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Editorial

Nigel Rooms
Church Mission Society, Oxford, UK, and The Queen’s Foundation, Birmingham, UK  
nigel.rooms@churchmissionsociety.org

It is always remarkable to me how a journal issue comes to-
gether from disparate sources, but when the articles are placed 
alongside each other, the whole offers many connections and 
therefore new insights. This issue is no exception to such a rule. 
Thus, themes of poverty, engaging in mission with the other, the 
nature of research in searching out the hidden with curiosity and 
ingenuity, plus the fine detail of the practices involved in partici-
pating in the mission of God characterise what is laid out before us 
in six engaging articles. I’m also immensely pleased that we have 
the most female authors we have had so far and that the majority 
of those writing have African and Asian location or heritage. At 
the heart of this issue are authors being published for the first time, 
three of whom, I think, have crossed boundaries and borders to 
locate themselves in a place not of their birth. Such movement, 
in my experience, always offers tremendous insight for everyone 
involved, not least because the task of participating in God’s mis-
sion is always an intercultural enterprise which changes all of us. 

Beatrice Churu and Mary Getui from Kenya begin this issue 
with a deeply compassionate call for not so much liberation theol-
ogy (though there are many echoes of that project in the paper) as 



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a theology for breathing amidst poverty. It is the Holy Spirit who 
is described as breath in our scriptures, yet George Floyd was un-
able to breathe under the weight of the oppressor and COVID-19 
has squeezed the breath out of millions of people, especially the 
poor. Recovering a gospel based on the courage to simply breathe 
is the task the authors set themselves. They present searing analy-
sis of the double-edged alienation that poverty brings on both the 
“wretched of the earth” and the “lords of poverty” who are the 
cause of it. They show how the incarnate Christ addresses both 
sides of the poverty divide and offers a way for redemption and 
reconciliation, which demonstrates the principle that God has 
provided all the resources both within the church and in the wider 
context and culture for the flourishing of everyone. They pull no 
punches, however, in showing how those resources, especially the 
cultural capital inherent within Africa, are so often denied and 
ignored and urgently need to be recovered. What emerges is a 
truly African missiological response to their context, and they fin-
ish with a beautiful example of how this is embodied in one local 
Christian community. This article deserves to be widely read and 
reflected on throughout the continent of Africa and further afield. 

Staying with poverty and an author who began life in East 
Africa, I am pleased to share Daniel Njuguna’s article with our 
readership, not least because it is suggestive to lay it alongside the 
previous one and note similarities and differences. Njuguna ad-
dresses questions arising from his context as a Church of England 
parish priest in an area of significant poverty and in anticipation 
of a research project which he will undertake for a professional 
doctorate. There are inevitable questions which Churu and Getui 
do not have to deal with in the same way, such as the decline and 
closure of churches, but nevertheless what emerges is not dissimi-
lar. Njuguna is convinced of the need to complexify questions of 
mission and discipleship, and he does so suggestively by turning 
to a theology of baptism and theosis following Steve Bevans’s lead. 
This means that Njuguna refuses to separate personal and social 
transformation in the way that the Enlightenment project has so 
often done. And then it is in going to the edge of the church and 



Nigel Rooms—Editorial

3

its world and by creating common spaces that the messiness of 
life has to be dealt with in all its confusing complexity, but that is 
where the life of the new age is to be found breaking in. 

Sheila Akomiah is also part of the African diaspora, in her 
case West Africa, and is now living in Scotland. She presents, in 
the article, data from her recent PhD thesis which studied the 
growth of new churches in Glasgow, Scotland, between 2000 and 
2016. She presents a fascinating picture of the fast-changing scene 
in a major British city which is under-researched. As mainstream 
churches continue their inexorable decline, new churches spring 
up. Two things stood out for me in this work. First, the detailed de-
tective work Akomiah has to undertake to find and catalogue new 
churches. This is painstaking, ground-up work, and it is noticeable 
that larger national church surveys completely miss the data she 
is uncovering. More concerning, however, is her finding that the 
vast majority of these churches are ethnically homogenous. Inevi-
tably, she references McGavran and Wagner’s theories of church 
growth, which claim that people like to gather around those who 
look and act like them. I have always thought that giving in to such 
sociology is theologically disastrous given the witness of Galatians 
3:16 and Revelation 7:2. It is not Akomiah’s task in this article to 
address what to do about what is clearly happening in Glasgow’s 
new churches, but it is an urgent and pressing question for the 
worldwide Church, and does lead naturally in to the next article. 

Sinwoong Kim also presents an aspect of his recent doctoral 
research in a fascinating paper sharing how Korean missionaries 
in Britain have engaged with the phenomenon of nominalism, 
something they have not really encountered before. It is helpful 
to place this article after Akomiah’s as there is a sense in which it 
addresses what happens when a diaspora community breaks out 
of its homogeneity and engages with its British context, a jour-
ney all such communities will have to go on if they are to sustain 
themselves across generations. What is also interesting to me in 
this work, since I have been engaging with this post-Christian 
reality for many of my ordained years, is how the outsider, the 
missionary, the etic person views my own English/British reality, 



Nigel Rooms—Editorial

3

its world and by creating common spaces that the messiness of 
life has to be dealt with in all its confusing complexity, but that is 
where the life of the new age is to be found breaking in. 

