IAMS Paper #2 Planning Pilgrimmage [Co-authored with Carmel Villar]
Planning Pilgrimage: A Motif for Young Adults walking together in Mission Formation
Prepared for the International Association of Mission Studies Assembly, Pretoria, South Africa, 17–21 July 2026
Journeying is messy! We like to think about young adult mission formation less as the delivery of a tidy programme and more as the practice of accompaniment in a world that rarely stays tidy for long. Drawing on the Council for World Mission’s Training in Mission (TIM) programme across the 2023–2025 cohorts, we look at what young adults learned, and how formation itself needs to change if it is to remain credible, humane, and missiologically grounded in a fractured world. This speaks to the International Association of Mission Studies Assembly theme, “Walking Together in Mission,” because it treats formation as a shared journey of discernment, risk, and attentiveness to the Spirit in the midst of uncertainty, rather than only at the stage of careful theoretical planning. The phrase “planning pilgrimage” names the contradiction many of us in education and formation recognise: we do need to prepare well, but we also need to hold our plans lightly enough for grief, conflict, hybridity, cultural difference, and unexpected encounter to become part of the learning rather than simply problems to manage.
At the centre of our work are two closely related ideas. The first is planning pilgrimage itself, a formational motif that sees mission formation as a journey in which intention, interruption, discernment, and companionship belong together. Pilgrimage gives us a richer language for formation than linear leadership pipelines, because pilgrims do not control the terrain. They travel with purpose, certainly, but they are also shaped by what they meet, by those who walk beside them, and by the hospitality and vulnerability that arise along the way. The second is the emerging framework of WITHNESSING, developed by Carmel Burila Villar. WITHNESSING recovers the incarnational dimension of witness by reminding us that before Christians learn to witness for Christ, they learn to be with people in Christ-like presence. It emphasises walking with people, inquiring with humility, tarrying in reality, honouring human dignity, practising neighbourly solidarity, embodying the Good News, sharing stories, and committing to shared communion. Taken together, planning pilgrimage and WITHNESSING gently but firmly move the centre of mission formation away from control, expertise, and performance, and toward presence, accompaniment, and relational faithfulness.
We take seriously the social and emotional realities shaping young adults today. Ecological anxiety, geopolitical instability, the after-effects of COVID-19, digital saturation, vocational uncertainty, and relational fragmentation are not treated as background conditions, but as the very context within which formation must happen. The TIM experience suggests that many participants arrived already exercising meaningful leadership in demanding settings, even as they carried grief, fatigue, and sometimes a cautious relationship to institutions. That matters. We do not see young adults as leaders-in-waiting, but as people who are already both being formed and helping to form others. What they need, then, are learning environments that honour their agency while also making room for pain, contingency, and pastoral care. When formation ignores the actual pressures participants are living with, it risks becoming abstract, performative, or simply unconvincing. Formation needs to be shaped around real people in lived complexity, not ideal learners in ideal conditions.
Theologically, our emphasis is rooted in an incarnational and participatory understanding of mission. Drawing on thinkers such as David Bosch, Lesslie Newbigin, Stephen Bevans, Roger Schroeder, and others in contextual and polycentric missiology, we understand witness not as one-way proclamation but as embodied participation in the Missio Dei. We draw on the Emmaus narrative as a lens for the 2026 IAMS Assembly theme. In Luke 24, recognition of the risen Christ does not happen at the start of the journey, but in its disrupted middle, through companionship, conversation, reinterpretation, and the breaking of bread. That is a powerful image for formation. People are not shaped simply by receiving information; they are shaped by walking together, being interrupted, and discovering God’s presence precisely where plans prove inadequate. Our thinking is deepened through themes of reconciliation, contextualisation, and polycentricity. Mission is understood as shared pilgrimage rather than transmission from a privileged centre, and formation, accordingly, must be communal, intercultural, and open to being changed by the other.
One of our key claims is that disruption is not necessarily a failure of formation; often it is where formation becomes most honest and most profound. In the TIM 2025 cohort especially, participants brought fresh bereavements, relational fractures, and community traumas into the learning space. Rather than treating these realities as interruptions to the curriculum, facilitators found that naming suffering truthfully opened a level of communal trust and spiritual depth that more tightly controlled programmes rarely achieve. Here the pilgrimage motif becomes especially illuminating: pilgrims do not leave their wounds behind when they begin the journey. They carry them, and the journey becomes one of accompaniment, patience, and healing through shared presence. Importantly, we do not want to romanticise suffering or turn grief into a lesson plan. Instead, we are asking a more careful and pastoral question: how can formation hold pain with integrity? In our view, educational responsibility and pastoral responsibility in mission formation cannot really be separated. Facilitators are not only transmitters of content; they are companions who need to know how to listen, discern, and respond with care.
