





































11

Parklife – Listening to Stories as a Deep 
Missional Practice

Sally Mann
A pioneering missional leader in East Ham, East London and the Senior Minister of 
Bonny Downs Baptist Church. Sally is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Univer-
sity of Greenwich, focusing on issues of social inequality and co-director of Red 
Letter Christians UK, a relational network for those who want to live for Jesus and 
Justice. https://redletterchristians.org.uk/.
Email: S.E.Mann@greenwich.ac.uk

Abstract

This paper offers missiological reflections on a sociological research project 
the author undertook during the 2020 Covid lockdown, called Parklife (Mann, 
2021). The fieldwork for this involved listening to the stories of those experi-
encing homelessness during the pandemic. This paper reflects on this experi-
ence and suggests that a deeper understanding of how stories work may serve 
to strengthen the creative, and potentially transformative, art of missional 
listening. To this end, it brings findings from the Parklife project into a con-
versation with Ricoeur’s notion of the narratological self, interrogating the role 
that stories have in identity creation. It offers a set of working propositions for 
consideration in other missional contexts.

mailto:S.E.Mann%40greenwich.ac.uk?subject=


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Keywords: Homelessness; Covid; Identity; Listening; Paul Ricoeur; Stories

Introduction

I am a missional minister in the East End of London and a jobbing sociolo-
gist. These roles synchronized in a small-scale research project called Parklife 
that I undertook to explore experiences of homelessness during the pandemic 
(Mann, 2021). Now, as I reflect on the methods and findings of Parklife, I believe 
there are important implications for missional leadership. Here I suggest how 
and why inviting people to share their stories is a powerful missional practice, 
especially among the most marginalized communities.

When we think of stories and mission, perhaps the power of storytelling 
is most readily appreciated. We may even emphasize this side of the dynamic:

A missional ecclesiology demands a new story. The best response 
to the challenges in a complex world is to tell the stories of the 
church … In a certain sense, the whole enterprise of Christian 
theology is about storytelling … Leaders are storytellers. They 
know that stories make life possible (Niemandt 2019: 143, em-
phasis added).

Telling stories is an essential part of forming a missional community (Roxburgh 
and Romanuk, 2006: 71). Contextualizing and weaving together the cosmic 
gospel with local stories is an artform (Hirsch and Ferguson, 2011: 1343-4). 
Missional communities are ‘story-rich’ and our narratives invite others to join 
and find their place in a communal story (Morisy, 2004).

But what precisely happens when we invite someone to tell us their story? 
Does this have its own intrinsic power?

Reflecting on the stories curated in the Parklife project convinces me that 
soliciting and truly attending to stories is a concrete example of what Sam Wells 
calls ‘being with’, a practice of ‘incarnational mission’ (2018). Here, I suggest 
that a deeper understanding of how stories work may serve to strengthen the 
creative, and potentially transformative, art of missional listening. To this end, 
I interrogate what happens when we share stories in the light of some of Paul 
Ricoeur’s philosophical notions. I offer the Parklife stories and the peculiar 
philosophy of Ricoeur to those considering the importance of biographical 
stories, who want to think this through at a deeper level and are up for a little 
speculative philosophy to achieve this. Ricoeur’s work, and in particular his 



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later book Time and Narrative (1984), has been described as offering “the finest 
example of contemporary philosophical hermeneutics and is one of the most 
significant works of philosophy published in the late twentieth century” (Wood, 
1991: xiii). I have more modest aims. I plan to develop some intriguing ideas 
Ricoeur has about narratives, time and identity. I have found these useful in 
discerning how and why stories are transformational. Ricoeur suggests that 
stories are the primary way that we make sense of our lives and the means by 
which we come to understand and represent our identities. Storytelling shapes 
the shared world between the listener and the storyteller. For Ricoeur, human 
speech and actions operate in a similar way to texts. This means that a story can 
take on new meanings and work within those who have heard them long after 
the storyteller has finished speaking. Stories are generative.

Mining the Parklife project for its missiological content has deepened by 
appreciation of missional listening as ministerial practice. It has also led to 
some working propositions which might be helpful to other missional leaders 
and communities.

