A trip to the UK and An Autumn Report from the Commons

Autumn provided a great opportunity for the core team of The Commons to be together. Having weekly meetings online has been a great way of maintaining contact, formulating plans, and hosting table conversations, but the gift and opportunity of being together in the same room was such a blessing. Four days staying together, sharing, eating, praying, planning, laughing, and learning more about one another was a deeply enriching experience.

Our times alone and together were interspersed with several meetings and conversations with other people, friends and advisers, advocates, and endorsers of what The Commons is about.

Following their time together as a team, Cam flew off to Albania, and Alan and Roy headed north for a series of meetings with leaders of all denominations, from established, emerging, planting, and pioneering contexts. They met not online but in the same rooms, in homes, churches, pubs, and restaurants, each one providing great opportunities to share in stimulating conversations, engaging debate, picking up and exploring the themes of their book, Forming Communities of Hope in the Great Unravelling.

It was so heartening to build on the relationships that have been formed online and meet with people in person who are connecting with The Commons, each one recognizing and wrestling with the challenges as well as engaging with the opportunities of discerning and discovering what the Spirit of God is doing in their respective neighborhoods and communities. To realize, amidst the chaos, complexity, and disruption felt in the church and wider society, as the prevailing narrative of human agency, management and technique, systems, and strategies seem to be breaking down, that there is a narrative that is rooted in God’s agency, in the story that is forming communities of hope and seeing signs of the kingdom of God at work in the unravelling.

Alan and Roy concluded their time together at Cliff College in Derbyshire, laying down the early track on recording their book for Audible, which we hope will be released sometime next year.

Roy, following the publication of that book, was asked to write and deliver a new missional leadership module for the college. Cliff, with its history of training and equipping Christians to be ambassadors of Christ, taking the good news of the gospel into all the world, recognizes that the world in which the college was formed is a very different place today.

Of the many good things that have come out of the core team's time together has been the formulation of the Discovery Tables, which will be launched throughout the UK, Canada, and the US in 2026, details of which will be published on the website. Watch this space…

The Commons exists to actively encourage people, facing the reality of the unravelling that is taking place, to recover the primacy of our relationship with God and to re-orientate our lives around the narrative of God’s agency, redeeming and re-creating the world. This calls us to dwell, discern, and explore what it means to be a community of hope, seeing the Spirit of God at work in the shaking, disruption, and re-ordering of the world.

As an initiative rooted in God, The Commons is foundationally relational, with friends journeying together, becoming companions, joining in the adventure of following the wind of the Spirit, listening to the heartbeat of God, and joining in the adventure of journeying with Jesus in every place where we find ourselves. Sitting together around Discovery, Companions, and other tables, not as experts or elite but as sisters and brothers in Christ, dwelling and discerning together, encouraging, supporting, listening, and learning from one another, creating safe places of conversation and confidence, prayer and affirmation.