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Communal maturation and missional 
discipleship: A congregational study1

Nick Ladd
Nick Ladd has been an Anglican minister for 40 years, during which time he has 
served in six parishes of very different social make-up. For eight years he was Director 
of Ministry, Formation and Practical Theology at St John’s College, Nottingham. At 
present, he works freelance, supporting churches in their missional development with 
the Church Mission Society, teaching, researching, and offering spiritual accompani-
ment to clergy. In 2021, he received his doctorate from Birmingham University for his 
thesis, Exploring Communal Maturity: A Theological and Ethnographic Study of a Christian Congre-
gation. He has published several pieces around the practice of ministry and mission. 
Email: nick.ladd57@gmail.com

Abstract

Individualization exercises pervasive power in the modern western 
church, generating an isolated and privatized approach to discipleship and mis-
sion that has been attended to extensively over the years in attempts to foster 

1.  This article is based upon a thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the 
degree of Doctor of Practical Theology in December 2020.



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“whole-life” discipleship. My doctoral field work in 2015–17 was with a single 
Church of England congregation that had adopted an outward-looking mis-
sional process which disrupted this individualization and challenged people to 
a personal and communal journey of change in which the public life that they 
began to share with people in their wider community shaped both their per-
sonal and communal maturation. This journey was fuelled by shared commu-
nal practices which in turn generated new forms of communal life to express 
the congregation’s developing public Christian identity. This research demon-
strates both the challenges and the potential of forming communal identity in 
an individualized culture. Moreover, when mission is undertaken with open-
ness to the other, a profound interdependence between communal maturation 
and missional discipleship is revealed.

Keywords: Individualization, personal and communal maturation, spiritual 
practices, missional discipleship

Setting the scene, personally

From 2001 to 2009, I was minister of a relatively young (mostly 20s and 30s) 
congregation in an English university city. Outwardly successful, it was a typical 
programme church: large Sunday services, with a strong emphasis on creativity 
and excellence, mission and ministry led well by paid workers with volunteer 
teams, and small groups where people banded together to create a sense of 
relationship and belonging that was hard to find at a large Sunday service. The 
majority of people lived their faith in a separate world to the rest of their life: 
the most perceptive of them wanted this to be different, but did not know how 
to achieve this.

In response to this situation, the vision we developed was for mid-sized 
communities that would challenge people to take responsibility and ownership 
for ministry and mission, involving more people in using their gifts rather than 
passively consuming church life. The groups would be big enough to develop a 
ministry and welcome to a wider community, but small enough for people to 
feel a sense of belonging.

During this period, a woman in her forties – whom I would have counted 
as a mature Christian, someone to whom others looked for spiritual support 
and mentoring – came to me to say that in order to continue her own journey 
of growth with God she felt she needed to leave the church as she could not find 
what she needed with us.



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I remember my feelings of disappointment and shock, and I questioned 
why she could not continue to grow by investing herself in the mid-sized com-
munity of which she was a part. But, at the same time, I had to admit that this 
large evangelical congregation was not the easiest place in which to explore 
complexity and change in one’s life with God – however much I wanted it to be.

I had hoped that the journey that we were taking would be one of personal 
and communal growth and I deeply believed that it could be – but at the same 
time there were things that I sensed, but could not quite see, that made this 
trickier than I had imagined.

My discomfort with this situation was often submerged by busyness whilst 
never quite leaving me alone. What would it take to form Christian community 
that was outward looking and yet could be such that people might be able to 
make complex journeys of personal transformation within them? I had always 
been committed to forming such Christian community, whilst recognizing that 
community life can be both friend and foe to such development. I wanted to 
understand better how to foster communal maturation and this is what led me 
to my doctoral research project at Birmingham University.

The research context and the research question

I considered that my questions could not be addressed through theory alone but 
needed to be grounded in personal and communal lived experience. I wanted 
to explore this with ordinary lay Christians, attending to what they said and 
how they lived. I believed this would best be achieved through an ethnographic 
study, which I began in September 2015 with an Anglican church in a suburban 
setting in Nottingham.