The original Parklife  project

I am a co-vocational Baptist minister and lecturer in sociology. I have been 
researching experiences of homelessness for several years to explore how 
grassroots communities can assist transitions from street sleeping. My research 
includes the contribution of my own church’s advocacy project.1 During the 
2020 Covid lockdown I found myself working from home and spending the 
permitted hour of outdoor exercise in my local park. I noticed that a group of 
street drinkers and others I knew to be homeless had taken up daily residence 
there. Despite the shifting demographics of the park, they had maintained own-
ership of a circle of six benches around a cenotaph. I observed how this group 
were ostracized within the increasingly busy park. To my sociological imagina-
tion, my local park became a site rich with forced interactions between widely 
differing cultures. The park became a place to contend for space, to label those 
who felt threatening, but also a place for communality and care. I recognized 

1 My church set up a separate community organizing charity almost 30 years ago 
www.bonnydowns.org and a bespoke project to address homelessness in our borough 
www.newwayproject.org. See Looking for Lydia: Encounters which Shape the Church in 
2019, available from Amazon or www.bonnydownschurch.org.

http://www.bonnydowns.org
http://www.newwayproject.org
http://www.bonnydownschurch.org


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many of those passing time at the six benches in my role as a volunteer advo-
cate. I knew them as regulars at my church’s midweek community meal. Covid 
restrictions had changed the way these projects operated. Spending time in the 
park with this “street community” altered the context of our relationship. To 
my missional eye, the park became a place ripe with the possibility to “be with” 
a community of vulnerable people I now had less opportunity to “do for” – 
to borrow Sam Wells’ excellent definitions (2018). After an initial period of 
pondering about what I was witnessing, I asked for ethical clearance from my 
university and set up an ethnographic research project called Parklife.

At first, I simply observed interactions and chatted to people. Later, when 
I had become a familiar figure, and formal research agreements were in place, I 
began to invite the regular bench sitters to share stories with me. My methodol-
ogy was participatory and narratological: I curated stories. To anyone passing, 
I was just choosing to sit on the same park bench for an afternoon every week 
and chat to people from the “street community”. If they agreed, I would jot 
down notes about the stories they told me and invite them to tell me more. 
Undoubtedly, being a familiar face helped foster trust and I adopted the stance 
of moderate participation of “participant observer” (Howell, 1972).2 My open-
ing gambit was usually to introduce myself as someone who was interested in 
stories and ask whether they had one to tell me.

The Parklife project involved six months of fieldwork. It offered the oppor-
tunity to study huge numbers of everyday interactions and some exceptional 
ones. It was a snapshot of urban life which may well have been replicated 
internationally during Covid lockdowns while confined to the particularity of 
a certain place and the stories of a certain group. I found that stories were cur-
rency at the six benches. The park was rich with stories. Twelve participants, 
nine men and three women, were formal participants. Two of the women had 
their children with them. All twelve had experienced homelessness in the last 
eighteen months according to the UK Government’s definition (gov.uk, 2021).3 
Four were in the “roofless” category for some of the time during the project. 
Of these, three had spent some months in hotel accommodation as part of the 

2 I reflect on my subjective position as an activist academic in Mann, 1999.
3 The UK Government definition of homelessness includes: Rooflessness (without a 

shelter of any kind, sleeping on the street); Houselessness (with a place to sleep but temporary, 
in institutions or a shelter); Living in insecure housing (threatened with severe exclusion due 
to insecure tenancies, eviction, domestic violence, or staying with family and friends known as 
“sofa surfing”); and/or Living in inadequate housing (in caravans on illegal campsites, in unfit 
housing, in extreme overcrowding).



Sally Mann—Parklife

15

Everyone In pandemic response in London, which saw 40,000 people affected 
by homelessness offered immediate, temporary accommodation in hotels 
and Bed and Breakfasts. One of the participants had refused to engage in the 
scheme and remained roofless or “sofa surfing” for the duration of the project. 
Of the remaining eight, six were “houseless” for most of the project, living 
in temporary hostel accommodation. Another two were currently living in 
insecure housing. For example one woman and her child were living with her 
grandparents and sister in a two bedroomed flat. Nine of the twelve participants 
reportedly spent at least part of everyday (defined as more than five times a 
week) at the park. The rest spent at least part of more than one day a week there. 
Most were recurrent contributors, meeting me repeatedly and adding to their 
stories or sometimes just passing time and watching people use the park with 
me. Alongside the formal participants were a wider group, mainly of “street 
drinkers”, whose housing classification I did not come to know. The majority of 
them appeared to be migrant workers who came to the park after their shifts. 
This group did not give formal consent to participate but had stories to share, 
which due to ethical guidelines could not be included in the research project. 
This group were sometimes an audience for stories and this shaped how they 
were told. Most of the stories were told just to me and these were often returned 
to over a period of time, either being repeated or expanded. How they were 
retold became an important feature of the Parklife study.

