














































Rooms.indb


95

Dreams and Visions
Critical Realism, Practical Theology, and the 
Spiritual Experiences of Pioneers Discerning 
the Missio Dei

Paul Bradbury

Abstract

This article develops a narrative framework toward a meth-
odology for my research exploring the call and practice of pioneer 
ministers in the Church of England. I argue for a critical realist 
perspective as a means of affirming and valuing spiritual experi-
ence as a locus for knowledge. Drawing on the work of Alasdair 
MacIntyre and NT Wright a narrative framework of “intelligibil-
ity” is developed in which to place such testimonies of experi-
ence. This framework is then shaped by a biblical pneumatology 
whereby the work of salvation is driven forward toward the telos 
of the Kingdom by the mediation of the Holy Spirit. The value of 
this framework is explored in light of my future research into the 
experiences of pioneer ministers for whom discerning the missio 
Dei is a key part of their call and ongoing ministry in innovative 
mission and ecclesial reimagination. Attention is therefore given 
to the implications of this for practical theology and for spiritual 
discernment as a part of a methodology of empirical research.



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

96

Introduction

The story of the genesis of the Franscisan movement commonly 
hinges around a moment of Francis’s life in the church of St Da-
mian in Assisi. Having returned to his hometown from military 
endeavors, bewildered and humiliated by sickness, Francis took 
to praying in front of the crucifix in the church. One day as he 
carried out this practice, he heard a voice say “Francis, seest thou 
not that my house is in ruins? Go and restore it for me?” (Chester-
ton 1924, 46). On this experience the course and story of his life 
changed. This one experience brought about a radical movement 
of Christian mission, spirituality and discipleship which renewed 
the church of the day and continues to provide a source of renewal 
today. 

I am currently embarking on research which aims to explore 
the reality of spiritual experience in the lives of those called to 
new missional and ecclesial endeavors in today’s church. Many 
have noted the degree to which renewal movements emerge out 
of periods of significant cultural change (Cox 2009; Tickle 2012). 
Similarly, the church’s own self-understanding, culture and form 
undergoes significant reappraisal and change in ways that corre-
late closely with wider social and cultural transitions. (Moltmann 
2011). Yet, when the lives of those at the center of renewal move-
ments are studied and their stories told there is another consistent 
theme—divine action in the form of profound and interruptive 
subjective experience. Profound because they are experiences 
that are initially outside the knowledge field and experience of 
the individual; interruptive because they interrupt the flow of the 
individual’s life and take it in a radically new direction. Spiritual 
experience of this kind is therefore an important locus for knowl-
edge about ourselves, God and the world. 

In wanting to explore this “tradition” of spiritual and eccle-
sial renewal I am aware of my own investment and place within 
it. Having discerned a call to ordination, my own vocation took 
a surprising turn during my curacy in a traditional parish church 
setting. Much of the discernment of this turn was rational, 



Paul Bradbury—Dreams and Visions

97

informed by reading and discussion with friends and colleagues. 
There was however a strong element of the kind of spiritual experi-
ence I am seeking to explore—in my case a dream. In the dream I 
am at a leaving party at the end of my curacy. Someone from the 
congregation asks me where I will be going to continue my minis-
try. I reach into my bag and take out a vellum scroll. On unrolling 
it a map of the British Isles is revealed with names on it locating 
the old kingdoms such as Wessex and Mercia. To the south of the 
mainland is an area of land where the English Channel ought to 
be and on this new kingdom of land is written the words “Resur-
rected from the Sea.” The details of the dream’s interpretation are 
not relevant here. But the effects are. For the dream ultimately had 
the effect of affirming and orienting my role in Poole around the 
emergence of new forms of church amongst people with little or 
no Christian heritage or experience.

These stories, my own and that of St. Francis, draw me into 
an important reflection on the nature of epistemology in the field 
of practical theology. In particular, how can the experiences that I 
have described be embraced as valid knowledge? How might this 
spiritual experience act as a valid locus of knowledge, in terms of 
the task of practical theological research? These sorts of experi-
ence may be categorized as “religious experiences” or “spiritual 
experiences.” There is a distinctiveness to such experiences that 
invites particular attention. Yet in the field of practical theology 
such experiences are given limited attention and at times scant 
credence. Mark Cartledge argues, “The theological narratives of 
those having religious experiences are often given cursory atten-
tion, if any at all” (2015, 56). Whilst practical theology places great 
emphasis on experiences, begins in experience, it tends to reduce 
experience to a shorthand for context, for starting in the midst of 
the forms structures, language and culture of religious practice. In 
this reduction the particular nature of spiritual experience can be 
ignored, perhaps conveniently in view of a preference for theolo-
gies that provide little space for experiences of such an unverifiable 
nature.1