The church had a congregation of 70–90 adults and 10–20 children 
across two Sunday services. The ministry had been evangelical for the previous 
35 years. A good number of the congregation had been formed in this tradition, 
but the spirituality of the church as a whole was more varied than the label 
might imply. At the beginning of a guided missional process that they entered in 
2012, the congregation was invited to choose pictures and metaphors that they 
felt best described them; they saw themselves first as a spiritual “filling station” 
for individuals and then with a mission to the community beyond the church. 
The vicar expressed to me his weariness with the programmatic approach of the 
church – something that resonated with my own experience.

I participated in a wide range of church and community events, activities 
and meetings – formal and informal – attending to the way they spoke and 



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lived and to the stories they told. I was guided in this by Hopewell’s symbolic 
interactionist approach – allowing the stories they told and the symbols that 
shaped the stories to illuminate their world view and ethos (1987: 28–39).

As well as participating in their life for two years, in the first year I con-
ducted a series of focus groups with most of the adult congregation around 
themes of growth and development and followed that in year two with a num-
ber of one-to-one interviews where the questions were more focused in the 
light of the unfolding story. I also ran a community survey and one-to-one 
interviews to discover whether the wider community shared the congregation’s 
sense of a changing relationship between the two.

In the course of the study, I ran focus groups with leaders to explore 
emerging themes with them and then again at the end with as many of the con-
gregation as wanted to attend. I returned in 2018 to run a focus group exploring 
further development in the congregation’s journey.

I coded the data from focus groups and interviews and correlated this with 
thematic analysis of my field notes. Alongside this detailed analytical work, I 
also employed narrative analysis to allow me to attend to the emotions, rela-
tionships and power dynamics of the interactions.

Though two years was a substantial period of time for me, it was short in 
relation to the story of a church. So I felt that stories and commitments in relation 
to growth and development might arise more quickly if I researched a church 
that had opted for a journey of communal change. This influenced my choice of 
church as I opted for one that had entered such a process with Partnership for 
Missional Church (PMC). PMC is a process of communal spiritual accompa-
niment designed to enable Christian congregations to form partnerships with 
their wider communities within the mission of God (Keifert, 2006; Rooms and 
Keifert, 2014). It does this through employing spiritual practices that encour-
age listening, partnership and hospitality with God and the wider community 
(Ladd, 2021: 101–102 gives more detail). Though this was a missional process, 
it was the aspects of community formation and practice that drew me to PMC 
in the first place. It was one of the serendipities of the project that it revealed 
the interdependence of communal maturation and an approach to missional 
engagement which takes seriously the agency of the other – hence this article.

When I spoke to people in the church, I used words like growth, change 
or development. I felt that asking people about their “maturity” would be akin 
to asking them about their humility – it would make them introspective and 
cautious – whereas I wanted them to be free to tell their stories. It was then up 
to me in my theological reflection to make the connections with processes of 
maturation.



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The aims of the research project were encapsulated in this 
question:

What are people’s understanding and experience of change and 
development when their church journeys with the Partnership for 
Missional Church (PMC) process?
What light might this shed on issues of maturity through 
community?

To summarize: the stories of the congregation’s personal and communal jour-
neys was the focus, the PMC process was the catalyst for many conversations 
and maturation was my reflective and reflexive question.

I took a narrative approach to analysis and interpretation. This allowed 
me to draw the findings from the stories of my participants – both in substance 
and feeling. What emerged were two stories or, rather story and counter-story. 
The story was about a journey outwards towards the wider community and the 
formation of public Christian identity based on partnership and hospitality 
with the other – divine and human, both proximate and distant, which shaped 
the way they shared their faith and formed community and was grounded in 
a democratizing approach to learning and a turning of church inside out. The 
counter-story was reactive to this, holding on to an “expert-driven” approach to 
knowledge as the key to growth and a commitment to bringing outsiders in to 
the church – in principle if not in practice. I will tell these stories and the con-
flicts between them in future writing. My focus here is on the way in which this 
journey outwards shaped their maturation both personally and as a community.

Overview of the argument

One of the most arresting findings of the research was the pervasive power 
of individualization – even when attempts at a more communal practice were 
being made. Individualization fosters an isolating and privatised approach to 
discipleship and mission – one which is closed to the other who is different, 
creating a chasm between privatized fellowship and public witness. Taylor’s 
concept of the “buffered self ” is important for understanding this as a cultural 
norm (2007: 37–42).

