingdom. This 
co-agency is necessarily asymmetric as the Church is invited into 
the overflowing and reconciling life of God that flows firstly within 
and beyond the Trinity. The Church is thus “the eschatological cre-
ation of the Spirit” (Moltmann 1977, 33), continuously called and 
formed by this flow of God’s reconciling life.

7. Organic metaphors abound within the parables of Jesus regarding the 
kingdom of God (e.g., parable of the yeast, mustard seed, sower, wheat and 
tares). Other parables reassert an anthropology that places human agency 
within the limits of the sovereignty and nature of God. For example, in the 
parable of the growing seed (Mark 4:26–29 NIV), the kingdom is likened to a 
man who scatters seed. Agency is given to the man but this is tempered first 
by humility (“The seed sprouts and grows though he does not know how”) 
and second the freedom and life of the kingdom (“Whether he sleeps or gets 
up . . . all by itself the soil produces grain”). Thus, human agency is reframed 
with the freedom and agency of God and his kingdom.



Paul Bradbury—Wilding the Church

47

The Wilding of the Church?

I have drawn on Charles Taylor’s description of the emerging “sec-
ular age” and Moltmann’s three paradigms of the Church to argue 
that the Church needs to explore a radically different “ecclesial 
imaginary,” a renewed way of seeing itself as Christian commu-
nity in the context of Western society. There are rich theological 
resonances with wilding which provide a basis of confidence for 
inviting an engagement with it as a pathway into this new ecclesial 
imaginary.

Wilding’s power as a metaphor lies in its subversion of the 
modernist assertion of rational control and agency over creation 
and a consequent subversion of our objectification of creation into 
a resource for our own ends. Wilding affirms a thoroughly Chris-
tian anthropology that places us as human agents in conversation 
with nature and with the land, alive to the mysteries of nature, 
attentive to the space between things, conscious of the limits of 
our knowledge, and attentive to the deep connectedness of the 
creation of which we are a part.

Wilding thus provides a parable of the shift from a Newto-
nian view of the world to an emergent one. From a world of cause 
and effect, inputs and outputs, and predictable systems where 
humanity assumes control through power and knowledge to a 
complex and fluid world where connectedness, relationships, and 
conversation provide the environment in which life emerges. It is 
a parable that ejects humanity from an anthropocentric “age of 
mobilisation” where any engagement with the world must work 
through human agency and organization into a new age where hu-
man beings and organizations can operate with a more humble, 
collaborative kind of attentiveness to the world.

Wilding may therefore provide a means by which the Church 
can reimagine itself away from an objectifying posture in the 
world, where context is a resource to be instrumentalized toward 
its own missionary aims, toward a doxological posture in which its 
whole life is oriented toward the flow of creation’s praise to God 
(Paas 2019).



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This approach places the Church in a more ec-centric locus 
in the world, a position in which voices and agents on the margins 
receive attention as potential partners in the Church’s mission and 
the growth of the kingdom. It is a locus where liminal boundar-
ies of belonging and engagement can be fostered—a church thus 
more able to engage with the “expressive individualism” and rest-
less spiritual searching of so many trying to find their way in the 
secular age.

In my own ministry as a pioneer minister8 in the Church of 
England this perspective has increasingly been expressed in a mis-
sional disposition that is marked by an attentiveness to the Spirit 
at work in the world and a more emergent approach to the form 
and nature of new ecclesial communities. It is also expressed by an 
openness to humble dialogue with those networks and individu-
als seeking to express their spirituality in a variety of ways. This 
posture, common to other pioneer ministers (see for example Ross 
and Baker 2015), comes into significant tension with the inher-
ited institution, where the normative ecclesial imaginary assumes 
church formation to quickly involve attendance and membership 
through the application of mission projects and programs. Within 
this tension pioneer ministers feel a pressure for measurable re-
sults which can foster a utilitarian attitude to their context.

However, where space and freedom are given to allow pioneer 
ministers to explore a more emergent approach something akin to 
the blossoming of diversity experienced at Knepp shows signs of 
taking place. For example, in the Diocese of Bath and Wells the 
appointment of nine full-time pioneer ministers, free from the 
demands and responsibilities of the inherited Church, alongside 
a program designed to train and release further volunteer mission 
leaders, is beginning to generate a new environment for contextual 

8. The term “pioneer ministry” became a normative term with the publica-
tion of the Church of England Report Mission Shaped Church (Archbishop’s 
Council 2004). The Church of England now defines pioneer ministers in the 
following way: “Pioneers are people called by God, who are the first to see 
and creatively respond to the Holy Spirit’s initiatives with those outside the 
church; gathering others around them as they seek to establish new contextual 
Christian community” (Church of England 2021).



Paul Bradbury—Wilding the Church

49

mission and ecclesial formation. In this environment process takes 
precedent over project, attentiveness to context and to the leading 
of the Spirit are prioritized over predetermined outputs or results, 
and conversation and partnership are fostered. In the beginnings 
of this project what is emerging within the conversation between 
those facilitating the project, missional leaders, and their context at 
the margins is often surprising and unplanned. Much more work 
needs to be done to research the effects of such ministries and 
projects on the Church. If wilding and the story of Knepp point to 
a deeper understanding of the reality of God’s mission of creation 
and new creation and to the kind of change within his mission 
that we are invited to participate in, we need to listen attentively 
to our own “wilding projects” already at work. Further research 
is needed into the shape of mission practice for church leaders to 
embody the kind of ec-centric ecclesiology I describe here. Such 
research could also explore how such an ecclesiology can relate to 
the inherited ecclesiologies in which church ministers and leaders 
work and how these different perspectives might work together.

The metaphor of wilding has the potential to subvert an ec-
clesiocentric imaginary which sees the flow of God’s life through 
the Church and into the world, and to create a more ec-centric 
imaginary where the Church joins in with the flow of God’s life al-
ready present in the world by the Spirit (see Fig 1). It is a metaphor 
which opens up a rich way of “seeing” the Church as “emergent 
phenomena” (Duerksen & Dyrness 2019) and of engaging with 
the constantly unfolding conversation between cultural context, 
tradition, and Scripture which has always been the foment of the 
Church. Wilding helps envision the reception of the Holy Spirit as 
the prime agency and conversation partner in the mission of God 
and the realisation of the eschaton, the Spirit which flows from 
the future, inviting the Church to join in with the growing song of 
praise to God which is the coming and fulfilment of the kingdom.

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