1. Root refers to “established practical theology’s allergy to realism” which 



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

98

However, Cartledge argues religious experience is “essen-
tial to the spirituality that informs and permeates religious life” 
(Cartledge 2015, 56). Furthermore “human experience in a more 
general sense is the ‘place’ where the gospel is grounded and an 
important locus for the work of Spirit” (Cartledge 2015, 55). To 
continue in a reflexive mode, this has been my epistemological 
starting point. My own Christian faith has been formed to a large 
degree by the charismatic wing of the Anglican church, a stream of 
theology and spirituality that links back to the Pentecostal move-
ment and the revivals of the early twentieth century. The theologi-
cal and epistemological framework that I have been grounded in 
places a good deal of emphasis on experience, on God “coming to 
us” in various forms, whether through the Bible, gathered wor-
ship, the words of others, the natural world or even “directly” in 
terms of the “voice of God.”2 There is a continuation of that stream 
into the ministry of others like myself, who as “pioneers”3 in the 
Church of England are asked to explore mission and ecclesiology 
in the secular context of modern Britain. For many it is a natural 
posture of mission and leadership to listen to the promptings of 
the Holy Spirit in the development of new initiatives. Religious 
experience in this sense has become normative in a growing arena 
of the Church of England’s formalized ministry. Where might a 
practical theology begin that can welcome religious experience, 
critical, robustly and fruitfully?

has led it to “overdose on the pills of dependant objective reality, claiming in 
its drugged state that all reality is dependant objective” (2014, 211). Elsewhere, 
Root argues that an “overcommitment” to empirical methods drawn from the 
social sciences has restricted the place of theology within the field (2016).

2. Though Cartledge asks to what extent any religious experience is unme-
diated: “In what sense is the Holy Spirit ever experienced directly at all? Even 
a ‘direct’ voice from heaven would be mediated in some sense via sound waves 
and ear drums, and an ‘inner’ voice is processed by the brain” (2015, 67).

3. Pioneer Ministers or “pioneers” are terms generally accepted into the 
language, local and official, of the Church of England for those leading in-
novative forms of mission and church planting. See, for example, www.
churchofengland.org/pioneering.



Paul Bradbury—Dreams and Visions

99

A Way in—Critical Realism

At the heart of the disjunction that I have briefly described be-
tween the normative theology of pioneers and the field of practical 
theology lies the question—what is real? And how might we know 
that what we believe to be real, is real? The dilemma this creates for 
practical theology is summarized by Root:

I believe deeply generative possibility rests in contem-
plating divine action next to human experience and 
agency. And yet to do so is problematic, for divine action, 
if we are to contend that it is real—that is, a reality—is a 
transcendent mystery. (Root 2014, ix) 

Thomas O’Dea describes religion as “the symbolic and or-
ganizational embodiment of the experience of the ultimate in 
less-then-ultimate forms” (1964, 31). All experience must be 
translated, expressed, given form in some way. The work of trans-
lation and expression can never be neutral or perfect, leaving a gap 
into which epistemological doubt enters. This is true of all experi-
ence. But perhaps most particularly true of religious experience in 
cultural context of the post-Enlightenment west. 

Indeed, the roots of the dilemma with divine action lie in the 
Enlightenment and the dominance of a positivist philosophy that 
reduces the real to that which can be proven by measurable experi-
ence. Despite developments away from this position in the field of 
academic philosophy, the positivist perspective on reality contin-
ues to hold considerable influence over popular opinion which, 
perhaps informed by a media industry that revels in dualistic de-
bates, maintains a view that there is choice to be made between 
empiricism and myth, where myth is a byword for nonsense. 

The internal contradiction of positivism4 led to more post-
modern anti-realist perspectives as described by Ludwig Witt-
genstein and Jacques Derrida (Archer et al. 2004). These focussed 
on ontological constructions in the realm of language. Language 
functions to create reality thus leading to distinct realms of reality 

4. That is, the claim that all that is real is that which can empirically verified 
cannot itself be proved empirically. 



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

100

according to each arena of language. Religion is rendered as one 
language field, one arena of knowledge, one in which God exists 
only by virtue of language. The challenges inherent in talking 
about God in an academic world influenced by the long shadow 
of positivism made this new avenue for epistemology attractive. 
As Margaret Archer, Andrew Collier, and Douglas Porpora note, 
“Many theologians find this post-Wittgensteinian perspective 
congenial” (Archer et al. 2004, 8) in that it creates a valid arena for 
talk of God without making any claims about reality. 

