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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 with great pleasure I can write this editorial knowing it will be pub-
lished online and Open Access along with all the articles through the Radboud 
University Press and Open Journals in The Netherlands. We were extremely 
grateful to the good people at Wipf & Stock who originally published us and 
helped us get our ‘foot in the door’ as an international journal. However, after 
a tip off from Stefan Paas, who is on our Editorial Board, and via Frans Wijsen 
from Radboud University who has kindly joined our Board we can now offer 
the journal as “Diamond Open Access” with our new publishers. All articles, 
including the back-copy from the first two volumes, will be made available 
online – free to write for authors and free to download for readers. Do spread 
the news far and wide about this fantastic new opportunity.

This issue brings together some critical questions in our field addressed by 
a diverse set of authors from Britain and Europe. I hope this won’t always be the 
case, and the International Association of Mission Studies Quadrennial Con-
ference that is happening in Sydney in July will no doubt help, but it is inter-
esting to have a full set of articles addressing questions of ecclesial futures in 
the western world, all gathered in one place. There are significant overlaps and 
interactions between the articles as they are presented here; use of the metaphor 
‘pioneer’; how disciples are formed and grow into leadership; the forces ranged 



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against such personal and communal maturation; the importance in all this of 
embodied spiritual practices (and therefore neurotheological insights into the 
how the right hemisphere of the brain can help us) which all adds up to a very 
different understanding of ‘salvation’ from that which we inherited from our 
immediate forbears.

The first article is a collaborative piece between four reflective practitioners 
in the UK and Germany, Ben Aldous, Luke Larner, Adrian Schleifenbaum and 
Rajiv Sidhu, who have crossed cultures and sometimes borders in their learning 
and practice of mission. It addresses the question of the aptness of the meta-
phorical term ‘pioneer’ for what happens when new worshipping communities 
or ‘fresh expressions’ of church are formed. This is contentious ground, but a 
journal like ours must not shy away from such questions – and indeed if anyone 
would like to offer an article defending the term in response I would gladly 
consider it. I have often wondered about this metaphor, not least since visit-
ing the National Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive Centre near Baker City in 
Oregon which showcases what is perhaps the origin of the term in modern era. 
Alongside the colonizing question within the pioneer metaphor which both the 
authors here and the Interpretive Center fully address – what I learnt there was 
the communal nature of the movement of tens of thousands of highly vulnerable 
women, men and children to a new life on the Oregon trail over decades; many 
of them never survived the journey. Whereas we, I think, rather imagine the 
pioneer much more as those who originally ‘blazed the trail’ in some individu-
alistic and heroic fashion. All metaphors need to be ‘taken and broken’ for us to 
find their truth and their limits, and the four authors find ‘pioneer’ wanting on 
several counts. They also helpfully offer an alternative in the biblical notion of 
‘pilgrim’. Time will tell whether this might stick or other alternatives be taken up.

James Butler in the next paper, which rather asks to be laid alongside 
the first, assumes the metaphor and label of pioneer when researching what 
is happening in the field amongst ‘lay pioneers’ in the Church of England i.e. 
those grassroots people who do not receive ordination but find themselves 
nevertheless starting and leading fresh expressions of church. Equally critical 
of the ‘organization’ and how it has responded unhelpfully to the grassroots 
nature of the emergence of lay pioneers, I also wonder whether his critique of 
the unidirectional nature of what has been happening and the deficit nature 
of how lay pioneers are understood supports the critique of the label ‘pioneer’ 
in the previous article. Just as pioneers tend only to flow in one direction and 
assume they are to fill a space that is largely empty, so Butler discovers in sev-
eral reports and documents an assumption that laity need ‘resources, equipping 
and training’ in a one-way flow from the centre to the edge. Returning to the 



Nigel Rooms—Editorial

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founding document of fresh expressions, the Mission-shaped Church report of 
2004, Butler calls for a ‘mutually enriching relationship’ between these grass-
roots practitioners and their organization and outlines some principles for what 
this might look like.

The next three articles all started life as presentations at the 2021 online 
gathering of the International Research Consortium which was loosely hosted 
by the UK membership. We held a fascinating and wide-ranging ‘Open Day’ 
conversation on ‘missional discipleship’ with several more papers than those 
that have made it into the journal – though this is the reason they are all UK-
based. I deliberately start with the contribution from Naar Mfundisi-Holloway, 
who works with the Salvation Army in Britain and is part of the Zambian dias-
pora. Naar has conducted a small qualitative study amongst women leaders in 
UK-based African diaspora churches. What strikes me, as editor, is both the 
overlaps and the sharp differences with the questions that James Butler was rais-
ing about formation of leaders in the previous article. Especially suggestive to 
me is the assumption from Mfundisi-Holloway that what these women require 
is discipleship and mentorship as well as, at some level, basic training (e.g. one 
of the research participants knows she needs to discover how to conduct a 
baby’s dedication service). Perhaps if we framed all ministerial formation, of 
whatever kind and for whatever end, as discipleship this would have radical 
implications for the way we go about it. The participants show that their reliance 
on the Holy Spirit and an entrepreneurial outlook within their networks means 
they more often than not find the formation they know they require from those 
around them. Nevertheless, the routes these women took into leadership have 
many gaps too, not least in contextualizing their mission and ministry in the 
UK beyond their own communities. Mfundisi-Holloway therefore offers some 
helpful suggestions and signposts about how these gaps may be filled.