In terms of research design, the original Parklife project was broadly an 
emic approach in that it investigated how the street community thought and 
interpreted events. Parklife was intentionally set up to allow the participants 
to lead and shape the scope of the conversations and sought to understand the 
stories from within street culture. This later reflection is more etic in approach 
as I consider the original findings and draw conclusions from my own perspec-
tive as a missional leader, which is a different cultural perspective.

Reflecting on the stories of Parklife:  stories of 
victims and heroes

The stories curated in Parklife were as surprising as they were illuminating. 
Many of stories I listened to had recognizable themes. I heard many tales of 
victimization, of battling “the system”. I was struck by the personification of 
organizations and governmental departments – “the social”, “the housing”. 
Often these narratives pitched the storyteller against a personified adversary, 
one bent on denigrating them. Sometimes the storyteller would return over the 



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course of the weeks and bring paperwork to show me, official letters presented 
as evidence. Folded and well-worn, these were offered as the objects which 
framed the plot – the letter from “the housing”, the court summons, hospital 
appointments.4

“See … [shows me a letter which appears just to be an appoint-
ment schedule] I had evidence. I have it here. They should have 
talked to my doctor.”

I ask for clarification, “Who should have?”

“The housing. They were bang out of order. I have all the evidence. 
See there’s this one back in 2005. I have this from years ago. I have 
proof. Look. I was under the hospital. They had no right.”

Or another time:

“They don’t give a fuck. They do it to get me down. They’d prob-
ably like it if I give in and just fucking do it.”

“Do what?” “Who doesn’t care?” I ask.

“Just fucking top myself. Here in the park. I could. I could. I won’t 
though. But they want me to.”

“Who wants you to?”

“The housing. Those. Those people. They don’t give a fuck.”

And later,

“Don’t tell the social I’m here.”
“They didn’t win. I got that claim.”

4 In places, the storytellers used strong language. This language is retained in order to 
accurately reproduce the reality of the stories (Editor).



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Over the years, volunteering in a church-led advocacy project, I have heard 
many such stories. Encounters with statutory systems seemed to frame many of 
the life-stories I was told.

Less expected were the frequent heroic narratives. These included stories 
of intervening in fights, getting people out of trouble, overcoming the odds:

“It was kicking off here last night. Fucking mental. It was. It was. 
[laughs] It was the full moon or something. Fucking mental … 
He was well out of it. No-one could get him straight. He was all 
for having it out with [anonymised]. I don’t know what would’ve 
happened if I’d not been around … See him? I saved his life!”
“You know [anonymised]. She’s had it rough. Honest Sally she’s 
been right through it. All these fuckers taking her stuff off her 
and all. Not a penny … She would not have survived without me.”
“I told him. I did. I got him down there [to the hospital] and I 
said ‘He’s not leaving ‘til someone sorts this!’ … I stayed with him. 
Probably saved his life.”
“They’ve not won. They’ve not won. I’m not letting this go.”

“Who?” I ask.

“The social. They’ve not won. I’m not letting them off with this. 
They don’t know who they are messing with.”

The stories seemed larger than life and were often retold to me as others arrived 
in the group and provided a new audience. Sometimes people were invited to 
validate the story:

“I did, didn’t I?”

At other times there was somewhat of a contest around who was telling the 
story, a battle for ownership:

“Who’s telling this? Who’s telling this?”

Alongside the victim and hero stories were other stories of loss and bereave-
ment. There was a quietness to these, and they were usually told to me on my 
own. These stories were often prefaced with “Do you remember…” or “You 
know… [this person]?”. It was clear that the loss might only be shared if I knew 



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who they were speaking about. I heard stories of three deaths in the duration of 
this project – of people’s close friends, all of whom seemed to have died from 
the long-term health effects of problematic substance use. These stories seemed 
less rehearsed, and I could not tell how they were being incorporated into any 
larger system of meaning. They were sad stories. I did not experience these sto-
ries being cast as victimization narratives. The deaths were not explained in that 
way, but simply as sad losses. The context of these deaths needs to be situated in 
the fact that homelessness and street life too often have fatal consequences. The 
UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimated that 726 people experiencing 
homelessness died in England and Wales in 2018. This is a 22% year-to-year 
increase and the highest since estimates began in 2013. Data suggests that most 
deaths among people experiencing homelessness were caused by drug-related 
poisoning, suicide, and alcohol-specific deaths (Aldridge, 2019).