To affirm the validity of transcendent experience requires 
therefore a perspective that neither brackets out this experience as 
unverifiable (a positivist perspective) nor relativizes such experi-
ence as but one of a plurality of experiences without any claim 
on reality (a post-Wittgensteinian/postmodernist perspective). I 
seek a perspective that offers a dignified and humble attitude to 
the “brute fact” of people’s experience of the transcendent and a 
perspective that does justice to the data of people’s experience by 
more than simple description. 

Critical realism offers such a perspective. Drawing on the 
philosophy, in particular, of Roy Bhaskar, whose work was en-
gaged with by Archer, Collier and Porpora, the critical realism that 
developed the field of practical theology5 affirms a critical asser-
tion about the stratified nature of reality and hence a distinction 

5. Andrew Wright (2012) traces the origins of the various streams of 
critical realism. The dominant stream within practical theology is associated 
with the philosophical movement started by Roy Bhaskar. Archer et al. (2004) 
represent “a second wave of critical realism’s spiritual turn” (Wright 2012, 39) 
and provide the enduring connection between Bhaskar’s critical realism and 
its place within the field of Christian practical theology. Wright also identifies 
steams of critical realism emerging from the dialogue between theology and 
natural sciences (beginning with Ian Barbour and taken up by key voices such 
as John Polkinghorne, Arthur Peacock, and Alistair McGrath), a stream initi-
ated by Thomas Torrance exploring a critical realist perspective on doctrine 
and a stream applying critical realism to Biblical interpretation (Ben Meyer and 
NT Wright). The latter stream is important for my own purposes of exploring 
a narrative approach to interpreting experience. Thus, whilst the critical realist 
perspective of Meyer and NT Wright has developed rather independently of 
the Baskharian stream it provides a complimentary resource in terms of giving 
a valid and rich means of engaging with and interpreting spiritual experience.



Paul Bradbury—Dreams and Visions

101

between the empirical (that which we experience), the actual (that 
which happens independent of our experience of it) and the real 
(the deeper truth of what lies behind all reality) (Taylor 2020).6 In 
addition critical realism asserts that it is not an a priori assumption 
about reality (or non-reality) that informs our perspective on the 
world but an a posteriori interpretation of our lives in the realm of 
subjective experience. Practical action in the empirical realm, our 
engagement in the world, draws experience which, as relational 
beings, we seek to share and interpret with others: “It is our doings 
in the world which secure meanings and not vice versa” (Archer 
et al. 2004, 189). For critical realism, however, these interpreta-
tions must remain as postfoundational, held humbly and critically 
as a lens with which to continue to critique and interpret further 
experience. 

Critical realism’s perspective is constructed from three philo-
sophical commitments. Firstly, rejecting the collapse of ontology 
into epistemology, it asserts that the real is something that exists 
independent of our ability to know it fully. It embraces realism as a 
truth about the way things are but not as a reduction to saying how 
things are. Secondly, rejecting the “epistemic fallacy” of positiv-
ism, but acknowledging that there is no such thing as the detached 
or “objective” observer, critical realism asserts an epistemological 
relativism. The quest for the real is not a zero-sum game of philo-
sophical conquest, we are not seeking the next candidate for the 
hegemonic position held by positivism, rather the development 
of our understanding of the real is through the conversation be-
tween different ontological perspectives. Any ontology is seen as a 

6. Andrew Root (2014), drawing on Christian Smith (2010), makes the 
distinction between the dependant subjective layer (empirical), dependant ob-
jective layer (actual) and independent objective layer (real). It is the experience 
of the real, whether as an infant dropping a cup from a high chair, Newton 
observing the apple dropping from the tree, or Francis hearing the voice of 
God, that propels us into the sharing and interpretation of experience and the 
seeking of understanding in the actual realm. In this sense all experiences are 
ontological, they are experiences of the real which are deeper than mere epis-
temology. “They are greater, more real . . . existing on a higher plane of reality 
because they encounter us as a real event outside of or ability to describe them” 
(Root 2014, 216).



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

102

provisional “best account” of reality and must be open to critique, 
dialogue, development or even rejection as the accumulation of 
data emerging from experience acts upon it. Thus “critical realism 
combines a realist ontology with a relativist epistemology” (Taylor 
2020, 58). Finally, critical realism asserts judgemental rationality 
as a means by which reason can be applied to argue for decisions 
over the “fit” of one ontology over another. This is a critical move 
from the judgemental relativism of more postmodern perspectives 
and leads to the possibility of “alethic truth” (Archer et al. 2004, 
2). This is the kind of truth that is commensurate with our experi-
ence and that of others to the degree that it is a shared truth that 
in practical terms is (at least temporarily) a closed case. In critical 
realist terms such “truth” is provisionally held, open to the future 
scrutiny and critique of new experience and new argument, will-
ing to enter into dialogue with them in the search for a deeper 
vision of the truth behind the “truth.”