Nick Ladd in the next article also connects in interesting ways with James 
Butler’s work – since the question of lay formation is also one he starts with. Nick 
shares with us some important aspects of his doctoral research in a single con-
gregation which was on a journey towards a missional way of being church. Nick 
ably demonstrates what I have come to realize is a deadening and even ‘crusting-
over’ of the fire of love for God and neighbour that occurs in western Christians 
within their churches over time. It is not that connectivity is not at all possible, 
just that the culture and behaviours that are learnt over time seem to shut down 
any initial enthusiasm and motivation for growth and maturation beyond a cer-
tain level. And the answer isn’t, as it seems to be in some places, more of what 
I have come to call ‘high-energy discipling’, which ultimately also exhausts and 
even burns out its adherents. Ladd’s research subjects, going on the missional 



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and spiritual journey, move outwards from an individualistic framing of Chris-
tian faith inherited from modernity. He shows how intersubjectivity is formed 
through appropriate spiritual practices which negotiate the space between the 
self and the other, especially in public mission; this is how ongoing maturation 
in community occurs. The traditional ‘communal vehicles’ such as homegroups 
simply are not sufficient to carry the complexity of the public nature of faith in a 
missional church. A new framing of these groups was required to carry forward 
the vision of the church now described as ‘Sharing Life’.

It is not a big step forward then to imagine that once the churchy crust 
that has covered over the fire of God in a Christian has been broken open, joy 
may ensue! Mike Harrison places joy at the centre of his article since joy is also 
at the heart of the life of the Trinity of love. Drawing on such diverse sources 
as neuroscience, neurotheology, the long Christian tradition and contempo-
rary writers such as Dallas Willard and Jim Wilder, Mike shows how joy ensues 
when we intentionally cultivate ‘relational loving attachment’ with God and 
which then flows out naturally into our other relationships. Moving away from 
the behaviours and assumptions of modernity about right belief through doc-
trinal assent two particular spiritual practices are outlined here, following Jim 
Wilder: ‘Interactive gratitude and Immanuel journaling’. What is worth noting 
in this article is that the practices are both personal and communal as well as 
being simple rather than simplistic – as all good spiritual practices are. That the 
work of finding an ecclesial future for the western church is found in particular 
simple spiritual practices is surely to be celebrated and welcomed – especially in 
a journal that could easily become caught up in theory over practice.

In fact, the final article in this issue underlines much of what has already 
been said and picks up the importance of embodied spiritual practices in the 
contemporary Church. However, Dejan Aždajić from the Freie Theologische 
Hochschule, Gießen in Germany starts with the wider question of how salva-
tion plays out in western world. He offers a very helpful overview of the state of 
the ‘secular age’ and where the disconnects are in how churches engage in con-
temporary society. He is clear that we must move away from just words in the 
head to engaging with whole person, and in particular the body. Such a move 
also brings us very much into the here and now of the present moment, which is 
of course where prayer and spiritual practices take us – and where God is avail-
able to us, thus underlining the point Mike Harrison was making. In addition, 
just as Nick Ladd showed, salvation, if it is anything is both a personal and a 
communal event and process and Dejan underlines this aspect too. Participa-
tion in intersubjectivity, as Ladd put it, is also key for Aždajić’s understanding 
of how good news can be lived out.


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	Editorial
	Nigel Rooms

	Problems with “pioneering” mission: Reflections on the term “pioneer” from Germany, South Africa and the UK
	Setting God’s pioneers free? The need to release lay pioneers from the Church of England’s narrative of resourcing and equipping
	James Butler

	Discipleship, mentorship and training which empowers African women for ministry in the diaspora
	Naar M’fundisi-Holloway

	Communal maturation and missional discipleship: A congregational study
	Nick Ladd

	Joyful disciples: A study of a missing link in considering spiritual disciplines and corporate missional habits
	Mike Harrison

	We want the good life now: Insights from lived religion for a whole person and communal approach to salvation in the twenty-first century
	Dejan Aždajić
	BOOK REVIEWS
	Kwiyani, Harvey. 2020.
	Multicultural Kingdom: Ethnic Diversity, Mission and the Church.
	London: SCM Press.


	Reviewed by Sabrina Müller
	Roxburgh, Alan J. 2021.
	Joining God in the Great Unraveling: Where We Are & What I’ve Learned.
	Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books.


	Reviewed by Steen Olson
	Susan Lucas (ed.). 2020.
	God’s Church in The World: The Gift of Catholic Mission.
	Norwich: Canterbury Press.

	Reviewed by Luke Larner
	Olsen, Steen, 2020.
	Jacob’s Ladder: Missional Church in the 1970s.
	St. Marys, Australia: SA & RL Olsen.

	Reviewed by Patrick R. Keifert