There were many other stories gathered from the six benches. A few were 
childhood and teenage recollections, sometimes prompted by the presence of 
children among the group. But the prized stories were the ones about taking on 
systems, and of being a “face”, a known figure who resolved others’ problems 
and kept things in order.

Using thematic analysis to explore the Parklife stories, the primary theme 
was “victimhood”. The next theme was “tragic”, stories that could be grouped 
together as tragedies which happened to others. However, stories of “pleasant” 
events and memories featured next and a surprising number of these featured 
“heroic” personal content.

We all use self-authoring narratives. In thinking through stories from a 
missional standpoint, it may be useful to think about the relationship between 
stories and identity more closely. I suggest that Paul Ricoeur’s general frame-
work, and his particular notion of “emplotment”, helps us to appreciate the 
extent to which a person attempts to make sense of their identity, their relation-
ship to others and their place in the world, through telling stories. This suggests 
that inviting and attending to a story encourages the process of identity forma-
tion and can even shape it. To this end I offer a summary of Ricoeur’s broad 
framework and some of his key ideas which might shape how we perceive mis-
sional listening.



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The broad philosophical context of Ricoeur’s ideas

For Ricoeur, stories are an act of mimesis. Stories are mimetic as they attempt 
to reproduce events from one time or place within another. In Ricoeur’s words, 
they are “the imitating or representing of action in the medium of metrical 
language” (1983/1984: 33). Ricoeur draws from Aristotle’s understanding of 
stories and understands story as mimesis. He adopts the idea of emplotment 
to theorize how mimesis occurs. Every storyteller is therefore also an editor, 
choosing which elements to bring together or leave out, inferring or explicitly 
commentating on events, shaping the plot, bringing it to a resolution.

“Emplotment” is one idea within Ricoeur’s understanding of narratives and 
identity. In a three-volume work called Time and Narrative (1984-88), Ricoeur 
described the relationship between narrative discourse and human experience. 
He finds that to be human is to tell stories. Stories are “the privileged means by 
which we re-configure our confused, unformed, and at the limit mute temporal 
experience” (Ricoeur, 1984: xi).

At the end of the third volume, Ricoeur announces that his philosophical 
exploration has been in search of an answer to the question “Who?”, “Who am 
I that I can be spoken of in so many different ways?” (1988: 274). He considers 
narrative and time to address an existential question of selfhood.

For those conversant in this field, Ricoeur’s notion of the subject is not 
essentialist; he speaks of the self in terms of act and potentiality rather than 
substance. The subject’s identity is not fully stable and tangible, but neither is it 
completely incoherent. Ricoeur’s concept is not the completely decentred sub-
ject posited by Foucault and other postmodernists. Neither does Ricoeur fully 
situate the subject within language as Derrida does. The difference, philosophi-
cally speaking, is how Ricoeur handles issues of agency and being. The self, as 
Ricoeur understands it, is the idea and reality of a person capable of testifying 
to their own existence and acting in the world. This self has agency but is also 
acted upon, one that can recount and take responsibility for its actions. Telling 
stories is one way to exert this responsibility and agency. It an act of active 
interpretation. Through the stories we tell about ourselves we aim to discover 
rather than impose a narrative identity.

Ricoeur’s understanding of narratives has encouraged me to interrogate the 
nature of storytelling and attend to how a person attempts to make sense of 
themselves and the world through this. This approach asks me to set aside the 
desire to check out the veracity of the story. To use theological language, this is a 
true expression of “being with” a person (Wells, 2018). A deeper understanding 



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of how this works can strengthen missional listening skills. Even the most exag-
gerated and unlikely narrative need not be cast as “telling stories” but as the 
important act of story telling.

