Living in Liminality

One of the benefits of being a Doctor of Ministry Director is having opportunity to meet some incredible practitioners, authors, thinkers that come through Western. Last night, I had dinner with Eddie Gibbs, a professor at Fuller Seminary and a futurist of sorts, who just wrote Emerging Churches. It is less a theological analysis and more a sociological study of the emerging movement.

It is in such discussions that I again ask myself, “How can a traditional church and an emerging culture connect?”  I’ve processed some of this in an earlier blog, “Giving the Emertional Church Its Due.”  It’s an important question, for voices like Gibbs would say the future of the existing church depends, in part, on its willingness to engage with the shift going on in culture.

That leads me to Tim Conder’s recent book, The Church in Transition: The Journey of Existing Churches into the Emerging Culture. For some reason, I wasn’t particularly drawn to this book. Maybe it was the cover, maybe because it was a handout at a recent conference. But once I got into it, I was hooked. Conder is a pastor of an existing church, and he has thought carefully about how the church must journey amidst a changing landscape; how existing pastors, like me, must cope with living in “liminality”, the transition between modern and postmodern.

He doesn’t give cheap answers (e.g. what’s needed is a change in worship style). And he doesn’t begin with the assumption, that some have made, that the church cannot connect. As he puts it, “I don’t think the existing church is a candidate for reformation by extermination.”  Nor does he conclude that reformation can only happen by replication.

Rather, there can be a reformation for the existing church, if it is humble enough to hear the prophetic voices, and savvy enough to take its own history and structure and make them work for the glory of God. As we have often said at Village, there’s nothing wrong with wineskins, so long as they keep adapting to the fermenting Jesus. And there can be a future for the emergent movement, if it is willing to be humble enough to acknowledge what God has done up to now through imperfect, but faithful churches, and allow them to play a shepherding role.

In Conder’s words, the existing church must be both student and mentor. I take it that this means, as student, the church heeds the prophetic word to be an authentic community, responsive to the values of an emerging culture. Present Christianity as a way of life - not merely as an adherence to a set of beliefs. Be passionate for the values of God’s kingdom. Be comfortable with, more than this, embrace mystery. Expect nothing less than radical discipleship. Honor beauty. Be missional.

As mentor, it means modeling a deep commitment to truth. Preaching such that the text is heard, careful exegesis has been done. Partnering in global efforts in ways that give emerging churches a vision of what they can do when God brings growth and critical mass.

All of this can work is we are willing to take books like Gibbs’ and Conder’s and let them be a basis for good dialogue.