We are conscious of the importance of weaving theology and diagnosis into pedagogy, and this is where many colleagues involved in education may find the discussion especially useful. In practice, we use tools like Gallup Clifton Strengths awareness, de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats, Godly Play, Deep Talk, the WITHNESS curriculum, and peer mediation. TIM is presented as a kind of formational laboratory in which curriculum functions as a living framework rather than a fixed script. Several practices stand out because they cultivate attentiveness, participation, and mutuality. Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats, for example, gives diverse participants a shared language for parallel thinking, reducing ego-driven debate and opening room for multiple perspectives. Godly Play is adapted as a practice of wondering that slows the room, resists premature closure, and allows mystery, grief, and scripture to be engaged through reflective presence rather than quick explanation. Deep Talk adds another dimension by helping participants develop an inner language through story, symbolic action, and communal dialogue, something especially important for those working across several languages and cultural worlds.
Alongside these, the WITHNESS curriculum provides an eight-week scaffold for accompaniment, built around action-reflection-action praxis and culminating in outputs such as a digital story-weaving portfolio, a symmetric partnership blueprint, and a personal missional manifesto. What matters here is not simply the variety of methods, but the coherence among them: each one decentres the expert, treats the group itself as a place of learning, and measures growth through how participants learn to walk with others rather than simply how efficiently they complete tasks.
Especially relevant for contemporary mission studies is the discussion of hybrid and digitally mediated formation. The experimentation within TIM suggests that online and hybrid models can widen access, sustain international participation, and maintain relational continuity between face-to-face intensives. At the same time, we want to be realistic about embodiment. Meals, silence, informal conversation, and the unstructured texture of simply being together in person still matter deeply for any formation that hopes to nurture presence, attentiveness, and patient engagement. Hybrid formation therefore calls for a certain honesty about what digital environments can and cannot hold. We explore this through situational leadership, noting that readiness, confidence, and participation are often much harder to discern on screen than in person. We also treat conflict management and peer mediation as integral to formation rather than as add-on problem-solving tools. If mission is fundamentally about reconciliation, then misunderstanding, disagreement, and the negotiation of power need to be worked through as part of the curriculum itself. By equipping participants not only to receive mediation but to mediate for one another, the programme helps form empathy, accountability, perspective-taking, and mutual care. Reconciliation becomes not just a topic, but a shared practice.
We have been learning that the facilitator’s role needs to be reimagined. In the planning pilgrimage model, facilitators are guides rather than architects. They bring experience, theological depth, and practical resources, but they do not presume to control the whole route. Instead, they accompany, interpret, and make room for surprise. That requires a kind of leadership marked by humility and vulnerability: the willingness to admit that a plan did not quite work, that a cohort needs something different, or that the group itself is revealing something the programme had not foreseen. This is not a diminished form of leadership; if anything, it is a more relational and more missiologically appropriate one. In the same spirit, young adults are best understood as co-experimenters in formation. From the outset, they are asked what practices they are exploring, what they need, what forms of pacing or support will help, and what spiritual resources they themselves bring. Curriculum is therefore co-created rather than merely delivered. This honours participant agency and resonates strongly with asset-based and appreciative approaches that begin from what is already living and generative in a community rather than from assumptions about lack.
For the wider field of mission studies, we hope this opens up three fruitful lines of reflection. First, it invites us to rethink our usual metrics of formation. Competence still matters, of course, but the deeper question becomes not only what a participant can do, but who that person is becoming and how they are learning to walk with others. This shifts evaluation toward accompaniment, relational depth, and mutual transformation. Second, mission formation needs to be communal, contextual, and pastoral all at once. Programmes that reward efficiency, confidence, and polished productivity may unintentionally crowd out the very qualities needed in fragile and contested contexts, where patience, humility, vulnerability, and the capacity to remain present in ambiguity are essential. Third, mission agencies and theological institutions may need to examine the assumptions embedded in their curricula and expectations. If mission is truly polycentric and from everyone to everywhere, then formation can no longer proceed from a fixed cultural centre or from the fantasy of a universally adaptable programme. Every participant arrives bearing gifts, histories, wounds, and theological insight, and formation needs to be spacious enough to receive that reality.