Ricoeur: Emplotment and the storyteller as an 
active interpreter

As we tell a story, we organise events in ways that generate meaning, creating 
an intelligible whole from many parts. Its’ telling “pursues and reveals mean-
ing” (Ricoeur 1983/1984: 65). We choose where to position ourselves within 
the story and this is how we discover a sense of selfhood. Ricoeur recognizes 
that this sense of identity is not written on a blank slate. We have a pre-existing 
idea of how reality is organized, “a preunderstanding of the world of action, 
its meaningful structures, its symbolic resources, and its temporal character” 
(Ricoeur, 1984: 54). Moreover, in telling stories we actively shape and interpret 
this realm. We tell stories to make sense of the world, but this also involves fit-
ting events, imagined or memorialized, into the framework of our worldview. 
We fit together the parts of a story, the “what, why, who, how, with whom, or 
against whom” (55) into “meaningful structures” (54) which pre-exist our tell-
ing of this particular story. Sometimes, this is very apparent. “Once, upon a 
time …” invites us into a certain imaginary, but pre-existent, mental space. So 
does, “You’ll never guess …”. These structures also open possibilities for future 
landscapes.

Many of the “victim” stories at the six benches took place in a world where 
systems were, at best, uncaring, but were frequently described in terms of their 
imagined malevolence. This is not my pre-existing worldview. Listening closely 
to the stories it was obvious that early criminalization and experiences of social 
welfare systems framed the lives of many of the participants. This was the world 
within which they were attempting to make sense of themselves.

It was not just the Parklife stories which seemed rooted in social mar-
ginalization and multiple deprivations. Interactions within the park were also 
shaped by invisible power structures. In the Parklife stories I found the primary 
interaction between other park users and the group at the six benches was one 
of outright avoidance. Occasional rowdiness and acts of deviance were perhaps 
reactions to ostracizing practices by the other park users.



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Paths criss-crossed the circle of six benches, but these were 
rarely used by other park visitors. The circle of benches acted as 
a shibboleth. As well as circumventing the physical space, other 
avoidance techniques included not looking in the direction of the 
benches, passing by quickly, and avoiding eye contact. These were 
very apparent to me but not commented on by any of the bench 
participants … I witnessed ostracising practices many times in 
the park. Perhaps the very act of gathering as a loosely defined 
group countered this to some extent? It is much harder to ignore 
a group of a dozen or so people. I wondered if the loud greetings 
among the group, which seemed exaggerated at times, and the 
frequently shirtless chests of the men, went some way to counter 
feelings of invisibility. (Mann, 2021: 131-2)

On reflection, the story’s “spectacle” or setting may provide an insight into why 
“victim” stories featured so regularly. Perhaps those at the six benches knew 
how others viewed them and were attempting to make sense of how this had 
happened.

Personifying the structural causes of marginalization might be one way 
to explain feelings of persistent battle and threat. This “emplotment” technique 
situates the storyteller’s identity into a world of battle and contest. The street 
homeless are not the only community to personify adversarial powers. Might 
there be some theological resonance here? An example of the personification 
of negligent social institutions appears in Walter Wink’s analysis of Naming the 
Powers. Of course, the social context of marginalization was also a context for 
the “heroic” stories. These narratives confer dignity and status. They might be 
appreciated as similarly imaginative responses to marginalisation, as attempts 
to shore up identities for those experiencing social invisibility.

There was often a palpable feeling that the storytellers were trying to make 
sense of the things which had happened to them. Some stories jarred and shifted 
in subjective positions and grammatical tenses. The stories would ricochet in 
different directions if others joined at the bench, suggesting that the audience 
did indeed shape the story (a point I will return to in a consideration of how a 
story’s meaning is co-created).

Sometimes “emplotment” involves dissonance as well as coherence. This 
too is telling. Ricoeur invites us to notice the “concordant discordance” as ele-
ments of a story fit into meanings and others resist them (1986: 66). This is 
surely how many of Jesus’ parables work. They lead you along a known path 
and then subvert where you arrive with a discordant element (for example 



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Lk. 10.25-37; 14.15-24; 15.11-32). In terms of autobiography, dissonance may 
flag up shifts in identity creation. Elements of the story which seem to jar with 
the overarching sense of meaning may point to shifts in the way the storyteller 
positions themselves as they tell the story. Perhaps they are aware that they are 
revealing more then they intend. Or that the listener is not reacting as they 
expected.

I recall one Parklife story about a fight which had this subjective shift. It 
had begun as a glorification of the participant’s role in a fight but shifted to 
describe how they held someone else back and “saved their life”. Was this disso-
nance between aggressor and hero due to the storyteller’s awareness that I was 
unimpressed by boasts of violence? Did they adjust their identity in the story 
because of this, or because they saw an opportunity for a more heroic narrative?