The missional impulse of the journey outwards towards the other was the 
way to enable change in their culture as people formed relationship and com-
munity in public space. This journey proved both challenging and unnerving 



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and took great courage. To make such steps involved a personal journey of indi-
viduation and not everyone was willing or able to do this.

To make any progress at all required that the journey was grounded com-
munally. Personal change was dependent on and embodied by communal 
transformation in two ways:

 ◆ It was communal practices that enabled the personal journey towards the 
other in the public space.

 ◆ People found that they needed to create new “communal vehicles” to 
embody their new identity and narrative and to keep them accountable to 
a new way of being in the public space.

This led me to conclude that Christian maturation is shaped through engage-
ment with the other in the public space, involving a subtle interplay of the 
personal and the communal. It was the impulse of a non-colonizing mis-
sional approach which prompted the engagement with the other that was the 
prerequisite for such embodied communal maturation.

Individualization

Conceptualizing individualization

Ulrich Beck summarizes individualization as “how one lives becomes the bio-
graphical solution of systemic contradictions” (1992: 137). Our propensity to 
look for personal solutions to systemic problems in all walks of life, not least in 
the church, blinds us to the cultural and communal nature of profound change. 
Our default response is the assumption that individuals carry both the respon-
sibility and the potential to create change in their own lives and that the task of 
formation – however this is perceived – is theirs alone.

Historically, individualism has taken different forms. In the early modern 
period, the commitment to rationalism generated an instrumental individual-
ism in which “rational mastery” is understood in terms of “instrumental con-
trol” (Taylor, 1989: 149). Instrumental reason objectifies the other and from 
here it is but a short step to use the other as the object of one’s subjectivity – “a 
solipsistic concept of self whereby the embodiedness of the other is something 
to escape, possess or control” (Irigaray, 2000: 30–39).

However, the romantic reaction to rationalism generated a new shape to the 
individualism, without abandoning other forms. Taylor (2007: 473) describes 
this as “expressive individualism” in which the tendency to use people for one’s 



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own ends is overlaid with an almost moral imperative to form oneself through 
one’s personal and private choices and relationships; something he describes as 
“the ethics of authenticity” (Taylor, 1991: 29).

This expressivism is set within the wider parameters of instrumental 
control, what Taylor describes as the “buffered, disciplined self ” (2007: 476). 
In contrast to the “porosity” characteristic of earlier ages, he argues that the 
“buffered self ” is a boundaried and autonomous self, grounded in disengage-
ment; a mind-centred personhood, which is self-referential (2007: 25–54). Such 
“disengagement” may not be “hospitable to a sense of community” (2007: 42).

This reading resonated with the data from the established patterns of 
church life in my research context, where I observed the tendency to use the 
other in the process of one’s own formation. This should not necessarily be 
understood as a cynical act, more a cultural norm or expectation. Further-
more, the swirling currents of individualism in contemporary culture, make 
it extremely difficult for Christian communities to form public identity with 
the other who is different in their wider communities – something that was a 
characteristic of the communal life of the church.

Individualization in practice

How did this manifest itself in the research context? I ran a series of focus 
groups with the existing home groups to explore their understanding of growth 
and development and their engagement with the PMC process.

Members understood the purpose of the home groups as a means of 
developing their personal learning and knowledge as revealed in this group 
discussion:

e: More recently we’ve shared the leading; each of us have taken one of 
the sessions and led it. I think that’s a massive step forward for people 
who are just not used to doing that.

They felt that in this approach each one has a chance to prioritize their learning:

jjj: I think we should probably have “knowledge” because there is no 
point in any of it, unless you know what it’s all about.

mmm: Your growth. You’ve got to grow in the knowledge.
ggggg: Yes. You’ve got to.



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They also saw them as places of mutual support for personal formation – espe-
cially in the challenges of life – a kind of therapeutic individualism. One person 
said:

ggggg: I’ve been through some really tough times. And if it wasn’t for these 
guys, I probably wouldn’t be here today. It was so tough and if it wasn’t 
for when I found friends within this group … and they’ve supported 
me and they’ve helped me.

Of 55 comments about home groups:
 ◆ 24 were about mutual support.
 ◆ 21 were about learning and prayer.
 ◆ 2 were about the wider church.
 ◆ 4 were about disappointments with the home groups.
 ◆ Only 4 had any reference to the wider community.