In summary, we offer a way of thinking about young adult mission formation that we believe is both timely and necessary in a world marked by instability, plurality, and unchosen disruption. The central insight is both simple and demanding: formation often runs deepest not when programmes proceed without interruption, but when communities learn to prepare carefully, accompany one another honestly, and discern God’s presence together in the middle of what no one could fully map in advance. By bringing the planning pilgrimage motif into conversation with WITHNESSING, adaptive leadership, pastoral theology, contextual mission, and practical pedagogies of wondering and dialogue, we hope to offer a framework that is both theologically substantial and pedagogically generous. For a conference devoted to “Walking Together in Mission,” the invitation is straightforward: mission leadership is formed less through mastery and control than through shared presence, faithful responsiveness, and the disciplined willingness to keep walking together when the road changes shape. That, we suggest, has implications not only for young adult formation, but for the future of mission studies more broadly.
[for submission to Mission Studies Journal]
Conference Paper [Long Version]
Planning Pilgrimage: A Motif for Young Adults Walking Together in Mission Formation
Contemporary Missional Leadership Formation — Curriculum, Content and Methods
Amelia Koh-Butler, Council for World Mission amelia.koh-butler@cwmission.org
Carmel Burila Villar, Union Theological Seminary cvillar.uts@gmail.com
Abstract
Keywords
mission formation, young adults, pilgrimage, accompaniment, WITHNESSING, adaptive leadership, Godly Play, peer mediation
Biographical Notes
Amelia Koh-Butler is Mission Secretary for Education-Formation-Empowerment at the Council for World Mission. Her research interests include Intercultural Ethnodoxology, integration of indigenous learning models and narrative. She holds D.Intercult.Stud/Missiology (Fuller), MTh/MMin (Charles Sturt), MCA (Wollongong), BMus Hons (Sydney Conservatorium). She is a Minister of the Uniting Church in Australia and serves as CWM's Pacific Secretary.
Carmel Burila Villar (MTh, DPS) is Pastoral Care and Counselling Lecturer at Union Theological Seminary, Philippines. Her research focuses on contextual missiology, Filipino theology, and missional formation for young adults. She is the originator of the WITHNESSING framework and Convenor of the Jose Andres Sotto (JAS) Center for Pastoral and Spiritual Care, which spearheads mental health awareness among church workers and the laity.
1 Introduction
This article is a companion to Reframing Young People's Journeys in Mission (Paper 1), which focused on what young adults discovered in the CWM Training in Mission (TIM) programme across the 2023–2025 cohorts. Here the question is different: how was formation itself reshaped in response to participants’ lived realities? Rather than treating grief, disruption, and uncertainty as obstacles to learning, the article argues that they became some of its deepest sites.
Two concepts guide what follows. The first is planning pilgrimage, a formative motif that holds together intention, disruption, accompaniment, and discernment. The second is WITHNESSING, Villar’s contextual, incarnational framework for Christian witness rooted in accompaniment, relational presence, cultural listening, and participation in God’s work among communities. Together they frame a practical question: how do we form mission leaders when the journey cannot be fully planned but must still be walked faithfully together? In TIM, journeying with proved more important than journeying from or to.
2 Formation in the Same World, Seen from a Different Angle
2.1 Shared Global Conditions, Distinct Formational Pressures
The global conditions shaping young people's lives — ecological anxiety, geopolitical instability, digital saturation, the enduring disruptions of COVID-19 — are documented in Paper 1. What this article attends to is the distinct pressure these conditions place on formation processes themselves. Grief, vocational uncertainty, relational fragmentation, and a pervasive sense of being overwhelmed are not incidental to formation. They are the material out of which formation must work.
The lingering effects of COVID-19 showed up consistently across TIM cohorts: reduced capacity for sustained attention, heightened need for relational safety, and a wariness of institutions that had been absent or inadequate during the pandemic years. Formation that does not acknowledge these realities risks speaking into a void.
2.2 Young Adults as Formed and Forming
A recurring conviction in TIM is that formation is not preparation for future leadership — it is accompaniment of leadership already happening. These young adults are not leaders-in-waiting. They are already navigating complex mission contexts, making consequential decisions, and forming others in their own communities. This reframing matters for how we think about authority, curriculum design, and facilitator posture. Formation that treats participants as recipients rather than agents misreads the situation — and misses the formational resource that participants themselves represent.
