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Editorial

Steve Taylor
Director AngelWings Ltd (kiwidrsteve@gmail.com) and Flinders University, 
Adelaide, Australia (steve.taylor@flinders.edu.au).

Welcome to another issue of Ecclesial Futures and another fine set of original 
research contributions on the development and transformation of local Chris-
tian communities.

Original research

This issue of Ecclesial Futures offers five original research articles. We start in the 
particular, in London and among the homeless. During a Covid-19 lockdown, 
Sally Mann undertook participatory action research over six months, engaging 
in ethnographic research of homeless people in a nearby park. She analysed her 
interactions with the homeless, using the work of Paul Ricoeur to thicken her 
reflexivity and thus inform her practice. In particular, Mann drew on Ricoeur’s 
notion of “emplotment” and the ways in which individuals make sense of their 
identity, their relationship to others and their place in the world, in the telling 
of stories. Hence the act of listening and the reflecting back of repeated phrases, 
shifts in retold stories, offers pathways for changed sense of self. The stories 
that are shared might not be wholly accurate, but they can be transformative. 
In working with Ricoeur, Mann offers a fresh and grounded understanding 



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of “being with”. She demonstrates how attending deeply to the stories of the 
homeless invites those who feel trapped to explore a different identity, as known 
characters who belong in storied communities. Mann’s article is a fine example 
of how reflection can inform action and guide the development and transfor-
mation of local Christian practice.

We move to a second particular context, that of evangelistic activity by 
Ghanaian migrant communities in the United Kingdom. John Neate identi-
fied a significant gap between the stated evangelistic aspiration of the Ghanaian 
Church of Pentecost-UK (CoP-UK) to “possess the nations” and the practical 
situation within its individual assemblies. He explored this gap using empirical 
research, including questionnaires, interviews and focus groups. The research 
revealed very low levels of participation by White British people in CoP-UK 
and a paucity of cross-cultural friendships among the Ghanaian church mem-
bers. Barriers to cross-cultural friendships included the fear of being influenced 
by different cultural values and concerns over how Ghanaian church members 
might perceive the building of relationships. Neate also observed a lack of 
positive feedback about White British culture among his participants. A feature 
of Neate’s research is his desire to not simply achieve an academic goal, but 
conduct transforming research that might actually shape ecclesial futures, in 
this case among the Ghanaian Church of Pentecost-UK. Hence Neate sought to 
model the relational approach he was seeking to explore and observed insights 
being crystallized among his participants through the research process. Along-
side Neate’s research and approach, I also commend his bibliography, which 
gathers an impressive range of resources in understanding migrant missiologies 
and diaspora movements.

We move from the particularities of culture to the particularity of film. 
Rein Den Hertog works with the Polish film Corpus Christi and the ways in 
which the main character facilitates communal processes of interpretation and 
reconciliation. Hertog argues that the missio Dei is visualized in a particular 
social reality. Hertog uses the movie to examine contemporary ecclesial prac-
tices in his denomination, the Christelijke Gereformeerde Kerken in Neder-
land (CGKN). The result is a set of challenges to the nature of gospel witness, 
ministerial identity and liturgical practice. From film and denominational 
self-reflection, Hertog then turns backwards and sideways. Looking to the past, 
Hertog notes several starting points in his Reformed tradition that encourage 
the ordained minister to understand themselves as a facilitator of processes of 
interpretation. Looking sideways, Hertog examines Michael Moynagh’s under-
standings of leadership as conversations, group processes and sense-making. 
The article concludes with three challenges: including ministerial practice, 



Steve Taylor—Editorial

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ministerial formation, and lay participation in local communities. While these 
challenges are focused on CGKN, they provide thought provoking challenges 
for all those working toward communal processes of interpretation and recon-
ciliation in ecclesial communities.

Our final two articles research another dimension of particularity in mis-
sion, exploring missiological reflection on how the human brain works. Nigel 
Rooms works with recent research in neuroscience and considers what Iain 
McGilchrist’s interdisciplinary work in The Master and his Emissary might offer 
to the particularity of Christian spirituality. Rooms engages critically with two 
Christian responses to McGilchrist, one broadly Evangelical, the other Angli-
can. Rooms argues that the recovery of the apophatic stream of Christian spiri-
tuality and the importance of nurturing the gift of “beholding”, in which the 
world as God’s creation is a gift to be noticed. The embodied dimensions of this 
spirituality are traced, including heightened awareness of the here and now and 
an unselfing. What results are conditions which make possible an openness to 
the other and around which practices of hospitality, communal discernment 
and joining in with what God can form. Nigel works to integrate his analysis 
with his ministry as a spiritual director and mission consultant. His aim is to 
integrate the individual and communal as the local church participates in the 
missio Dei. (Rooms is co-editor of Ecclesial Futures and this team approach 
to editing means that academic standards of double blind peer review can be 
maintained, in order that readers can benefit from the original research being 
conducted by the journal’s editors.)