Riceour invites us to pay attention to stories as windows into the ways an 
individual attempts to sense of the world and their place within it. We should 
expect this to be ongoing and their sense of identity to be plural. Construct-
ing a sense of self through narrative identity is “an open-ended, incomplete, 
imperfect mediation, namely, the network of interweaving perspectives of the 
expectation of the future, the reception of the past, and the experience of the 
present” (1986: 207).

Working Propositions to consider in other contexts:

1. Learn to see the power of “story telling” inherent in even the most 
unlikely stories. Where it’s appropriate, stop interrogating for accuracy, and 
listen for the authentic account of how the storyteller attempts to discover a 
sense of selfhood.
2. Attend to the frameworks of pre-existing belief implicit in stories. These 
tell us where a person is at as much as the events they recount. Also listen 
out for the dissonances – these are places where change might be emerging.



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Ricoeur: Stories bring the past, present and future 
together

Stories are very interesting in terms of how time works within them. Ricoeur is 
a dense read on this, but it is worth the mental stretch. In Time and Narrative 
he takes issue with all preceding philosophical accounts of time, from Aristotle 
through Augustine, Kant, Husserl and Heidegger. He offers instead, and with 
planned provocative confidence, a hypothesis that “narrative is the guardian of 
time” and that “time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after 
the manner of narrative” (1984: 3).

Ricoeur’s argument is complex. He argues within a tradition which has 
struggled to conceive of time in terms of how we experience it (a phenomeno-
logical approach). He suggests a definition which takes seriously how identities 
are constructed through narratives and how these create illusions of unitary 
time by bringing past, present and future together in a transitory moment. He 
sees this happening at historic levels, for example in the creation of national 
identities through the stories a society chooses to tell about itself.

It also happens at the level of an individual life. This is where, as a mis-
sional leader, I find his ideas most compelling. Ricoeur brings time, identity 
and narrative together:

What counts here is the way in which every day praxis orders the 
present of the future, the present of the past, and the present of the 
present in terms of one another. (1984: 60)

The past is present in a story through the obvious fact that we are re-presenting 
events, but beyond this, there is the non-linear work of symbolism at a sub-
textual level. The story is not merely experienced as linear, even if the narra-
tive appears chronological. Telling a story draws on preexisting meanings 
from deeper, past stories. The meaning of a new story is drawn from ideas and 
themes in other periods, and they become present too. We recognize this in 
the presence of archetypes in stories – such as how we speak about heroes and 
villains. Repetition of recognizable stereotypes, inference and connotation to 
myths are present in the most everyday stories (Hall, 1999). They are not merely 
shorthand. They bring the past into the present, and vice versa.

Biblical parables, and all stories with twists, are especially interesting in 
terms of how time works within them. We are invited to rethink them from 
their endings. So, “to understand the story is to understand how and why the 
successive episodes led to this conclusion” (1986: 66). Once we have heard them, 



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we may have to rethink how we heard them. Ricoeur describes this as gaining 
the ability to “read time backwards” (1986: 66) a process which involves com-
ing to see that the end is present at the beginning and the beginning becomes 
meaningful at the end.

We make sense of events in an autobiographical story by pulling together 
a character which represents ourselves. This might be the narrator. We situate 
this subject within a moral universe where choices matter, and meaningful con-
nections are made between events and effects. Emplotment is a “reading back 
into events” that opens up the possibility of reading forward into the subject’s 
actual future choices and actions. There is the potential for stories told today to 
change tomorrow’s choices and the way we understand ourselves.

The Parklife stories victim or hero stories may not be wholly accurate, but 
they can be transformative. Choosing to tell a story in, for example, a heroic 
way opens new and real potentials for how an individual may go on to act in 
future. Stories shape our future “being in the world”. Telling stories is a process 
of mentally organizing the past and understanding future potentialities.

Stories also work by making the future present in the story as they invite 
the consideration of how the story unfolds. I think of this as the “promise of 
sequels” that is evident in how the story is told and to whom it is told – its 
“speculation” as Aristotle says. If I tell you a story about myself as a victim, I 
may invite your protection and intervention. If I tell you a story about my acts 
of violence, I invite subservience or contest. Both of our futures are potentially 
present in these stories. They are generative.