2.3 WITHNESSING: An Incarnational Framework for Formation
Within this context, an emerging missional framework helps name what faithful formation requires. WITHNESSING, as proposed by Villar, recovers an incarnational dimension of witness that undergirds proclamation. Before the disciples became witnesses for Christ, they spent years with Christ. Before Jesus proclaimed the kingdom, he dwelt among people—walking, listening, eating, and sharing their joys and suffering (John 1:14). Modern missiology likewise understands mission as participation in the Missio Dei. Bosch frames witness as embodied presence and participation in God’s reconciling mission (Bosch 2011:390). Newbigin likewise describes the church as a community sent to continue the ministry of Jesus through faithful presence (Newbigin 1989:222). Bevans and Schroeder identify prophetic dialogue—faithful witness joined to respectful listening—as central to Christian mission (Bevans and Schroeder 2004:69).
The WITHNESSING framework gives this conviction practical shape through eight commitments expressed in the acronym WITHNESS: Walk with people, Inquire with humility, Tarry in their reality, Honour human dignity, Neighbourly solidarity, Embody the Good News, Shared stories and experiences, and Shared communion and commitment (Villar 2026a). Each is developed more fully in Appendix A. What matters here is the posture the framework forms: the missioner enters not as expert or saviour, but as companion, learner, and fellow pilgrim. That is exactly the posture planning pilgrimage asks of both participants and facilitators.
3 Planning Pilgrimage as a Formational Motif
3.1 Pilgrimage in Christian Tradition and Missional Imagination
Pilgrimage offers a different grammar for formation than curriculum delivery or leadership pipelines. It is non-linear, communal, exposed to interruption, and dependent on hospitality and trust. The pilgrim does not control the terrain; she brings intention and is shaped by what she encounters. This resonates directly with the Emmaus narrative — the Assembly theme — in which two disciples walking together encounter the risen Christ through the disruption of a stranger who joins their journey, reframes their understanding, and is recognised in the breaking of bread (Luke 24:13–35). Formation, in this sense, is not something done to participants. It is something that happens among and between them, and between them and the God who goes ahead. In the walking together and in the sharing of conversation and bread, communitas develops (Turner 1969).
Communitas, in this account, is not merely the social context in which formation occurs; it is one of formation’s primary instruments. Shared social and spiritual practices do not simply express community—they help generate it, shaping belonging through repeated, embodied participation (Koh-Butler 2015; Koh-Butler 2020). In TIM, this matters because communitas cannot be assumed in global, cross-cultural cohorts; it must be patiently cultivated through practices that hold difference without demanding uniformity. Read through the pilgrimage motif, such practices become everyday hospitality, so that communitas is not a romantic ideal but a lived experience participants can carry back into their own contexts.
The WITHNESSING framework speaks directly to this dynamic. Its emphasis on pakikipagkapwa — the Filipino value of shared identity and relational solidarity described by de Mesa — provides a culturally specific account of what communitas looks like when approached not as a Western sociological category but as a living cultural resource (de Mesa 2003:45). Mission is not a one-way movement in which the missionary speaks and the community listens; it is a flat space of mutual encounter in which both parties bring stories, wisdom, and transformation.
3.2 From Strategic Planning to Discerned Journeying
The contrast between formation as programme delivery and formation as planned openness to God's interruption calls for a different theoretical framework. Adaptive leadership, developed by Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, offers precisely this. Heifetz distinguishes between technical problems — which can be solved by applying existing knowledge — and adaptive challenges, which require people to change how they think, what they value, and how they behave (Heifetz 1994:35; Heifetz and Linsky 2002:13). Mission contexts are predominantly adaptive. Cultural negotiation, identity transformation, shifting power dynamics, and unexpected grief do not yield to predetermined programmes. They require what pilgrimage demands: attentiveness, flexibility, and the willingness to keep walking when the path is unclear.
Within TIM, disruption — grief, loss, pandemic aftermath, interpersonal conflict, unexpected change — is not treated as a failure of planning. It is formational material. Heifetz's image of "getting on the balcony" — stepping back from immediate pressure to see the larger pattern — is a practice TIM facilitators actively cultivate (Heifetz and Linsky 2002:51). Theologically, this draws on Al Tizon's vision of reconciliation as the shape of mission: disruption, faced together honestly and with care, becomes a site of reconciling encounter (Tizon 2018:85).
4 Pastoral Realities within Missional Formation
4.1 Formation Amid Grief, Loss, and Unchosen Experiences
In TIM 2025, personal and communal grief entered the formation space in ways that could not be anticipated or avoided. Participants arrived carrying real losses — bereavements, fractured relationships, community traumas — that were present, not historical. The honest tension this creates for facilitators is genuine: how do you hold space for suffering without either collapsing the formation programme or, worse, instrumentalising grief as just another learning moment?