Sheila Akomiah is also part of the African diaspora, in her 
case West Africa, and is now living in Scotland. She presents, in 
the article, data from her recent PhD thesis which studied the 
growth of new churches in Glasgow, Scotland, between 2000 and 
2016. She presents a fascinating picture of the fast-changing scene 
in a major British city which is under-researched. As mainstream 
churches continue their inexorable decline, new churches spring 
up. Two things stood out for me in this work. First, the detailed de-
tective work Akomiah has to undertake to find and catalogue new 
churches. This is painstaking, ground-up work, and it is noticeable 
that larger national church surveys completely miss the data she 
is uncovering. More concerning, however, is her finding that the 
vast majority of these churches are ethnically homogenous. Inevi-
tably, she references McGavran and Wagner’s theories of church 
growth, which claim that people like to gather around those who 
look and act like them. I have always thought that giving in to such 
sociology is theologically disastrous given the witness of Galatians 
3:16 and Revelation 7:2. It is not Akomiah’s task in this article to 
address what to do about what is clearly happening in Glasgow’s 
new churches, but it is an urgent and pressing question for the 
worldwide Church, and does lead naturally in to the next article. 

Sinwoong Kim also presents an aspect of his recent doctoral 
research in a fascinating paper sharing how Korean missionaries 
in Britain have engaged with the phenomenon of nominalism, 
something they have not really encountered before. It is helpful 
to place this article after Akomiah’s as there is a sense in which it 
addresses what happens when a diaspora community breaks out 
of its homogeneity and engages with its British context, a jour-
ney all such communities will have to go on if they are to sustain 
themselves across generations. What is also interesting to me in 
this work, since I have been engaging with this post-Christian 
reality for many of my ordained years, is how the outsider, the 
missionary, the etic person views my own English/British reality, 



E c c l e s i a l  F u t u r e s :  Vo l u m e  2 ,  I s s u e  1

4

and how helpful that perspective is; we need more of this. Hav-
ing defined sociological approaches to nominalism, Kim presents 
detailed analysis of his research subjects’ approach to the nomi-
nal Christians they find in abundance around them. Then, in a 
sophisticated missiological reflection, he begins to make sense of 
the phenomenon and make some proposals as to how to respond 
to it. What is suggestive to me here is the “cognitive dissonance” 
the nominal Christian brings to the missionary encounter; they 
upset the unhelpful binary between the saved and the unsaved, 
creating the requirement for curiosity, inquiry and a discernment 
of God’s activity—which isn’t always there, but might just be. Thus, 
an open inquisitive stance to the other emerges—which takes us to 
our next article. 

In fact, Nick Ladd’s research (not unrelated to his doctoral 
research thesis, of which we hope he will write more in the future) 
picks up several themes in this issue of the journal. If missional 
discipleship is related to practices that complexify the relationship 
between mission and discipleship (Njuguna), what is the nature of 
those practices? All mission is encounter with the other in pub-
lic space, however strange that other may seem to us (Kim), so 
what is happening when we form a public relationship across the 
boundary of the church? Ladd picks up a research question from 
one of the groups related to this journal, the International Research 
Consortium, and runs with it in the UK context. The practice of 
Dwelling in the World, which is part of the missional change jour-
ney of the Partnership for Missional Church process, is examined 
in detail by interviewing those who have practiced it and asking 
what was happening as they were forming relationships in public 
with “people of peace”—a concept drawn from Luke 10:5–6. What 
is the exchange that is going on as peace is shared in public? Such 
a question takes us into the fine detail of crafting the missional 
church—just as a craftsperson has to pay attention to the smallest 
element of their work. Given our inheritance in the West, such en-
counters are fraught with pitfalls on both sides, yet what emerges 
from the research demonstrates that the God of mission is to be 



Nigel Rooms—Editorial

5

found in the mutual space between two people forming a relation-
ship which participates in that very mission. 

Our final article is a new departure and a little different to the 
others, not least in the way that it wasn’t peer-reviewed in quite the 
same manner, as that would not have been possible given its auto-
biographical nature. It is a truism that there is no theology without 
biography, and therefore telling the story of how one church leader 
grew into embodying a missional stance in their life and ministry 
should be mightily instructive. I am grateful to Coenie Burger 
from South Africa, therefore, for offering to write the story of his 
personal journey for us in this issue. We learn many things from 
Coenie as he shares his story, not only in the de-colonizing of his 
denomination, the Dutch Reformed Church, which has its clear 
failures and successes, but also, again, picking up a theme of this 
journal—a life lived in curiosity, always looking for new ways of 
seeing things—and reading and producing an enormous number 
of books and written material, some of which the reader may wish 
to follow up. 

Once again thanks to Patrick Todjeras for putting together a 
wide range of book reviews, not least our first contribution from 
an Orthodox source. Another new departure is my co-editor, Steve 
Taylor’s foray into reviewing “grey literature”—we’d like to see 
more of this kind of review if readers are interested in sending us 
their reflections on resources they find generative in participating 
in God’s mission. 