What critical realism therefore offers is a way in to explore 
the testimonies of spiritual experience in the context of practical 
theology. It validates practical theology’s starting point of experi-
ence, avoiding the trajectory from Schleiermacher to Cupitt where 
the primacy of spiritual experience leads to the relativization of all 
experience (Wright 2012, 49). It also validates practical theology 
as more than a “pseudo-science” or a mere mode of description; 
rather it is a discipline of enquiry, alongside other theological 
disciplines, that offers a means of discovery complimentary to the 
natural sciences. 

Exploring Methodology

The question remains however exactly how judgemental ratio-
nality might be applied in the arena of spiritual experience. Such 
experiences are by their nature particular and personal. What is 
the difference between someone who professes to being commu-
nicated to by a unicorn and someone who hears the voice of God? 

Alasdair MacIntyre develops the concept of “intelligibility” 
to describe the way human beings sort actions, statements and 



Paul Bradbury—Dreams and Visions

103

experiences into plausible or implausible fields. The way we do 
this, our innate methodology, is to place the action or utterance in 
the context of a narrative: 

It is because we all live out narratives in our lives and 
because we understand our own lives in terms of the 
narratives that we live out that the form of narrative is 
appropriate for the understanding of the action others. 
Stories are lived before they are told. (MacIntyre 1981, 
246)

This narrative structure may well be, initially at least, an experi-
ment, but without any such narrative the data we receive makes 
little sense. The fit of the data to a story creates “intelligibility” so 
long as new data continues to fit the narrative that is being told. 
What develops is an iterative process of testing the narrative 
structure in which experience is contextualized with any new in-
formation that arrives. The process is therefore a dialectical one, a 
multivalent conversation involving sense-data, narrative and the 
interpretative tools that help discern whether new experience can 
be accommodated in the unfolding narrative.

Judgemental rationality in this methodology agrees with 
MacIntyre who argues that humans are like “a story-telling ani-
mal” (MacIntyre 1981, 250). For MacIntyre, discerning action 
and experience in the course of life our fundamental question is: 
“Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?” (1981, 250). 
For NT Wright, this renders the typical subject-object frame for 
epistemology into a frame of story-telling humans and story-laden 
world. The scientific challenge of verification can be responded to 
within this framework whereby verification is the test of intelligi-
bility with the theory-story we inhabit. Critical realism therefore 
“sets up as hypotheses various stories about the world in general 
or of bits of it in particular and tests them by seeing what sort of 
‘fit’ they have with the stories already in place” (Wright 1992, 45).

Of course, our theory-stories do not emerge out of nowhere. 
They are stories we inherit from our communities and the tradi-
tions those communities hold. Such stories become a key part of 
our identity to the extent that we are our stories, and without our 



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

104

stories we lose sense of our identity. Traditionalism (and funda-
mentalism) is the holding fast to stories despite the intervention 
of new sense-data that places a fundamental challenge to the 
story. A living tradition by contrast holds its founding story firmly 
but openly. It embraces the risk of ongoing conversation about 
the continued validity and nature of the story in the face of new 
information.7 

However if it is true, and now valued, that all knowledge is 
embodied knowledge, embodied in particular traditions, stories 
and cultures, then how are we to say there is any kind of tran-
scendent truth? This anti-realist challenge, whilst demanding a 
critical perspective on truth claims, cannot however go as far as 
concluding with certainty that there are no transcendent truths. 
Leslie Newbigin states, “The (true) assertion that all truth claims 
are culturally and historically embodied does not entail the (false) 
assertion that none of them makes contact with a reality beyond 
the human mind” (1995, 74). In this sense the commitment to 
judgemental reality is a necessarily personal one. It is the placing 
of data within a story in which I have placed a personal commit-
ment. There is no other way in which truth is explored: “I can only 
affirm the objective of a truth claim which I make my committing 
myself to live and act in accordance with that claim” (Newbigin 
1995, 75). 

It is this framework into which I wish to place the commit-
ment to judgemental rationality. For example, taking my own 
story, after rejecting the dream initially as “just a dream,” I sensed 
an invitation to attend to its significance. The story and tradition 
I inhabit is one where the notion of spiritual experience is norma-
tive, and also one where the biblical witness affirms dreams and 
visions as an aspect of the means by which God speaks, and par-
ticularly a means where God provides guidance (e.g., Matt 1:20; 
2:12, 13; Acts 2:17; 16:19). 