Members would in theory welcome new members, but because of the inward-
facing and privatized nature of the groups, none had welcomed new members 
during the last five to seven years, bar one person in one group very recently. 
They saw these groups as safe spaces and some were honest enough to say that 
they did not want new people because it would disturb the trust that they had 
developed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, people on the outside of these groups within 
the wider church told me that they found these groups cliquey and inaccessible.

Interpreting this through the lens of individualization suggests that the 
groups existed to support people’s needs for personal development and emo-
tional sustenance. They gathered primarily as a group of individuals drawing 
on each other for support and strength. The bounded nature of a group of 
“buffered selves” is such that there was not enough sense of community to risk 
the penetration of those boundaries from unknown others.

When it came to outward focus of PMC, as I listened to the home groups 
it felt as if this journey was going on somewhere else – and they were either 
watching, resisting or ignoring it. Three of the groups were united in their oppo-
sition or passivity towards PMC and had almost no advocates for the process in 
their midst. Two of the groups were more positive and had individuals who had 
played a genuine part in the missional journey. However, even here, the process 
had made little impact on the group as a whole and people who were strong 
advocates of PMC practices in one-to-one interviews were concerned not to 
“rock the boat” within the group.



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One of the most common ways of theorising this is Fowler’s approach to 
faith development and what he describes as “stage 3”: synthetic-conventional 
faith in which he argues we find and form our identity through dependence 
on significant relationships – conforming to the expectations and judgments 
of others. Fowler associates this with teenage years, but he admits that people 
may be processing what he calls “stage 3” in their 30s and 40s, something which 
leads many to be suspicious of the idea of “stages” if not towards the description 
of stage 3 that he offers (1981: 151–73).

Fowler argues that the weakness of this stage lies in the internalisation of 
others’ perspectives for the sake of group identity (1981: 173). If this were all 
that was going on, then more open, porous groups would develop naturally as 
people grew out of the need for group think. The theory of individualization 
adds to Fowler’s analysis a dimension which suggests that rather than being 
shaped only by the group, individuals create a group that protect the vulner-
abilities of the buffered self from the unsettling other. Arguably, what Fowler is 
describing is less a stage of development and more an observation of what com-
munal life looks like in an individualized culture. This certainly pictures well 
the character and relationships in the home groups. The groups defended their 
private world strongly in order to sustain their boundaries towards the other.

The journey outwards

Catching the imagination

In my doctoral thesis, I argued that, as a starting point, maturation in Scripture 
is at the very least communal as well as personal and that it is also other-centred 
in relationship both to God and people – something that becomes attenuated in 
a culture where a buffered self is the default pattern. However, Smith contends 
that porosity is the ontological nature of human beings and that “the reified 
Western ideal concept of the individual … has alienated us moderns from our 
‘essential species-being’” (2012: 60). If this is the case, then it is to be supposed 
that it would be possible to engage the imagination with a vision that challenges 
the buffered self of modernity – and this proved to be the case in my research 
context. Alongside the established, privatized life of the church, many (includ-
ing a good number of home group members) were on a journey outwards to 
their wider community, which deeply engaged their heart and imagination. The 
following was spoken with energy and excitement by a church council member:



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If you had asked us at the beginning to find someone to talk to in 
the community we would have found it really difficult, but now 
we are falling over them.
(Field Notes: 8–14.09.15)

Entering uncharted territory

PMC works with a number of what it calls “disruptive missional practices”, 
which focus on attention to the other as subject, whether that other is God, or 
Scripture, or the human other – both proximate in the congregation and more 
distant in the wider community.

All of these practices involve the disrupting of privatized and individu-
alized spiritual life. Dwelling in the world, for example, involves attending to 
the wider community and noticing the people that God brings across our path 
who we sense might be people of peace (a concept drawn from Luke 10.6) 
– people that we don’t know well but whom we sense might share something of 
our values, vision and aspiration for the community where we all live. Having 
discerned this, the next step is to initiate a one-to-one conversation in public 
space – not to make a new best friend, but to discover a possible partner in the 
mission of God.

When they were first introduced to this practice, members of the congre-
gation were paralysed by it and struggled even to make the first steps towards 
such conversations: it felt like entering uncharted territory – like the encounter 
with the giants in the Promised Land – “a land that devours its inhabitants” 
(Numbers 13.32-33).

