In order to really get to grips with the dynamics of these primal shifts (two posts ago) in community dynamics, I have found the anthropologist Victor Turner’s ideas of liminality and communitas particularly useful Victor Turner, The Ritual Process, Cornell University Press, 1969 ). Turner was an anthropologist who studied various rites of passage among African people-groups and came up with the term liminality to describe the transition process accompanying a fundamental change of state or social position. Situations of liminality in this context can be extreme, where the participant is cast out of the normal structures of life, is humbled, disoriented, and subjected to various rites of passage, which together constitute a form of test as to whether the participant will be allowed back into society and to transition to the next level in the prevailing social structure. Liminality therefore applies to that situation where people find themselves in an in-between, marginal state in relation to the surrounding society, a place that could involve significant danger and disorientation, but not necessarily so.
For example, in some tribes younger boys are kept under the care of the women until initiation age—around thirteen. At the appropriate time the men sneak into the female compound of the village at night and ‘kidnap’ the lads. The boys are blindfolded, then roughed up, and herded out of the village and taken into the bush. They are then circumcised then left to fend for themselves in the wild African bush for a period lasting up to six months. Once a month the elders of the tribe go to meet them to help debrief and mentor them. But on the whole they have to find both inner and outer resources to cope with the ordeal pretty much by themselves. During this time, the initiates move from being disoriented and individualistic to developing a bond of comradeship forged in the testing conditions of liminality. This sense of comradeship and communality that comes out of the shared ordeal Turner calls communitas. Communitas in his view happens in situations where individuals are driven to find each other through a common experience of ordeal, humbling, transition, and marginalization. It involves intense feelings of social togetherness and belonging brought about by having to rely on each other in order to survive. If the boys emerge from these experiences they are reintroduced into the tribe as men. They are thus accorded the full status of manhood—they are no longer considered boys.
So the related ideas of liminality and communitas describe the dynamics of the Christian community inspired to overcome their instincts to ‘huddle and cuddle’, and form themselves around a common mission that calls them onto a dangerous journey to unknown places. A mission which calls the church to shake off its collective securities and to plunge into the world of action where they will experience disorientation and marginalization but also where they encounter God and each other in a new way. Communitas is therefore always linked with the experience of liminality. It involves adventure and movement, and it describes that unique experience of togetherness that only really happens among a group of people inspired by the vision of a better world actually attempting to do something about it. (Remember the response to the tsunami.) And it is here where the safe, middle-class, consumerist, captivity of the church is so very problematic. And it is here where the adaptive challenge of the 21st Century could be God’s invitation to the church to rediscover itself as a missional communitas.
While some missiologists use this idea to describe the experience of transition the church in the West is currently experiencing in moving from one state (Christendom) or mode of church to another (missional), the emphasis has generally been on the new state of the church at the end of the process and so liminality and communitas are viewed as temporary experiences. From my perspective, significant manifestations of Apostolic Genius teach us that liminality and communitas are more the normative situation and condition of the pilgrim people of God. This is certainly the case for the phenomenal Jesus-movements in view; it is in the conditions of shared ordeal that these Jesus movements thrive and are driven to the activation of Apostolic Genius. What is clear is that both the Early Christian movements and the Chinese underground church experienced liminality through being outlawed and persecuted.
In this perspective, the phenomenal Jesus movements were/are expressions of communitas and not community as we normally conceive it. And as far as I can discern it is always a normative element of Apostolic Genius. The loss of communitas leads to a diminution of the total phenomenon of Apostolic Genius—the life force of the authentic Christian movement wherever it truly manifests.
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