Thus the notion of a dream as a spiritual experience can be 
integrated into my own story by virtue of its embeddedness in the 

7. “A living tradition, then, is an historically-extended, socially-embodied 
argument” (MacIntyre 1981, 257).



Paul Bradbury—Dreams and Visions

105

wider story of my own tradition. Alternative stories compete for 
intelligibility and these stories must be attended to. The positivist 
paradigm argues that dreams are purely brain chemistry and that 
there is nothing to prove that dreams can have any epistemologi-
cal relevance beyond this. Without doubt the majority of dreams 
fit perfectly well in the limited scope of this account. But critical 
realism allows me to contend that there are some dreams that can 
inhabit a larger story intelligibly and with validity.

Pneumatology and Narratives of Spiritual 
Experience

NT Wright states: “Story can help us in the first instance to articu-
late a critical-realist epistemology and can then be put to wider 
uses in the study of literature, history and theology” (1992, 32). 
Likewise, story can be put to use in the study of spiritual experi-
ence. Is it possible, and constructive, though to talk about these 
narratives of spiritual encounter as particular kinds of experience? 
I want to argue that such stories like that of St Francis and many 
others contain a particular theological validity because of the par-
ticular story that they inhabit. Firstly, it is a story with a particular 
telos. Secondly it is a story with a primacy for the agency of the 
Holy Spirit. 

Andrew Root connects realism and experience through 
cause: “We experience something as real because we are impacted 
by its cause. . . .We give epistemological shape to what has delivered 
cause to our being” (2014, 201). Spiritual experiences provide a 
validity to the realist claims of the transcendent, not only through 
the sense-date of the experiences themselves, what was seen, what 
was felt, but through the impact that they cause in those who ex-
perience them. NT Wright contends that the very validity of the 
bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ is to be placed in the story of 
the disciples for whom the experience of the resurrection appear-
ances and the day of Pentecost cause such a radical shift in their 
worldview and their posture toward the world (Wright 2003).



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

106

Furthermore, the story of God’s salvation argues for a par-
ticular kind of cause, that is a cause that fits with the eschatological 
arc of the story. NT Wright’s categorization of the story of salva-
tion is one of a play of five acts in which the fifth act is still being 
written, and, though we know the end of the story as the healing 
of all things, nevertheless there is scope for creativity and “faithful 
improvisation” within the unfolding narrative. This is the act of the 
story in which the church is invited to participate (Wright 1992, 
139–43). 

A primary agent and actor within this final act of the story is 
the Holy Spirit. John V. Taylor asserted, “The chief actor in the his-
toric mission of the Christian church is the Holy Spirit” (1972, 3). 
This assertion can be made from the witness of the New Testament 
where the salvation story is driven forward in the gospels by Jesus, 
who “full of the power of the Holy Spirit” as he begins his minis-
try, “can only do what he sees the Father doing” (Luke 4:1; John 
5:19) and therefore discerns how to use his agency in the story 
by prayerful participation with Father in the power of the Holy 
Spirit. The promise of “another Counsellor” and the breathing of 
the Holy Spirt upon the disciples at the resurrection (John 14:16; 
20:19–23), in connection with their commissioning as agents of 
the Kingdom in the world, argues for a continuation in the church 
of this co-agency with the Spirit in the ongoing story of salvation. 
As Cartledge puts it: “Following Pentecost, the praxis of the Spirit 
was determinative for the religious experience of the church in an 
active rather than passive sense” (2015, 57).

The experience of the Spirit therefore has a particular telos as 
the movement from the Father, mediated by the Holy Spirit drives 
forward the story of salvation with purpose to its inevitable conclu-
sion. This concept of purpose is a critical one in distinction to the 
dominant philosophical perspectives of the post-Enlightenment 
west. Purpose in such schemes are speculative and unreliable. They 
require a prior assumption of some origin of purpose from outside 
what is observable. A position which of course is, according to 
positivism, untenable. Michael Polanyi however has argued that 
all knowledge is “personal knowledge” (1958); that is, it requires 



Paul Bradbury—Dreams and Visions

107

a personal investment, a testing of one’s weight. To provide a ba-
sis for being and action in the world an epistemology must make 
contact with reality, it must be tested. That in itself is an act of 
faith, a move with the ingredient of doubt: “Only statements that 
can be doubted make contact with reality” (Newbigin 1995, 52). 
Furthermore, Polanyi argued for a “tacit dimension” (1966), the 
presence of purpose in the scientific method. The ability to shape 
questions and problems that form the basis for scientific enquiry 
are expressions of an enquiry that is reaching from the possibili-
ties of pattern and coherence towards a greater reality. Confirmed 
positivists would reject such claims. But the point remains that 
positivism’s rejection of purpose is not straight forward. Further-
more, its commitment to empirical observation, to cause and to 
certainty, is itself a position of personal commitment, a story of the 
world that brings its own inherent predispositions. Critical realism 
accepts this epistemic relativism and invites the valid proposal of 
story as means of discovery and knowledge. It provides scope for 
a story of the cosmos in which there is a place for purpose and 
therefore a place in which stories with a telos provide the grounds 
for the testing of reality. 