What the TIM 2025 cohort offered was something the facilitators had not planned. Their willingness to bring their whole selves — including their pain — created a quality of community that more managed formation rarely achieves. This is entirely consistent with both the pilgrimage motif and the WITHNESSING principle of tarrying in reality: the pilgrim does not leave her wounds at the trailhead. She walks with them, and finds that the walking, and the companions encountered along the way, are part of the healing. The WITHNESSING framework names this explicitly: to tarry is to cultivate patience — to resist the impulse to draw immediate conclusions or offer premature answers, and to acknowledge that genuine understanding emerges from sustained attentiveness to people's stories, struggles, and daily rhythms (Villar 2026a).
4.2 The Blurring of Pastoral Care and Pedagogy
TIM facilitators regularly found themselves holding dual roles as educators and pastoral companions — sometimes in the same session. The question is not whether pastoral care belongs in formation; it clearly does. The question is how to hold it with integrity.
The ethical and theological implications matter. Pastoral accompaniment in a formation context requires facilitators to carry educational and relational responsibility without collapsing them together or pretending they can be neatly separated. Mission studies has much to learn here from pastoral theology, which has long attended to the formation of persons through suffering, liminality, and encounter (Pattison 1988; Lartey 2003). Henri Nouwen’s emphasis on presence, hospitality, and accompaniment is equally instructive: Christian ministry is less about solving problems than creating spaces where people can encounter God’s grace, and the figure of the “wounded healer” highlights shared humanity and mutual vulnerability in ministry (Nouwen 1975:90; Nouwen 1989:61). Graham similarly argues that theological reflection begins with attentive engagement in lived experience, making listening a theological practice rather than merely a communication skill (Graham 2017:45). Formation that takes pain seriously is not less rigorous than formation focused only on competency. It is more faithful to the whole person and more honest about the conditions in which mission is practised.
5. TIM as a Formational Laboratory: Designing for Pilgrimage
5.1 Curriculum That Engages Real Lives
The TIM curriculum has never been fixed in the sense of immune to context. It is better understood as a living framework — structured enough to hold coherence across diverse cohorts, flexible enough to bend toward the actual lives of participants. Across the 2023–2025 cohorts, this meant adapting in real time to participant context, emotional and spiritual need, and the worldview diversity that a genuinely global community brings. Curriculum, in this model, is responsive rather than prescriptive.
This responsiveness is helped by frameworks that give participants a shared language for navigating complexity together. Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats assigns six modes of thinking—analytical, intuitive, critical, optimistic, creative, and process-oriented—to six coloured hats worn by everyone simultaneously, opening space for perspectives that might otherwise be crowded out (de Bono 1985:31–75). In multicultural groups, this parallel-thinking discipline reduces ego-driven debate and deepens exploration. TIM also uses deliberate disruption—shifting context mid-activity or changing a task’s parameters without warning—to help participants notice their default habits under pressure and practise less familiar ones.
Godly Play: Wondering as a Formation Practice
Alongside these cognitive frameworks, TIM draws on Godly Play, developed by Jerome Berryman. Originally created for children’s religious education, Godly Play presents scripture through story, materials, and sensory engagement, then opens space for wondering—slow reflection through open questions that resist easy answers (Berryman 1991:42). The storyteller does not so much explain the story as invite participants to dwell with it. For Berryman, the aim is not simply information transfer, but the formation of a language able to hold mystery, grief, limitation, and transcendence (Berryman 1991:1).
In adult, cross-cultural formation, wondering slows the pace and makes room for voices that might otherwise be crowded out. It creates what Berryman calls a threshold of attentiveness that cannot be rushed (Berryman 1991:58), and it levels the room: the experienced mission leader and the newest participant are both simply invited to wonder. That is not just good facilitation; it is a quiet theological claim about whose voice matters and where wisdom can surface.
Most importantly, Godly Play gives participants a way to stay with existential limits — death, loss, uncertainty, and all that cannot be neatly explained (Berryman 1991:14). In TIM 2025, when grief entered the room, the wondering circle was not a pause in formation. It was one of the places where formation ran deepest. To wonder together is already to walk together. That is the pilgrimage motif in simple form, and it is also WITHNESSING: tarrying in reality, honouring what participants carry, and making space for shared stories to become shared testimony.
Deep Talk: Community, Story, and Finding Your Own Language
Closely related to Godly Play is Deep Talk, a dialogical method developed by Finnish counsellor and educator Tuula Valkonen. It begins with story—often using symbolic objects—moves through wondering, and then invites communal dialogue. A key feature is the act of changing places before speaking, which encourages participants to inhabit another perspective before responding.
