Dock
Resource Kit
Sunday sermon, 27 September 2026
Summary
Phil is back from study leave and spoke to us about some of what God has been showing him through his time away. Drawing on experiences from New York, Rome and the Camino, and reflecting on the Psalms, he asks what it might look like to make more space for God, to give him our attention in a distracted world, and to use what we have for the sake of others.
Key Points & Takeways
Make space. Not every moment needs a purpose to be purposeful. Sometimes we need to resist filling every gap and leave room to notice what God is doing.
Seek God. In a world of fragmented attention, there’s a difference between proximity and intimacy. Being around the things of God isn’t the same as seeking his face.
Open doors for others. Advocacy means using what we have to create opportunities for others, noticing what God is doing in them and helping them flourish.
Ambling. Attention. Advocacy. Three simple practices for how we might travel together into the season ahead.
Dock Discussion Questions
Where in your life do you find it hardest to leave space unfilled? What might “ambling” look like for you this week?
What tends to compete most strongly for your attention? What could help you intentionally turn your attention and affection back towards God?
Have you ever experienced proximity to God without intimacy with God? What helped you move from one to the other?
Who could you open a door for at the moment? What do you already have that could help someone else grow or flourish?
Long-form, edited transcript
What I’m Bringing Home
It’s really good to be back.
I’ve been at work again for a couple of weeks now, but this is my first proper opportunity on a Sunday to say something about my study leave over the summer term.
And first, just to say thank you.
After ten years as Rector here at SPS, having that extended period of time away was an amazing gift. I’m really grateful to you as a church for releasing me, to the team who carried so much while I was away, and to God for what became a really rich few months.
The purpose of the time wasn’t simply to have a long holiday!
It was an opportunity to step away from the day-to-day responsibility of leading SPS and Poplar, and various things across Tower Hamlets, to make space, pray and reflect, learn from other churches and leaders, think about the wider Church, and ask again what God might be saying to me for the season ahead.
And I was able to pack quite a lot in!
I spent time in New York with some extraordinary churches and institutions, including Trinity Wall Street, General Theological Seminary, Church of the City and Hillsong East Coast.
I went to Rome, exploring places connected with the earliest Christians.
Then I walked the final 120 kilometres of the Camino Portugués into Santiago. That became one of the real highlights: a week of walking, praying, meeting pilgrims from all over the world, working on some pretty special blisters, and eventually arriving at Santiago de Compostela Cathedral.
I also visited a really diverse set of about 20 different churches, both here and abroad, and spent time shadowing senior teams in three other dioceses.
There were conferences, books, conversations and retreats.
Lots of walking.
And praying.
And thinking.
And somehow nearly 50,000 words of journal by the end of it.
But in amongst all the learning, all the richness of those experiences, there are three simple invitations that I feel God has given me to bring home, which I’d love to share them with you today. Each embedded in the Psalms and reflects something of who God is.
MAKE SPACE.
SEEK GOD.
OPEN DOORS FOR OTHERS.
They’re not clever new ideas I discovered somewhere else and brought back to fix me or radically reorder SPS. They’re things I think God has been deepening and confirming in me, things I can already see him doing amongst us, but things I want to live more intentionally.
And I wonder whether they might be invitations for all of us as we step into this new term and journey together.
So, the first thing I’m bringing home:
Make space.
Make Space
One of the great gifts of study leave was just that. Space.
There’s a verse in Psalm 18 that I keep coming back to:
“He brought me out into a spacious place;
he rescued me because he delighted in me.”
(Ps 18.19)
For the first time in a long time, I had extended periods where I wasn’t responsible for what happened next.
And one of the surprises was discovering that I actually can switch off!
I could be the guest rather than the host.
The observer rather than the leader.
The wanderer rather than the worker.
And right at the beginning of my time away, someone gave me a word which really stuck:
Ambling.
Not needing to get somewhere efficiently, or every moment to achieve something.
And I took this as an encouragement from God to intentionally embrace this alien concept. There was lots of opportunity for it.
When I was in Rome, to be honest, it was all a bit last minute. But let’s say I deliberately didn’t have a packed programme! So I just ambled. Stopped for coffee. Wandered into churches. Explored.
And one day I ended up at the Colosseum, this vast monument to the power and brutality of the Roman Empire.
And then I just ambled a few minutes up the road and found myself at the Basilica of San Clemente.
You go into this beautiful church, but then you can descend underneath it. Down through an earlier church, and then down again into the remains of first-century Rome. Three layers of history, one built on top of another.
And I remember being really struck by the proximity of these places. Just down the road, the Colosseum. Enormous, the visible power of Rome.
And here, within a few minutes’ walk, evidence of those earliest Christians that we read about in Acts and Romans. They may have been small, appearing completely insignificant against the empire around them, but two thousand years later the Church is beautiful, and the Colosseum is in ruins.