The particular telos of the Christian story is that of the es-
chaton, the age to come. Anderson argues that the Spirit’s work is 
future oriented (Anderson 2001, 106). The Spirit comes “from the 
future” and mediates the enfolding revelation of the reconciliation 
of the cosmos made real by the work of Christ. Likewise, Molt-
mann states that “eschatologically, the Spirit can be termed the 
‘power of futurity’” (1977, 34). Further, “The church is the escha-
tological creation of the Spirit” (1977, 33). Through the Spirit, the 
church is created and renewed. God’s Spirit is the Spirit of renewal, 
but also resurrection, an agent of radical innovation and the initia-
tor of new chapters in the story. These are the sorts of interventions 
of the Spirit that place strong challenges to our normative theolo-
gies and practices. I want to suggest therefore that the tradition, 
in which spiritual experiences that I have described are embraced, 
has within it firstly the unfolding of the salvation story “to the 
ends of the earth” and secondly the promise of radical innovation 



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

108

such that the story not only evolves step by step (the “now” of the 
kingdom) but invites an openness to paradigmatic development 
(the “not yet” of the kingdom). Therefore, we might expect and 
find fitting those stories of spiritual experience, including amongst 
pioneers in the church, which invite the church into new contexts 
and in radically new ways. 

Pneumatology, Experience, and Practical 
Theological Research

What might critical realism and an embracing of the presence and 
ministry of the Holy Spirit mean for the practice of practical theo-
logical research? Critical realism takes seriously the location of the 
observer in the midst of a world of epistemologies in conversation. 
There is no such thing as the detached observer. Consequently, a 
critical realist perspective is intrinsically reflexive, placing the ob-
server in the midst of the story as a story-telling individual with 
an identity inseparable from their history and context. For myself, 
as a Christian, a pioneer, formed to a significant degree in charis-
matic evangelical communities I find myself as both participant 
and researcher as I approach this project. 

The missiology of the pioneer ministry movement has drawn 
heavily on the concept of the missio Dei, a commitment to mission 
being a first step for God, not a second step (Bosch 1991, 390–91; 
Flett 2010; Moynagh 2017, 146–47). Mission is part of the nature 
of God’s being, not a function of it. Consequently, mission is not 
a second step for the church. It is not something in addition to 
the being of the church, an optional extra. Rather mission is part 
of the life of God in which the church is called to participate. The 
apostolic self-giving nature of God is the life given through Jesus 
and the Spirit to the church. It is this same life the church is asked 
to witness to in its own life. Life without mission is contrary to the 
nature of God and the nature of the church. The church’s missional 
posture is one of “active passivity” (Flett 2010, 259). This is a re-
ceiving of the life of God which invites a consequent activity in the 
participation of that same life. A consequence of this commitment 



Paul Bradbury—Dreams and Visions

109

is a growing reemphasis on the spiritual practice of discernment in 
community. The oft repeated phrase within the Fresh Expressions 
movement8 of “seeing what God is doing and joining in”9 points 
to a conviction first of God’s prevenient action in the world and 
secondly our invitation to discern that action and participate in it. 
The concept of concursus Dei, that God’s actions can be discerned 
in and through the action of other agents, is similarly commonly 
espoused by those in the movement.

In this sense the pneumatology of many pioneers connects 
strongly with the concept of “mediation” described by Cartledge. 
For Cartledge, mediation means “the Spirit as intermediary medi-
ates the presence of the triune God such that God is recognized 
as present within intermediate aspects of creaturely reality for the 
purpose of salvation” (2015, 68). This is not to collapse the work of 
the Spirit into the creaturely or the material, but to recognize the 
intermediary action of the Spirit as working through the media-
tion of other processes, events and experiences. 