Valkonen describes Deep Talk’s aim as helping people develop an “inner language”—the capacity to put values, attitudes, and moral experience into words that can genuinely be shared (Valkonen 2022:3). For TIM participants, many working in a second or third language, this can be the difference between being present and being heard. Deep Talk shares much with Godly Play—story, wondering, circle, and careful attention to space—but adds a stronger communal dimension. It moves from individual reflection to shared meaning and action, echoing the final movements of WITHNESSING: shared stories, shared communion, and shared commitment.
The WITHNESS Curriculum: A Structured Framework for Accompaniment
The eight-week WITHNESS curriculum (Villar 2026b; see Appendix A) gives the pilgrimage motif a concrete pedagogical structure. Each week corresponds to one element of the WITHNESS acronym and combines a two-hour interactive learning lab with continuous field immersion, using an action-reflection-action praxis cycle. Week 1 (Walk with People) begins with mapping the lived spaces of a ministry site before any ministry activity begins. Week 2 (Inquire with Humility) uses active listening triads to practise holy listening. Week 3 (Tarry in Their Reality) invites a guided mirror-of-privilege reflection. Weeks 4 through 8 move through honouring dignity, neighbourly solidarity, embodying the Good News, sharing stories symmetrically, and a reciprocal accountability covenant that connects short-term immersion to lifelong posture. Summative outputs — a digital story-weaving portfolio, a symmetric partnership blueprint, and a personal missional manifesto — require participants to demonstrate not what they taught communities, but what communities taught them. This reversal is the WITHNESSING principle of inquiry and neighbourly solidarity made structural: the curriculum is designed so that the community cannot be reduced to a mission project.
Taken together, the Six Thinking Hats, Godly Play, Deep Talk, and the WITHNESS curriculum form a coherent set of practices. All four make room for voices that might otherwise be marginalised, treat process as formational rather than merely instrumental, and locate formation in the group rather than the expert at the front. Their shared conviction is simple: the deepest learning happens not when content is transferred efficiently, but when people are genuinely present to one another in attentiveness, honesty, and care. This is planning pilgrimage in practice.
5.2 Hybrid Formation and Relational Risk
The experimentation with hybrid preliminary learning across CWM TIM has surfaced both the genuine possibilities and the real limits of digitally mediated formation. The gains are significant: hybrid models extend access, enable global participation, and help sustain connection across the in-person intensives that give TIM its formational depth. The losses are also significant: embodiment matters in formation, informal encounters carry weight that structured sessions cannot replicate, and shared rhythms — meals, silences, unhurried conversation — create the relational substrate on which deeper formation depends.
Situational leadership theory, developed by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard, offers a useful lens for facilitators navigating this. The model holds that effective leadership means reading the readiness of those alongside us — their competence and confidence in relation to a specific task — and adjusting accordingly: directing when people need clear guidance, coaching when they are engaged but still finding their feet, supporting when capability is there but confidence is not, delegating when people are genuinely ready to work independently (Hersey and Blanchard 1982:150; Blanchard, Zigarmi, and Zigarmi 2013:54). In a hybrid setting, these readiness levels shift in ways that are much harder to read than in person. A participant who is confident and engaged face-to-face may become uncertain or withdrawn on a screen. TIM facilitators have found that making this model visible to participants — naming it together — helps the whole group become more attentive to each other's needs, distributing the work of accompaniment across the community rather than leaving it with one person.
The deeper point is this: the medium is not neutral. If mission formation aims to develop presence, attentiveness, and patient engagement with complexity, the formation environment must model these practices, not simply optimise for efficiency. The WITHNESSING principle of walking with people is immediately challenged in digital environments, where shared space is limited. Hybrid formation, at its best, is honest about this limitation and works deliberately to preserve the relational texture that makes accompaniment possible.
Conflict Management and Peer Mediation: Practising What We Preach
Formation that holds reconciliation as its theological centre cannot stay at the level of theory. In TIM, conflict management training and peer mediation practice are treated as formational disciplines — not bolt-on crisis tools, but core elements of learning to work across cultural difference. Conflict is treated as information, not failure. When participants encounter genuine disagreement — over theology, practice, the use of power, or the direction of the programme — the instinct is not to smooth it over. It is to name it, sit with it, and work through it together (Johnson and Johnson 2002:37).