And we’re still telling the stories, celebrating the faithfulness and remembering how much God delighted in those earliest Christians.
I hadn’t planned to experience that proximity and contrast. It wasn’t on my learning objectives for the day!
I noticed it because I had space.
Space that allowed God to reveal something I could so easily have missed.
Not every moment needs a purpose to be purposeful.
We’re very good at filling space. I certainly am. There’s always another thing that could be done, another person to see, another email or opportunity.
But I wonder, when we fill every space God gives us, what gets squeezed out?
What do we miss?
“He brought me out into a spacious place…
because he delighted in me.”
I really love the second half of that verse.
The spacious place isn’t somewhere God takes me so that I can become more productive.
Space can simply be an opportunity to experience God’s delight. To be with him and enjoy him. Space to remember that before I’m useful to God, I’m loved by God.
Maybe that’s part of what the gift of ambling gave me. Space to simply be available to God, to others, to interruption and to things I hadn’t planned.
But, of course, it’s easy to amble when you’re on study leave in Rome!
The question for me coming home has been:
Can I amble in London?
I’m often in the City, and all over, for meetings, and normally I’ll whizz about on a bike. Fastest route, always. Get back. Onto the next thing.
But the other day, after a meeting, I realised I could have a bit of space, and instead of flying home like normal, I just ambled. No great purpose. Just walking back for the City, along the river, into the East End.
And in that space I found myself noticing things, praying, thinking, enjoying God, and experiencing again something of his delight.
I might not be able to do that every day, but I don’t need to be in Rome to amble, and I don’t need months of sabbatical to find space.
For each of us, maybe there are moments when we could resist the instinct to fill every gap. Not immediately reach for the phone or squeeze one more thing into the diary.
Maybe sometimes we need to walk rather than run or ride, leaving a little more space for God, for one another, for the unexpected.
Perhaps some of what God wants to do amongst us this term will happen in the spaces we don’t fill.
So, make space.
Amble.
Seek God
The second thing I’m bringing home: Seek God.
Psalm 27 says:
“My heart says of you, ‘Seek his face!’
Your face, Lord, I will seek.”
(Ps 27.8)
Going into my time away, I was increasingly aware of the importance of attention.
We live in a world constantly competing for it. Phones. Notifications. News. Social media. Messages. Emails.
Even on sabbatical this was a challenge.
I’m ashamed to say, I was walking the pilgrimage to Santiago in Spain when my front doorbell in Shadwell went off on my watch!
At that point I realised I seriously needed to stop and adjust some settings.
Digitally and spiritually.
Today almost every empty moment can be filled, and every full moment interrupted.
Standing in a queue. Sitting on the bus. Walking down the street. Waiting for someone to arrive. Going to the loo!
In every moment there is a battle for our attention.
Switching off and finding focus can seem almost impossible. We rarely get to be alone with our thoughts, or simply alone with God.
I’m certain that one of the greatest spiritual challenges of our age isn’t simply busyness, but fragmented attention.
And what we give our attention to matters.
One of the places that really challenged and inspired me in this was Church of the City in New York.
They’ve developed this amazing culture of prayer around practices they call Disciplines of Disruption, deliberately disrupting the patterns of life that distract us from the presence of God.
And one of these disciplines is what they call Prayer Sets. The church runs four Prayer Sets a day, every day. 6–7am. 7–8am. 12–1pm. And then 7–8pm in the evening.
Four opportunities to pray.
Every day. Together.
A non-stop pulse of adoration and intercession.
So inspiring.
This discipline of repeatedly turning their attention and affection back towards God, and seeking him for the sake of their city.
And perhaps the most encouraging thing was that when I joined them, it was just really ordinary. A bunch of normal people getting together to pray.
For me there’s a particular danger in spending so much time around church that I can become very good at seeking better ways of doing ministry. How do I make the service better? How do we improve this programme? What should we change? What’s the strategy? What can we learn from that church over there?
All good questions.
But I know I can spend a lot of time seeking better ministry, rather than simply seeking God.
And that question extends to all of us. Whatever our work, whether we’re at school or at home. What do our calendars, our wallets, our screen time reveal about our attention?
What are we really seeking?
Do we need disciplines of disruption to turn our eyes back towards God?
“My heart says of you, ‘Seek his face!’
Your face, Lord, I will seek.”
Seek his face. I was really struck by that when someone was preaching at one of the churches I visited.
It’s an incredibly intimate picture. Being face to face. Not simply knowing about God or being around the things of God.
The invitation isn’t just, “Draw near.”
It’s, “Seek my face.”
Because there’s a difference between proximity and intimacy.
It’s possible in any relationship to spend a lot of time in proximity without growing in intimacy. And that’s especially true of our relationship with God.
I can spend my whole week around church. Scripture. Worship. Prayer meetings. Ministry. Conversations about God. Even writing and preaching sermons.