Subsequent research on this practice has revealed the same uncertainties 
(Ladd, 2021). People spoke about the fear of their reception and their wariness 
about approaching people; one person spent three weeks of anxious anticipa-
tion before summoning up the courage to speak. She commented that she was 
“not a person who went out an talked about my faith a great deal”. Another 
spoke of realizing that their faith “existed in a private space and not ‘out in the 
street’.”

Anxiety about entering public space is reported consistently in the research 
and pictures what it feels like for people to challenge the cultural norm of the 
buffered self. Living in such a privatized and individualized culture means that 
steps towards the other in the public space are fraught with anxiety and uncer-
tainty and need to be handled with care.



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In PMC, communal missional practices disrupt individualization through 
the invitation and challenge to attend to the “reasonably friendly-looking 
stranger” whether in the church as we read Scripture together or in the wider 
community as we risk initiating a conversation with a person of peace.

The stranger is a source of anxiety in our culture – sometimes for good 
reason, often for no reason at all. One church member encapsulates this:

rrr: Oh my word, some people aren’t that confident that they can go 
and find a friendly-looking stranger, and how do you know they’re 
friendly, anyway? Just because they’re in the church, don’t make them 
friendly, does it?

That is the embodiment of the buffered self!
The impact of instrumental and expressive individualism and the “buff-

ered self ” leads me to the conclusion that our cultural approach of using people 
in the task of personal formation is also a defence against the vulnerability of 
true engagement with the other. If maturity has always involved the ability to 
meet the other who is different, it becomes an even greater imperative in an 
individualized culture. Individualization leads to an attenuation of formation 
–  whether this be using others within the church for our own formation or 
using those in the community as fodder for our evangelism. I am not saying 
that we approach this cynically as the language of “use” might imply, but that 
our individualizing approaches to discipleship and evangelism makes us blind 
to the potentially manipulative effect of this – something that is more than 
obvious to those on the receiving end.

A new way of being

Over the whole of the three-year PMC process, through listening to God and 
others, through meeting people of peace, through missional experiments 
with partners in the community, the church began to form a new sense of its 
missional vocation and identity. After much work together, the congregation 
articulated this as “Sharing Life with Jesus, with one another and with our com-
munities”, encapsulated as “Sharing Life”.

This may not seem earth-shattering to the onlooker, but to them it was. 
It represented a move away from an instrumental approach of seeing others 
as the “targets” of their evangelism, which some saw as lacking in authenticity. 
Previously, their flagship missional activity was a holiday club – one person 



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described it as totemic – which absorbed a tremendous amount of time and 
energy throughout the year, yet which for many years had given people a sense 
that they were doing evangelism by bringing people into a church activity and 
putting on something for them.

It created a deep sense of community for those involved and so it took 
tremendous courage to question whether this really was having any lasting 
impact in the wider community and whether this was actually the way they, 
as a church, wanted to engage with that community. There was a huge struggle 
over this, which was still reverberating when I was with them. Was the calling 
to evangelise by bringing people into the orbit of the church or was it to form 
missional partnerships based on relationship and mutual spiritual discovery?

Their new sense of relational partnership with people led them to view 
people differently and to view mission differently – seeking to journey with 
their “partners of peace” in faith rather than impose something upon them. 
One congregation member put it like this:

j: I think, previously, there was a sense that the church and the world 
beyond the church were a bit polarised. I think we have begun to 
see the wider community, not so much as people who we need to 
evangelise, but people who we need to be partners with.

This is a bold journey for an evangelical church to take – but it is one that 
has borne fruit in terms of broadening and deepening relationships with their 
community and more experiments in missional partnerships.2 I received this 
comment from a member of the village’s Community Group:

aaa: It’s very different to anything I’ve experienced before in 45 years. I’ve 
never seen a church so actively involved in creating a sense of belong-
ing without having to be religious – left to choose to believe. Believ-
ing in community – God working in community – rather than having 
to be a believer.

2.  There is a wider question about the place of speaking in evangelism as well as listening. 
The place of this is implied in the use of Irigaray’s idea of the third space – co-creation implies 
contribution by both. However, to see mission in terms of listening and partnership is such a 
huge shift for a Christendom church that this was their focus during the time I was with them. I 
have explored the question of the place of personal witness in the context of mutual and shared 
witness to the presence and activity of God elsewhere (Ladd, 2021), but there is room for 
further research on this with churches who have adopted a partnership approach to mission.



