Belonging Isn't a Feeling — It's a Structure - a reflection from Revd Sue Butler

A guest blog from Revd Sue Butler, Bishop's Adviser for the GRT community in the Ely Diocese, who will be speaking at the AMEN Conference 2026 "Power, Solidarity and Belonging" this month.

I come to the question of belonging with my Gypsy, Romany, Traveller heritage. For most of my life, that wasn't something I said out loud — not in church, not anywhere. I grew up knowing what it felt like when a room's temperature changed the moment someone found out. It felt like a shameful secret. In many ways, not much has changed.

That experience shapes how I hear the word ‘belonging’ in the Church of England. Belonging suggests something relational and, as modelled by the early Church, organic and relational by nature. What have we lost of that in our institutional, process-driven Church?

My community taught me something about belonging I couldn't have learned anywhere else: what it looks like when it's unconditional. Nobody eats alone. A wedding or a funeral pulls in three generations without anyone organising it — and growth?   It just happens, because that's what family does. It's growth through relationship, not programmes. Faith gets carried in voices, not books, because when everything else is precarious, faith is the one thing that travels with you.

Jesus said he had ‘nowhere to lay his head.’ My community knows that verse as lived reality, not poetry. I don't think that's a deficit — I think it's a theological inheritance, a window into how God moves among people who are always slightly outside settled society, and, at the risk of being controversial, always moving forward rather than settling for good.

So when the Church talks or sings about ‘one faith, one Church, one Lord,’ I hear something true and something aspirational at once. Galatians 3:28 has no footnote excluding anyone. But belonging isn't only about doctrine — it's about who gets asked to preach, whose worship style counts as ‘normal’, whose is filed as ‘contextual’, and who's in the room when decisions are made about who gets to be in the room. We proclaim one family; we don't always practise it. Both are true at once, and the honest thing is to hold them together rather than pretend the gap isn't there.

Embrace, not absorption

Miroslav Volf describes embrace as four movements: open your arms, wait, close the embrace, then open again. ^[1] If it never opens again, it isn't embrace. It's absorption dressed up as welcome.

That distinction matters, because too often in the Church, ‘belonging’ has quietly meant: you're welcome, as long as you become like us. True embrace holds open arms and real difference. It doesn't require you to stop being GRT, Black British, Ghanaian, or part of the Windrush generation to belong. Pentecost is the pattern here: the Spirit at Acts 2 doesn't undo the scattering of Babel by making everyone speak one language. Each person hears the gospel in their own tongue. Unity, from the Church's first moment, was never sameness. It was reconciled and illuminated difference.

Lesslie Newbigin calls the Church to be a ‘sign, instrument, and foretaste’ of God's reign,^[2] and those three words are the real test. A sign that points to a kingdom it doesn't practise is just a slogan. An instrument that doesn't bring about the change it names is decoration. And a foretaste always deferred to ‘one day, when we're ready’ — after a little more consultation, a little more process — isn't a foretaste at all. It's a promise with no date on it. People should be able to walk into our church and get a real taste, now, of the reconciled, power-shared family we say we belong to.

The questions worth sitting with

Most of our structures are good at the first movement of embrace — the open arms in the mission statement, the welcome on Sunday. Far fewer are built for the second opening, where power actually gets redistributed.

Here are questions I'd genuinely like this to provoke, rather than answer for you:

-    Who sits on our discernment panels, and whose sense of "how a minister should present" quietly shapes who gets recommended?

-    Whose culture became the neutral default in our selection criteria — the gravitas, the polish, the concern about "how they'll be received"? Received by whom?

-    Does the room where decisions are made in our PCC, deanery, or diocese actually look like our local community — and are they good representatives of it?

-    What's one structure you have real influence over — not to consult on, but to actually open up — before this time next year?

I'm not suggesting another review or working group. Reports don't share power; people do. Repentance that leads to restitution isn't sorrow for the past — it's real change to the mechanisms of the present.

I believe the Church of England can become a place where a GRT voice, or a UKME/GMH voice, isn't a guest slot once a year but a permanent, unremarkable part of who leads, who decides, and who holds power. That won't happen through good intentions. It happens through relationships that cost something, and structures that keep opening, again and again.

So here's where I'll leave it: where have you seen embrace become not merely a photo opportunity but a genuine second opening with long-term potential? What's one structure, in your own context, that you have influence over?

Rev Sue Butler

September, 2026

Author's research and writing edited and condensed here with help from Claude AI.

[1] Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 141.

[2] Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995) 110, 113, 150.