This claim that communitas and liminality are normative for God’s people recently stirred up a bit of a storm in a recent speaking tour. Some people in the audience responded with real vehemence when Michael Frost and I proposed this way of understanding of Christian community. This negative response forced a deep reflection on the validity of these ideas but after much searching I have to say that I have not fundamentally changed my mind. On the contrary, this clash in conceptions in relation to the purpose of the church has forced me to conclude that for many of our critics, Christian community has become little more than a quiet and reflective soul-space (as in Alt Worship circles) or a spiritual buzz (as in Charismatic circles) for people trying to recuperate from an overly busy, consumerist, lifestyle. But is this really what the church is meant to be on about? Is this our grand purpose, to be a sort of refuge for recovering work addicts and experience junkies? A sort of spiritual hospital? I believe that the reason for the strong response in our critics is that they actually did ‘get the message’ about missional church but didn’t like it because, in this case, it called them out of a religion of quiet moments in quiet places and into liminality and engagement.
But the primary reason for not changing my mind is not because I simply disagree about their sense of the purpose of God’s people (I do) but rather because I have come to believe that communitas is thoroughly biblical and is inextricably linked to Apostolic Genius (the latent potency that energizes world-changing Jesus movements). When we survey Scripture with liminality and communitas in mind we must conclude that the theologically most fertile sections where in those times of extremity, when people were well out of their comfort zones. The main clusters of revelation seem to come in times of liminality (e.g. Patriarchs, the Torah, the Prophets, Jesus, Paul, John, etc.) and most of the miracles in the Bible are recorded in situations of liminality. (e.g. Exodus, Exile, the Gospels, and Acts) And when we consider the stories that have inspired the people of God throughout the ages and we find that they are stories involving adventures of the spirit in the context of challenge. In fact that is exactly why they inspire (e.g. Heb.11.)
Take Abram for instance, who with his entire extended family (estimated to be about 70 people and their belongings), is called by God to leave house and home and all that is familiar to undertake a very risky journey to a land that at that stage remained a mere promise by an invisible God. And when we look at the various experiences they have along the way, stories that have shaped all subsequent faith (e.g. the offering of Isaac), they are not safe little bedtime stories. Rather they call us to a dangerous form of faithfulness that echoes the faithfulness of Abraham (Gal.3:15ff, Heb.11:9-13.) Or when we explore the profoundly liminal Exodus experience we find that this very tricky journey indelibly shaped the people of God, and continues to do so to this very day. It was also the context of the substantial revelation of God in his covenant with his people. The same can be said of the exile into Babylon many centuries later—this was an extreme situation which changed the whole way Israel related to her God, and still does. The prophets spoke the Word of God into such contexts of extremity. And the fact it was precisely when the people of God settled down and ‘forgot YHWH’ (Dt.4:23-31) that they had be spiritually disturbed once again by the prophets. To awaken the people to their lost calling, the Prophets recalled the dangerous memories about fires on the mountain and pursuing armies and a God who lovingly redeems a people to Himself and enters into a sacred and eternal covenant with them. This sounds pretty liminal to me.
Consider the lives and ministries of Samuel, Elijah, Samson, David and his band, and ask what conditions they encountered and we come up with the consistent themes of liminality and communitas. And when we come to the New Testament we need to look only to the life of Jesus, who had nowhere to rest or lay his head, and who discipled his followers on-the-road in the real dangerous conditions of a occupied land and against a hostile and dodgy religious elite. So much so, that discipleship ala Jesus looks awfully like those risky initiation rites that the African kids have to go through. It was both costly (‘deny yourself and follow Me’) and dangerous (‘if they hated me, they will hate you too’) but it came with the territory of discipleship. But to find these themes in abundance, look at the life of Paul. He describes it pretty vividly for us in 2 Corinthians. Whippings, beatings, imprisonment, and shipwrecks can hardly be called ‘safe, secure, comfortable and convenient’ and yet through these experiences he and his apostolic band totally realign the course of history around the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Book of Acts is so brimful with communitas and liminality that it reads like a rollicking adventure story.
And the point of all this is that these are prescriptive descriptions for the church because it seems that liminality and communitas are normative for the pilgrim people of God in the Bible and in the Jesus movements of history. It is so deeply ‘there’ that I am simply at a loss to explain how we lost this perspective. I have come to the conclusion that the clash of images of the church experienced in the recent ministry trip just serves to highlight how far we have moved from the biblical imagination and experience of Church.
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