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The interplay of the communal and the personal in 
the journey of maturation

Personal formation

Many people in the congregation followed a journey with the “other” in the 
wider community that led them beyond instrumental and expressive individu-
alism to a more open and relational approach in which they came to understand 
mission less in terms of imparting what they already knew and more in terms of 
a shared spiritual journey of discovery in which they learnt to be differentiated 
enough to take seriously what others brought, whilst not being afraid to share 
their own insight. At the beginning of their PMC journey, an external interview 
team had pictured them as a well-defended castle – something which caught 
their imagination. A long-term member commented:

h: Right at the beginning they discerned that our church [had] a bit of a 
fortress mentality, and we didn’t relate terribly well to those outside. 
There had been in the past, a sort of “them” and “us” between the 
church and community.

They engaged in some imaginative reflective journeys together called “balloon 
rides”. And as they drifted over the parish envisioning a new world this is what 
they said:

People imagined that in the future, because of increase in rela-
tionships and partnerships, the boundary between inside and 
outside church would become increasingly blurred. The Com-
munity would see “us” as part of “them” as opposed to “them and 
us”. “We’re doing this” would be owned by a greater mix of people.

Irigaray’s work can help us to see why this can be construed as a journey of per-
sonal maturation. She argues that the male-dominated approach to the world 
treats all relationships as objects to a single subject, leading to the silencing and 
possessing of the other and the “reduc[ing] of the feminine to a passive object” 
(2000: 23). By contrast, intersubjectivity results from the embodied encounter 
of two subjects in which their generic distinctiveness, their story and person-
hood is respected. There is a mystery to the other which is not to be violated or 
controlled, but protected on a journey in which identity and mutual knowing is 
formed through relationship (2000: 17–29).



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This journey to intersubjectivity involves an attentive effort, which she 
describes as the movement from “sensation” to “perception”. “Sensation” sees 
the other as an object. “Perception” is a deliberate choice to listen and not just 
to look. It is a journey in which we refuse to allow the relationship to be reduced 
to a single subjectivity, refuse to appropriate the other, but allow them to be 
“other” in embodied relationship (2000: 40–47). Furthermore, this journey of 
openness to the subjectivity of the other is one in which we must be prepared to 
guard that subjectivity in ourselves and in the other. The goal is not fusion but 
rather “a relationship between two subjects, the objective of which is to leave to 
the other his or her subjectivity” (2000: 51). This leads Irigaray to develop the 
idea of a “third space” – a silence in which there is room for genuine attention to 
difference, to the history of each, not least to the party whose history has most 
consistently been unheard (2000: 62–67).

Though Irigaray grounds her work in the objectification and silencing 
of the feminine in western culture, it is also possible to see the impact of the 
“monosubjective” in communal relationships in a congregation. She recog-
nizes, if not develops, the implications of her approach to cultures and ethnici-
ties (1999: 156; 2000: 57).

This move towards mutual, intersubjective relationships is a bold and 
risky one in an individualized culture with its grounding in the buffered self. 
Nevertheless, this was a personal journey for some in which they left behind 
the closed communal structures of their home groups, which they increasingly 
realized could not sustain the journey they wanted to make. This is akin to 
Fowler’s stage 4 (1981: 174–98) which involves a level of individuating (I pre-
fer this to individuation) – which is well articulated in research on spiritual 
development from a psychodynamic perspective (Rizzutto, 1979: 41; Brokaw 
and Edwards, 1994; Hall and Brokaw, 1995; Hall et al., 1998; Hall and Edwards, 
2002; Simpson et al., 2008).

There was a personal journey of maturation to be made in my research 
congregation in engaging with the other in public space – leaving behind both 
privatized spirituality and individualized approaches to mission. This is psy-
chologically and spiritually challenging – and it needs good support. I want to 
argue that processes of communal maturation are central to that support.

Communal formation

Two factors proved significant in providing the communal formation that 
enabled personal and communal movement outwards in relational mission. 



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First, it was the practices that were introduced to them over the three-year PMC 
process; and secondly it was the new “communal vehicles” (as I termed them) 
that they created in order to support their new missional journey in public 
space.