Missional listening and appropriating meaning

When we listen to a person’s story and begin to try and make sense of it, we 
enter the story and the act of interpretation. Ricoeur calls this “appropriation”. 
Meaning is co-produced depending on how we receive the story. It is an inter-
action rich with the invitation of encounter. Appropriation, application and 
persuasion are involved as we tell and listen to stories (1986: 52-3). Just as the 
storyteller is active and generates meaning, the listener does too. Listening to 
another’s stories involves taking up a subjective position in the story ourselves. 
This is most obvious if we accept the invitation to identify with a character in 
the story: “Well, what would you have done?” “Do you know how that feels?” 
But it always happens as we imagine the scene and pick a perspective. In this, 
the listener is also concurrently producing a sense of themselves. Are they per-
suaded? Can they identify? Where do they see themselves in this story? What 



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ideas are they appropriating and what sense do they make of the story they are 
listening to?

Hence my sociological Parklife project was also a lesson in missional lis-
tening. It taught me to mentally note repeated phrases, how a retold story grew 
and developed, or boiled down to its essence. I learnt to pay attention to the use 
of hyperbole, the oration, the invited response and how the story changed given 
its “speculation” and audience. I realized that if I listen well, I might discern that 
something is happening in that moment, with the potential to observe and even 
participate in the creation of a sense of self. The storyteller is trusting me to see 
how they pull together a sense of who they are as they try to make meaning 
from the events of their lives. They edit and I pay attention to how they do this. 
Listening to a story is a space for “being with” (Wells, 2018). It takes time and 
the willingness not to cast yourself as a heroic character in this person’s story.

Perhaps the potentially transformative power of narratives is most pres-
ent in the stories people tell in liminal spaces. Liminality is present at borders 
where an individual is both losing and gaining identity. Liminality can occur 
through being physically displaced, which was a very common experience 
during the Everyone In pandemic-motivated offer in London of immediate 
temporary accommodation, although often in other parts of the borough or 
much further afield. Where this initiative was successful, Everyone In offered 
the chance to undertake a process of change; to lose the identity of being “one 
of the homeless” and begin to see what else might be possible. But we are foolish 
to reduce homelessness to rooflessness. As many have demonstrated, and I have 
attempted to explore elsewhere (Mann, 2019b) a sense of belonging, of being 
a known character in a community, is a key pull factor to transition from the 
chaos of street life to a new identity in a settled community. It is almost impos-
sible to make this journey unsupported and isolated.

During Parklife I noticed the pull of this familiar place in the park and 
how some would make long bus rides or walks to spend part of every day here. 
Being a known person in a familiar place shapes the stories we feel able to tell, 
the processes of “emplotment”. Of course, it is not just physical displacement 
that creates liminality. It can also happen as a person begins to cross into a new 
identity – for example from street homelessness to settled living. The stories 
told during these times can help or hinder future choices. I noted this in an 
earlier research project which involved spending a day walking around sites 
where one man had lived on the streets for five years (Mann, 2019b). As we 
walked and I listened I noticed that the subject of the story, the way this man 
“Dean” spoke about himself, fundamentally shifted when he began to recount 
volunteering in a local community project as their “Tea Angel”. He had heard 



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26

himself described this way and it now featured in how he described himself – as 
a person who was important in the work of helping others off the streets. The 
project he connected with, NewWay (www.newwayproject.org), was birthed 
in my own community and has the good sense to avoid replicating the power 
differentials inherent in the statutory sector. Instead, it uses an “alongsiders” 
approach, inviting people experiencing homelessness to connect through gar-
dening, food growing, football and cooking. The advocacy part of this project 
is well embedded in community life. Dean had found a way to think of himself 
as a respected volunteer rather than a “service-user” or one of the homogenized 
“homeless”. This gave him a way to tell his story which was full of “semantics of 
action” and involved reading meaning back into his own story to see it as one of 
beating the odds. He was also now part of a larger heroic community, a bigger 
story, where there was a shared mission to end street homelessness.

In an earlier work, Ricoeur lays out what he describes as “little ethics”: 
“aiming at a good life lived with and for others in just institutions” (1992: 172). 
This resonated with Dean’s experience of successful transition. The way Dean 
described himself was full of “concordant discordance” (1986: 66). His story 
was disruptive. It did not always lead where I thought it might. It challenged 
my expected appropriation. For instance, being in the places where he had slept 
out reminded Dean of mostly positive experiences. This was interesting as he 
also told me about the struggle he currently faced living “behind the walls” of 
his new accommodation. His mental health challenges were more acute now 
that he was out of the survival mode of street-sleeping. Ricoeur understood the 
discordance inherent in autobiography. He suggested it involves dimensions of 
both being and not being our former selves. Which is why, he suggests, a self is 
better thought of in terms of the question “who?” rather than “what” a self is.