Peer mediation takes this further by giving participants not just the experience of having conflict mediated, but the skills and responsibility of mediating for one another. Peer mediators are trained in active listening, impartiality, open-ended questioning, and helping parties move from stated positions toward the underlying needs actually driving the conflict (Crawford and Bodine 1996:14). Research consistently shows that the deepest formation through peer mediation happens in the mediators themselves: they grow in empathy, perspective-taking, and the capacity to see conflict as an opening rather than an obstacle (Sellman 2011:45). This maps directly onto the WITHNESSING framework's emphasis on neighbourly solidarity — standing alongside others as partners in pursuit of abundant life rather than managing difficulty from a position of authority. When young mission practitioners take responsibility for mediating one another's conflicts, they are embodying the mutuality and shared accountability that TIM, and WITHNESSING, are trying to form in the first place.
6 Facilitators as Guides, Not Architects
6.1 Shifting Roles in Leadership Formation
The pilgrimage motif reshapes not only what we do but who we are in the room. A guide does not simply draw the route and then manage delivery. She knows the terrain, has walked it before, carries resources that may be needed, and walks alongside — attentive, present, and genuinely willing to be surprised. In TIM, facilitators are explicitly positioned as accompaniers, resource people, and co-learners. This requires a quality of vulnerability that most institutional roles do not invite: the willingness to say openly, "I don't know what this cohort needs yet" or "that didn't land and I'm not sure why."
Grace Ji-Sun Kim's insistence that genuine cross-cultural encounter requires a willingness to be changed by the other — to receive difference as gift rather than manage it as problem (Kim 2015:141) — describes what facilitators in global formation spaces must practise in their own right, not merely commend to participants. The WITHNESSING framework makes the same demand of the missioner: the one who walks with people must be prepared to be transformed by the encounter, not merely to facilitate transformation in others.
6.2 Young Adults as Co-Experimenters
Formation in TIM is co-created rather than delivered. This is structural, not rhetorical. During the opening phase, participants are asked: what spiritual practices have you been exploring lately? What have you found helpful? What would you like to develop? From the beginning, the curriculum is shaped by what participants bring as well as what the programme provides. Questions about scheduling, pacing, and how to handle change are themselves formational: what needs to be included? How do we build in the ability to adapt? What actually opens up when the plan gets disrupted?
Sometimes lesson plans are set aside entirely. Sometimes much-loved and useful tools remain in the toolbox. Sometimes the learning facilitator must patiently attend to what is presenting in the group. This is entirely consistent with Asset-Based Community Development principles — beginning with what is present and alive in a community before designing interventions (Kretzmann and McKnight 1993:1) — and with Appreciative Inquiry's habit of asking generative questions: not "what is broken?" but "what is already working, and what becomes possible when we name it?" (Cooperrider and Srivastva 1987:129). In TIM, these are not theoretical frameworks brought in from outside. They are descriptions of practices that have developed over years of working with diverse young leaders, and that participants themselves now carry forward — embodying, in their own communities, the companionship they received.
7 Missiological Implications for Formation Practice
7.1 Rethinking Formation Metrics
The integrative "head, heart, and hands" framework needs complementary lenses that account for complexity, relational dynamics, and what it actually takes to make decisions under pressure. Adaptive leadership provides the conceptual frame — the distinction between technical competency and the harder work of identity transformation. Situational leadership provides the relational frame — attending to where each person actually is, not where the programme assumes they should be. The Six Thinking Hats, Godly Play, Deep Talk, the WITHNESS curriculum, and peer mediation together provide the formational practice through which these capacities are developed in community rather than simply taught in theory.
The WITHNESSING framework suggests an additional evaluative question that standard metrics consistently miss: not "what can this participant do?" but "how do they walk with people?" The three summative outputs of the WITHNESS curriculum — the digital story-weaving portfolio, the symmetric partnership blueprint, and the personal missional manifesto — are each designed to make accompaniment visible and assessable. Crucially, they measure formation in the direction of the community rather than the performance of the participant. A portfolio that cannot feature the participant as hero, a partnership blueprint that requires genuine co-design with local leadership, and a manifesto that commits to measurable changes in the participant's own life — these are not soft outcomes. They are rigorous assessments of whether a missioner has actually learned to walk with people rather than for them.
The shift in evaluation that follows from both planning pilgrimage and WITHNESSING is therefore from "what can this person do?" to "who is this person becoming, and how are they learning to walk with others?"
7.2 Formation as Communal, Contextual, and Pastoral
Faithful formation walks at the pace of participants. It takes pain as seriously as possibility. It holds together mission, spirituality, and care without collapsing one into the others. These are not concessions to weakness; they are what the gospel requires of those who would carry it into a fractured world.