Communal practices

Shared communal missional practices gave them the structure and support 
they needed to make their personal and communal journeys of change; the 
vicar used the word “scaffolding” to describe this supportive role. The practices 
that PMC introduces are deliberately disruptive of privatized community and 
the buffered self. Rather than imposition of or education for change, PMC fol-
lows a diffusion model in which people – influenced by one another – journey 
from awareness and interest in changing their practice through evaluation and 
experiment, hopefully to adopt new ways of being in relationship with each 
other and their wider community (Rogers, 2003; Keifert, 2006: 39–59; Rooms 
and Keifert, 2014: 20–24).

Discussing and reflecting on communal practices was central to people’s 
conversations with me in interviews. For example, there were 60 positive com-
ments about the practice of Dwelling in the Word – a practice of reading Scrip-
ture that privileges the voice of the other, something which began to give them 
confidence in their own understanding. Here are different reflections from two 
home groups:

tt: A new way of studying scripture which is much more equable and 
democratic and so people listen to one another.

c: [I] did not want to do Dwelling in the Word, hated the idea for lots 
of different reasons Partly it’s about the preaching always comes from 
the front, because they’ve got the training, they’ve got the experience, 
why would I take it upon myself, where’s the learning in that? Partly, 
it’s about a sort of learning disability; [it] took a lot of conversations 
in the background, saying, “Okay, well actually, I’ve got the same 
thing you have, so we’re on a level playing field, that’s fine.”

The same practice generated 88 negative comments.

rr: So, if you just give somebody a piece of Scripture and they look at it 
and think, “Well, I’m not sure I’ve got anything. I can’t see anything 



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74

that I can say to Fred Bloggs here.” “Actually, that’s helped me.” So 
therefore you can feel embarrassed.

nn: [We’re] frightened to make a mistake, frightened of misinterpreting 
what [we’ve] read, being incorrect, and then being hauled up for it.

Conflictual debate is a sign of diffusion and evidence of a maturing process in 
which people take responsibility for and own their views. It is a further mark of 
maturation when people gave give room to the thoughts and feelings of others 
and meet together in what Irigaray describes as a third space.3

This picture of diffusion is evidenced to a greater or lesser extent in their 
discussions of the other communal practices. These practices gave them a way 
to engage in the public space and form relationships with “reasonably friendly 
looking strangers” – as PMC puts it – who became their people of peace and 
partners in mission. Some members of the congregation embraced this with 
growing enthusiasm, whilst others remained cautious and suspicious.

New “communal vehicles”

Those who were embracing this more intersubjective relationship with their 
wider community began to recognise their need to ground these practices more 
in their communal life together. During Lent 2017, a number of the congrega-
tion took part in a series of meetings to explore how they might make their new 
sense of public engagement more secure in the church’s life. Gradually they felt 
their way to the need to create a new kind of small group in which their new 
vision of public Christian life could be embodied and in which they felt they 
could be accountable to one another for their journey with this; they called 
them “Connect Groups”. I described these as new “communal vehicles”. Three 
such groups were formed.

In reporting their experience with this, they noted that it helped them
 ◆ to be supported in and accountable for their vocations as public Christians;
 ◆ to become a porous community – welcoming new people, especially those 

on the fringe of church life;
 ◆ to “share life” in ways that went beyond individualised community to 

something more holistic and communal.

3.  There is not space here to discuss this particular journey with conflict and difference at 
greater depth here; it will be the subject of a later article.



Nick Ladd—Communal maturation and missional discipleship

75

They saw these groups as a way of normalising relationship with the other and 
having a consistent practice of welcome. One lay leader described it like this:

k: Because you just share what you do … You become intentional about 
spending time with people and the people you think God’s calling 
you to. We’ve got a couple coming along who we didn’t know their 
names. NNN went … “I’ve said you’re welcome to come to the group 
but I don’t know their names from Adam …” I said, “What are your 
names? Do you want to come this week?” And they started coming, 
and they are on the periphery of church.