Listening to Dean’s story and those from the Parklife participants changed 
me. This could be also described as one effect of appropriating of meaning from 
the stories I heard. Once a story is told and is out there “in the world” it is no 
longer just the product of the narrator. In its telling, another kind of work of 
identity formation is possible, one that takes place within the listener. My most 
vivid recollection of how this happened during the Parklife project was when 
one participant interrupted his own storytelling saying “Oh I know what you 
will say. You’ll tell me the story’s not over yet.” I often find myself using this 
phrase to invite someone to imagine a different ending for the situation they 
are in. In this case, the storyteller predicted I would do this and interrupted 
and possibly adjusted their story. Recollecting this, I shift my understanding of 
who I might be. Could I be the person who injects the potential for hope, the 



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subversion of an expected ending, in other people’s stories? This is potentially 
transformative to my own sense of self.

A working proposition to consider in other contexts

3. Appreciate listening to stories as an act of co-production. A listener 
needs to stay mostly quiet, but where it’s appropriate to do so, they can 
encourage new and positive emplotment through occasional questions 
which open new subjective positions: “What would you say to your younger 
self now?”; “What if this isn’t the end of the story – what would you like to 
see happen?”
4. Reflect on how you have been changed by the stories you have heard.

Some conclusions: story-rich placemaking

Parklife gave me the opportunity to listen to stories of those caught up in the 
crisis of homelessness, observe their marginalization in my local park and wit-
ness their communality in a site over which they managed to retain a level of 
control. There was conviviality and a sense of being known among familiar 
faces. There was drama. I did not witness violence but, over the course of the 
project, some participants passed off newly acquired injuries and described 
physical fights as “one of those things”. Many spent some part of every day at the 
six benches. I became convinced that many people fail to make the transition 
from street-sleeping because “mainstream” society is lonelier, less liveable, and 
altogether less inviting than Parklife. Transitioning from a chaotic life needs 
an invitation to a better, more compelling “story to find yourself in”, to bor-
row McLaren’s words.5 Statutory intervention alone cannot achieve this. It takes 
community. And perhaps this is where healthy Christian community comes 
in. Could local, missional churches be the story-rich places where people are 
invited to become a known character and join a heroic mission to transform 
the neighbourhood, all within a grand narrative of resurrection? I believe I see 
this in my own missional church and in the work of grassroots projects like 
NewDay which are long-term, non-judgmental, radically hospitable and confer 

5 From the title of Brian McLaren’s book, The Story We Find Ourselves In: Further 
Adventures of a New Kind of Christian (2013).



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new identities. They are not just listening places; they provide advocacy and 
community organization. They take time to listen to stories.6

It is very hard to “out local” the local church. When it expresses mission 
through radically hospitable expressions of “being with”, it offers a place for 
stories to be told and valued. With some training, and an appreciation of the 
potentially transformative act of listening, these might become more effective 
in helping others journey well. The local missional church is ripe with drama 
and the opportunity to become a known character. It is also “placed” and offers 
familiar spaces to return to. Of course, this only happens if they are genuinely 
hospitable. For those seeking models of “being with” as a missional ecclesiol-
ogy, Ricoeur’s theory encourages us that time spent listening to stories is worth-
while. It is even an act of identity recreation, the transformation of the self.

Working propositions to consider in a missional community or 
congregation

5.  Invite people into in a story-rich community, “Remember that time 
when we …”. Local missional communities are ripe with stories and rooted 
in places where people can become known characters. Let’s tell our local 
stories well and widely.
6. If you are part of a church, think through the stories you tell. Do they use 
dissonance and imagination? Do they intrigue, invite and discombobulate? 
Revisit the stories Jesus told, and as we retell them, let’s avoid prescribing 
how they must be understood. If you have sermons as part of your gather-
ing, use local stories to shape them.

References

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people: a population-based cross-sectional study of linked hospitalisation and 
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wellcomeopenres.15151.1.

6 For reflection on remaining as a missional practice, see Mann (2022).

https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.15151.1
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