Theologically, this is grounded in mission as participation in God’s reconciling work. Tizon’s claim that reconciliation is the shape of mission provides the centre (Tizon 2018:85). Kim adds a necessary challenge: genuine encounter across difference requires honest attention to the power and privilege embedded in our own formation and institutions (Kim 2015:29).
Sanneh’s account of the gospel’s translatability grounds contextual formation theologically: if the Word takes root in every cultural soil, formation cannot begin from a fixed cultural template without domesticating the Spirit’s work (Sanneh 1989:29). Walls’s twin principles of indigenisation and pilgrimage add a communal dimension: the cross-cultural cohort is not a logistical arrangement but a lived expression of the church’s shared pilgrim identity (Walls 1996:7–9). When that displacement becomes costly, as it did in TIM 2025, pastoral care is not incidental to formation. It is part of its truthfulness.
WITHNESSING names this directly. Nacpil’s Asian Critical Principle and de Mesa’s emphasis on pakikipagkapwa challenge any programme that begins from a fixed centre and radiates outward (Nacpil 1974:3; de Mesa 2003:45). Coe likewise treats contextualisation as a theological necessity, not a methodological option (Coe 1976:13). The larger de-centring of missiology—from Edinburgh’s transmission model to today’s polycentric vision of mission “from everyone to everywhere” (IMC 1947; Yeh 2016:23)—therefore carries direct implications for formation. If mission no longer flows from one centre to a dependent periphery, formation must be organised around the same conviction: every participant brings something the community cannot do without.
Maggay’s emphasis on cultural understanding and social engagement reinforces the point: formation must enter the worldview and everyday realities of communities rather than import a prefabricated model (Maggay 2011:34). Dean similarly observes that young people are drawn to communities that embody a faith worth committing to, not merely explain it (Dean 2010:12). Formation that is communal, contextual, and pastoral is therefore not a concession to fragility. It is a response to what the gospel requires and to what young adults most need.
7.3 Implications for Mission Agencies and Theological Institutions
TIM's experience suggests some direct implications for those who design and fund mission formation. Curriculum needs to be genuinely responsive rather than fixed — shaped by the actual lives of participants, not inherited templates that assume a particular kind of learner or context. Facilitator development must include the pastoral dimension — equipping people not only as educators but as accompaniers and co-learners, which requires its own formation, not just training. And institutional expectations of young leaders need to be examined honestly: if agencies and seminaries reward efficiency, confident productivity, and polished competency above all else, they will inadvertently select against exactly the qualities that mission in complex contexts actually requires — attentiveness, vulnerability, patience, and the willingness to walk slowly with people who are struggling.
The WITHNESSING framework and the WITHNESS curriculum offer one practical response to these implications. They are not prescriptions for every context; they are an invitation to design formation that begins with presence, builds through accompaniment, and evaluates through the quality of relationship rather than the quantity of activity. Mission agencies considering the integration of WITHNESSING into their formation programmes would do well to begin with the question Villar poses at the outset of the WITHNESS curriculum: Who are we called to accompany? — and to ask it not only of participants, but of the agencies themselves (Villar 2026b).
8 Conclusion
Walking Together Without a Map
Planning pilgrimage is not a contradiction in terms. It names a particular kind of faithfulness: prepare carefully, hold the plans loosely, and stay attentive to what the Spirit is doing in the journey itself. The Emmaus story — in which the risen Christ is recognised not at the start of the journey but in its disrupted middle, in the breaking of bread with a stranger — is not simply an illustration of formation. It is a paradigm for it.
WITHNESSING gives this paradigm practical shape. Before witnesses, companions. Before proclamation, presence. The same incarnational logic that Villar draws from John 1:14 and Acts 1:8 is the logic planning pilgrimage tries to enact: you cannot walk with people from a distance, and you cannot accompany what you have not taken time to understand. Both frameworks resist over-engineering mission. Both trust that the Spirit is already at work in the communities we enter, and that the missioner’s task is to discern—together, slowly, and humbly—where God is already present.
What TIM has found across cohorts and contexts is clear: the most significant formation rarely happens in the planned moments. It happens in the disruptions—grief that arrives uninvited, a hybrid session rebuilt together, a participant who names what others will not, a facilitator who admits she does not know. These are the moments when mission leadership is truly formed: not in mastery, but in presence; not in certainty, but in faithfulness; not by possessing a map, but by learning to keep walking together.
We offer this article, then, not simply as a description of one programme, but as a claim about mission formation more broadly: if we want leaders who can walk with people in a fractured world, we must form them through accompaniment, honest attentiveness, and practices spacious enough for the Spirit’s interruption. That is not a soft alternative to rigour. It is the discipline the moment demands.
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