The interplay of the communal and the personal

What their journey outwards with the other demonstrated was that this indi-
viduating journey is not the leaving behind of community as Fowler supposes, 
but rather the re-forming of community and the creating of new “communal 
vehicles” that can carry the new narrative identity of public mission and in 
which people can find support and accountability for a new way of being. The 
established home groups could not enable this because they were formed by 
a vision of privatized, individualized discipleship which created bounded as 
opposed to porous sets in order to protect what was seen as an environment of 
safety from the other.

Individuals needed to make a personal journey of maturation away from 
this closed vision of community – something which required a challenging 
engagement with individuation as Fowler proposes. But they also needed their 
communal life to enter a journey of change in order to support and sustain 
this new vision of life. They needed new communal vehicles to embody their 
new identity and narrative and in which to be accountable to others for their 
new public vocation as Christians. Without this journey of communal matura-
tion – grounded in the engagement with disruptive communal practices – the 
personal transformation would, I suspect, have been short lived.

Conclusion

Now to return to where I began with the person who felt she needed to leave the 
church in order to grow. What was missing here both for her and for the church 
was a parallel communal journey of maturation which would have enabled 



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76

her personal journey of change. This journey involves an intersubjective rela-
tionship with the other and the impetus for this comes from a non-colonising 
approach to missional engagement, which sets the stage both for communal 
and personal transformation that goes beyond the self-focus of an individual-
ized culture. The centrality of communal maturation to this lies in the fact that 
it is through communal practices that individuals are drawn into engagement 
with the other and to a public identity in the wider community where God is 
already present and active – thus drawing ever closer to the call to love both 
God and neighbour and to seek first the Kingdom of God.

By making this intersubjective journey with the other, my congregation 
member would have both been part of the church’s missional journey, but also 
by engaging with difference could have found a context in which to explore the 
complexity of her own changing perceptions of life and faith. It would also, I 
believe, have helped that somewhat conservative church to become more hos-
pitable to complexity, uncertainty and provisionality. On such an intersubjec-
tive missional journey with the other, the interplay of personal and communal 
maturation becomes a genuine possibility.

References

Beck, U. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage.
Brokaw, B. F., and K. J. Edwards. 1994. ‘The Relationship of God Image to Level of Object 

Relations Development’, Journal of Psychology and Theology 22/4: 352–71.
Fowler, J. W. 1981. Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for 

Meaning. New York, NY: HarperOne.
Hall, T. W., and B. F. Brokaw. 1995. ‘The Relationship of Spiritual Maturity to Level of 

Object Relations Development and God Image.’ Pastoral Psychology 43: 373–91.
Hall, T. W., and K. J. Edwards. 2002. ‘The Spiritual Assessment Inventory: A Theistic Model 

and Measure for Assessing Spiritual Development.’ Journal for the Scientific Study of 
Religion 41/2: 341–57.

Hall, T. W., B. F. Brokaw, K. J. Edwards P. L. Pike. 1998. ‘An Empirical Exploration of 
Psychoanalysis and Religion: Spiritual Maturity and Object Relations Development.’ 
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37/2: 303–13.

Hopewell, J. 1987. Congregation: Stories and Structures. London: SCM Press.
Irigaray, L. 1999. Entre Orient et Occident. Paris: Grasset French Text Edition.
Irigaray, L. 2000. To Be Two. London: The Athlone Press.
Keifert, P. 2006. We Are Here Now: A Missional Journey of Spiritual Discovery. St Paul, MN: 

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Ladd, N. M. 2021. ‘Dwelling in the World with People of Peace: Missional Discipleship 
within the Missio Dei’, Ecclesial Futures 2/1. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Papers, 100–23.

Rizzuto, A.-M. 1979. The Birth of the Living God: A Psychoanalytical Study. Chicago: 
University of Chicago Press.

Rogers, E. M. 2003. Diffusion of Innovations. New York, NY: Free Press, 5th edn.
Rooms, N., and P. Keifert. 2014. Forming a Missional Church: Creating Deep Cultural 

Change in Congregations. Cambridge: Grove Books.
Simpson, D. B., J. L. Newman and D. R. Fuqua. 2008. ‘Understanding the Role of Relational 

Factors in Christian Spirituality.’ Journal of Psychology and Theology 36/2: 124–34.
Smith, K. 2012. ‘From Dividual and Individual Selves to Porous Subjects’, Australian 

Journal of Anthropology 23/1: 50–64.
Taylor, C. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: 

Harvard University Press.
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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