For pioneers a great significance is placed on discernment of 
the action of God, by the intermediate action of the Spirit, through 
the mediation of other agents and aspects of reality. This discern-
ment is no different for the researcher, entering (for myself in a new 
but different way) into the ongoing dialectical conversation within 
the story of salvation being worked out in any number of different 
contexts around the country. Critical realism creates the frame-
work to take the spiritual experiences of pioneers seriously as the 
they seek to interpret these experiences in the context of the nar-
rative of salvation. Critical realism also validates as a contribution 
the practice of spiritual discernment on the part of the researcher 
within that conversation. For Root, this is encompassed in terms 
of “ministry” in the sense of personal, relational, participative 

8. Fresh Expressions is a British ecumenical movement with a vision to 
promote and enable new forms of church for a changing culture. For more, see 
www.freshexpressions.org.uk. 

9. A quote generally attributed to Rowan Williams, though with roots in 
the formal theology of the missio Dei, e.g., “The church participates in Christ’s 
messianic mission and in the creative mission of the Spirit” (Moltmann 1977, 
65).



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

110

encounters of love and care as opposed to more clerical or insti-
tutional understandings (2014). Practical theological research is 
therefore a ministry, participating in the ongoing sense-making 
dialectic as the church encounters and participates in the mediat-
ing work of the Spirit. 

This argues for a spirituality in practical theology, a posture 
of discernment in the practice of practical theology, that takes 
seriously pneumatology, experience and the mediating work of 
the Spirit in all aspects of the ministry of the church. This is not 
a perspective held strongly within the world of practical theol-
ogy. Cartledge goes as far as to say that “the majority of books on 
practical theology simply ignore pneumatology altogether” (2015, 
44). He references Bonnie Miller-McLemore’s “map of the field of 
practical theology” (Miller-McLemore 2012) and reflects that the 
majority of its fifty-six chapters “do not refer to the person or work 
of the Holy Spirit” (Cartledge 2015, 60). 

Yet it is consistent with the widely held commitment to criti-
cal realism to explore the development of a spirituality of practical 
theological research which embraces the exploration of knowledge 
beyond empiricism, description, or even hermeneutics. It invites 
a move toward a “phronetic knowing” (Wolfteich 2009, 13). Here 
space is created for knowledge development which can be more 
conversational and cyclical in nature, drawing on various episte-
mologies and perspectives (Rooms 2012). Spiritual discernment 
can thus find a place within phronesis and contribute to such a 
conversation. 

Spiritual discernment is however a broad term. Are there 
ways in which the concept of spiritual discernment might become 
a valid part of the methodology of practical theological research? 
Marc Henri Lavellee has offered a model for a process by which 
spiritual discernment can be integrated into the task for the practi-
cal theologian. He draws parallels with Ignatian spirituality which, 
in common with practical theology, gives attention to the lived ex-
perience of a person or community’s life as a means to “seeing” di-
vine reality. Lavellee also sees parallels for the researcher with the 
role of spiritual director as one who participates in a collaborative 



Paul Bradbury—Dreams and Visions

111

conversation between the person/community and the Holy Spirit 
(Lavellee 2016). Similarly, Pete Ward argues that one consequence 
of a critical realist perspective in practical theology is “the call to 
abide,” that is a commitment to a normativity of “discerning the 
presence of Christ” (2017, 184). Again, this is not a detached dis-
cernment for the researcher, but a participatory one that invites 
personal spirituality and attentiveness to the presence and voice 
of God in the midst of the process of research. This argues for the 
practice of prayer as a critical element in the arena of epistemol-
ogy. James Butler provides an autoethnographic account of the use 
of prayer in practical theological research (Butler n.d.) and finds 
close correlation with Ashley Cocksworth’s reading of the spiri-
tual theology of the fourth-century desert mystic Evagrius (Cock-
sworth 2018). Evagrius’s theology of prayer spoke of the pray-er as 
someone “eavesdropping” on a polyphonic conversation already 
taking place. In this sense practical theology is about practicing 
the kind of attentiveness necessary to eavesdrop well on the com-
plex conversation already taking place in a community or network 
in its context where Christ is present and active by his Holy Spirit.

Which brings us back in a sense to dreams and visions. What 
was my dream? It was the experience of the real generating new 
knowledge for me in the realm of my new ministry as a pioneer. 
In the wake of that experience a process of discernment took place 
where the dream came into conversation with the stories of scrip-
ture, tradition, my church community and the context around 
me. This context happened to be a coastal town in which much of 
the land given for new housing development had been reclaimed 
from the sea over the course of the town’s development. Was God 
inviting me to venture beyond the firmer landscapes of church 
tradition and trust that something new would emerge? I could not 
be certain. But it was an interpretation that might well bear my 
weight in the testing of it. Likewise, as a researcher exploring such 
experiences with other pioneers I am placing myself as an abiding 
presence in the midst of the conversations between experience and 
the means by which we interpret them. I am in a sense entering 
the sea that is the uncertain, ungrounded space that pioneers and 



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

112

others inhabit discerning the missio Dei. I am entering into the 
fluid conversation of research that trusts that in the wake of such 
listening and discernment something that begins to look like land, 
a place that others may come and stand on, begins to emerge.