I can be incredibly close to the things of God without necessarily being intimate with God.
I wonder how that translates for you.
Have you ever found yourself turning up on a Sunday, or to a Dock, serving on a team, helping at Alpha, doing things that are intended to help you draw nearer to God, but somehow just missing him?
The invitation is simple. Again and again, let’s turn our attention and affection back towards him.
Seek God.
Attention.
Open Doors for Others
The third thing I’m bringing home is:
Open doors for others.
Psalm 146 gives us an amazing picture of what God is like:
“He upholds the cause of the oppressed
and gives food to the hungry.
The Lord sets prisoners free,
the Lord gives sight to the blind,
the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down…”
(Ps 146.7-8)
And it goes on:
“[He] watches over the foreigner
and sustains the fatherless and the widow.”
(Ps 146.9)
This is what God is like.
He sees people. He lifts people. He uses his power for the flourishing of others.
And of course in the midst of that we can’t read a Psalm like this without hearing God’s concern for the poor, the marginalised, the overlooked, the person without power.
Again in New York, I was so inspired by some of the incredible compassion programmes shaping the life of the church there.
And it made me wonder, beyond that, what do I do with whatever God has put into my hands?
Can I use all that I have, steward all that I am, for the sake of others?
When Jesus promises the Holy Spirit in John’s Gospel, he calls him the Advocate. The one who comes alongside.
Advocacy isn’t just a good leadership idea. It reflects something of the very nature of God that we’re called to embody.
And during my study leave I became really aware of how just much other people were advocating for me.
So many of the experiences I’ve talked about happened because somebody opened a door for me.
Invitations. Introductions. Hospitality. Access. People being incredibly open and honest with me.
I spent some incredible time learning from Trinity Wall Street, this large Episcopal church in Downtown Manhattan, and the Vicar there was extraordinarily generous. He opened up the life of this huge and complex institution to me. He spoke transparently about its finances, politics and challenges, made introductions and created opportunities I simply wouldn’t otherwise have had.
He didn’t have to do any of it.
When I spent time shadowing senior teams in other dioceses here in the UK, people let me into rooms I wouldn’t normally be in. They opened doors for me to watch, listen and learn.
Even walking the Camino, one of the huge highlights of my study leave, happened because somebody else organised it and invited me to join.
Again and again, somebody invited me in or opened a door.
And so I’ve come home thinking:
What doors can I open for other people?
How can I advocate for others? And that doesn’t always have to be something dramatic.
For all of us, it could simply be speaking someone’s name when they’re not in the room. Noticing a gift in someone. Making an introduction. Creating an opportunity. Giving someone responsibility.
As I reflected on all this I was reminded of that strange story in 2 Kings 13 that I preached on last year about Think Big, Think Beyond.
You might remember it. Elisha is nearing the end of his life, and he puts a bow and arrows into the king’s hands.
He places his own hands over the king’s and tells him to shoot. A prophetic picture of God’s victory being entrusted to someone else.
Elisha is dying, but he’s still putting arrows into somebody else’s hands.
It’s a mad little story, and it speaks to legacy.
But as it came back to me over these last few months, the image stretched further.
I don’t just want to wait until I’m old to hand over arrows.
I can choose now to put arrows into other people’s hands.
If legacy asks, what will I leave behind?, advocacy asks, what can I give away now?
And this isn’t a new idea for us at SPS. Building people up and releasing them is deep in the DNA of this church.
We are a place of landing and launching.
So for me, this feels like a renewed call to keep advocating for others. Keep being generous with whatever access, relationships, experience or influence God gives us.
For all of us, the invitation is to keep noticing what God is doing in others, and to keep giving away things that grow. At work, at home, wherever God has grounded our feet.
Who can we help land and launch?
What doors can we open?
Whose hands can we put some arrows into?
Open doors for others.
Advocacy.
How We Want To Travel
Make space.
Seek God.
Open doors for others.
That’s what I’m bringing home.
In the weeks to come we’re going to keep talking about vision. About where we’ve come from as a church, where we are now, and where God might be leading us next. About making disciples, transforming communities and planting churches.
But before we ask, “Where are we going?”, it’s always good to ask: How do we want to travel?
And maybe that’s what these three invitations have become for me.
Ambling.
Not every moment needs a purpose to be purposeful.
Attention.
There’s a difference between proximity and intimacy.
Advocacy.
Use what you have to open doors for others.
Make space.
Seek God.
Open doors for others.
Let’s pray.
Lord, thank you that you bring us into spacious places because you delight in us.
Teach us not to fill every space you give us.
Turn our attention and our affection towards you. Give us a deeper hunger to seek your face, to know you and be known by you.
And make us generous with everything you’ve put into our hands. Help us to see others, to lift others up, to open doors.
As we journey into this new season together, may we travel well.
Amen.