Mike Harrison joins Rooms in an examination of how recent research in 
neuroscience might inform mission. This article offers a sustained reflection 
on character formation as participation in the missio Dei. The argument is that 
while behavioural attempts and Aristotelian approaches are popular, both in 
contemporary organizational practice and contemporary (especially secular) 
literature, they are theologically problematic. Harrison then makes a construc-
tive turn. First, Harrison turns to developments in neuroscience and the ways 
in which the brain processes affection. Second, he provides numerous examples 
to outline the ways in which loving attachment relationship to the divine and 
accountability-in-community are responses to the loving gaze of the Divine. 
While there is plenty of scope for further research into the lived realities of 
communal formation, Harrison provides an original and theologically formed 
meditation on embodied ecclesial practices.

What is instructive is to realize that, in different ways, all our articles are 
working at this interface between the individual and the communal in con-
temporary mission. Mann’s individual listening to the homeless results in 



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transformations in communal belonging. Neate examines how a denomination 
might nurture cross-cultural friendships through encouraging more relational 
ways of being that transform the evangelistic sense of self. Hertog demonstrates 
how cinematic analysis can provides mirrors on what it might mean to shift 
from individual and clergy-centric identities to communal processes of inter-
pretation. Rooms theorizes how the spiritual practice of beholding can form 
local communities in discerning what God is up as they participate in the missio 
Dei. Across diverse contexts, these articles provide challenges and evoke possi-
bilities in the development and transformation of local Christian communities. 
I commend them to your reflecting, thinking and acting.

Partnerships

As a jounal, we continue to be delighted with the unfolding partnership with 
Radboud University Press and Open Journals. Through Diamond Open Access, 
original research is available free to authors and reader. The shift of Ecclesial 
Futures from print to online has brought significant increase in access, evident 
in downloads of abstracts, complete articles and book reviews across all the 
issues of Ecclesial Futures to date, current and archived. We have also been 
delighted to see people offering to be reviewers through the online platform 
(https://ecclesialfutures.org/). Their reviewing expertise is already evident in 
several of the articles in this issue.

Ecclesial Futures partners with Churches Together in England to offer an 
annual MA prize in Mission. Every year, a group of mission-minded scholars 
across England read MA level dissertations from students completing their 
studies at a UK based college or university around the topics of mission, evange-
lism and church planting with a particular focus on mission in the UK context. 
In 2022, as a journal we offer our congratulations to Owen May for his MA dis-
sertation A Theology of Mission for Scriptural Reasoning – Guesthood: The Good 
Samaritan, The Incarnation, and Mystery.1 Owen, who studied at Cranmer Hall 
in Durham, was delighted to have won, noting, “What is really encouraging is 
that more people are becoming interested in relationships between those of the 
Abrahamic faiths and finding ways into deeper understanding and friendship.”

1 Owen May, A Theology of Mission for Scriptural Reasoning – Guesthood: The Good 
Samaritan, The Incarnation, and Mystery, MATM dissertation, Durham University, 2021. 
https://cte.org.uk/app/uploads/2022/06/A-Theology-of-Mission-for-SR-Owen-May.pdf.

https://ecclesialfutures.org/


Steve Taylor—Editorial

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Another partnership important to Ecclesial Futures is with the Christian 
Communities and Mission Study Group of International Association of Mis-
sion Studies. We are delighted to have an activity report from the recent IAMS 
Assembly 2022. Such reports remind us of the global nature of research into the 
development and transformation of local Christian communities. The report 
also points to current gaps in the field. These include improvised theorizing of 
approaches to the “other”, the cultural embedded nature of listening, empirical 
study of partnerships and the possibilities of learnings from other culture. We 
invite you as researchers to consider ways your work might respond to these 
current gaps. We also continue as a journal to actively seek submissions of 
original research from diverse cultures and contexts. We also seek reviews of 
book from across the breath of the worldwide church.

Thanks

Thanks to each of the blind peer reviewers, who continue to provide construc-
tive, thoughtful and engaged feedback. Thanks to my co-editor Nigel Rooms 
and to Patrick Todjeras (who remains eager to receive book reviews). Thanks to 
our copyeditor Christopher Pipe and the team at Radboud University Press and 
Open Journals for their skill and care.

Finally, stay connected. All our issues including archives are stored at 
https://ecclesialfutures.org/, thanks to the generosity of Wipf and Stock Pub-
lishers, Radboud University Press and Open Journals. To receive updates via 
the newsletter, sign up at https://ecclesialfutures.org/.

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