Conclusion

My argument is for research that can explore spiritual experience 
and the discerning of the missio Dei, generally in exploring eccle-
sial futures, specifically in seeking to understand the practice of 
pioneer ministry. Critical realism provides a perspective in which 
these kinds of experience can be seen as valid forms of knowledge. 
Furthermore, the framing of this kind of knowledge in the context 
of narrative and the use of intelligibility as a means of verification 
provide a robust means of allowing these stories and experiences 
to find their voice. Pneumatology should lead us to situate stories 
such as these in the context of a salvation narrative that has a uni-
versal telos and in which the Holy Spirit and the radical newness 
of resurrection are inextricably linked. Furthermore it validates a 
practice of practical theological research as a participative process 
of spiritual discernment, inviting prayerfulness and attentiveness 
on the part of the researcher as they seek to “eavesdrop” on the 
voice and presence of God in Christ, by his Holy Spirit, in the lives 
of those people and communities he/she is amongst.

Bibliography

Anderson, Ray. 2001. The Shape of Practical Theology. Downers Grove, IL: 
InterVarsity.

Archer, Margaret, et al. 2004. Transcendence: Critical Realism and God. London: 
Routledge.

Bosch, David J. 1991. Transforming Mission, Paradigm Shifts in Theology of 
Mission. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis.

Butler, James. n.d. “Prayer as Research Practice?: What Corporate Practices of 
Prayer Disclose about Theological Action Research.” Unpublished Paper.

Cartledge, Mark. 2015. The Mediation of the Spirit. Cambridge: Eerdmans.
Chesterton, G. K. 1924. Saint Francis of Assisi. New York: Doubleday.



Paul Bradbury—Dreams and Visions

113

Cocksworth, Ashley. 2018. Prayer, A Guide for the Perplexed. London: T&T 
Clark.

Cox, Harvey. 2009. The Future of Faith. New York: Harper Collins.
Flett, John. 2010. The Witness of God. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Lavellee, Marc Henri. 2016. “Practical Theology from the Perspective of 

Catholic Spirituality: A Hermeneutic of Discernment.” International 
Journal of Practical Theology 20 (2): 203–21.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue. London: Bloomsbury.
Miller-McLemore, Bonnie J. 2012. The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical 

Theology. London: Blackwell.
Moltmann, Jurgen. 1977. The Church in the Power of the Holy Spirit. London: 

SCM.
———. 2011. “The Holy Spirit in the World Today.” In The Church in the Power 

of the Spirit, edited by J. Williams, 14–28. London: Alpha International.
Moynagh, Michael. 2017. Church In Life. London: SCM.
Newbigin, Leslie. 1995. Proper Confidence. London: SPCK.
O’Dea, Thomas. 1964. “Five Dilemmas of the Institutionalization of Religion.” 

Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion 1: 30–41.
Polanyi, Michael. 1958. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. 

Chicago: Chicago University Press.
———. 1966. The Tacit Dimension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rooms, Nigel. 2012. “Paul as Practical Theologian: Phronesis in Phillipians as 

Practical Theology.” Practical Theology 5 (1): 81–94.
Root, Andrew. 2014. Christopraxis, A Practical Theology of the Cross. 

Minneapolis: Fortress.
———. 2016. “Regulating the Empirical in Practical Theology.” Journal of 

Youth and Theology 15 (1): 44–64.
Smith, Christian. 2010. What Is a Person? Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Taylor, John V. 1972. The Go-Between God. London: SCM.
Taylor, Lynne. 2020. “Making Room for the Missio Dei in Missiological 

Research.” Mission Studies 27 (1): 52–77.
Tickle, Phyllis. 2012. The Great Emergence. Ada, MI: Baker.
Ward, Pete. 2017. Liquid Ecclesiology. Leiden: Brill.
Wolfteich, Claire. 2009. “Animating Questions: Spirituality and Practical 

Theology.” International Journal of Practical Theology 13 (1): 121–43.
Wright, Andrew. 2012. Christianity and Critical Realism: Ambiguity, Truth, and 

Theological Literacy. London: Routledge.
Wright, NT. 1992. The New Testament and the People of God. London: SPCK.
———. 2003. The Resurrection of the Son of God. London: SPCK.


