The Forgotten Ways - Part Five

The chapter called "Communitas, not Community" is my favorite of the book. It explores why the focus on mission is so important.

He begins by stating that "community" is not the real test for success in a missional church, but "communitas". When referring to community, we often mean "the community for me." Our impulses are grounded in a mostly middle-class value of safety and security. When coupled with consumerism's obsession with comfort and convenience, we create a church that loses her missional edge. A missional view of community is "me for the community and the community for the world."

Connected to this idea is the concept of liminality, a term coined to describe the various rites of passage of an African community. "Liminality therefore applies to that situation where people find themselves in an in-between, marginal state in relations to the surrounding society, a place that could involve significant danger and disorientation, but not necessarily so." During this shared experience, a bond of comradeship and community is forged. "Communitas happens in situations where individuals are driven to find each other through a common experience of ordeal, humbling, transition, and marginalization."

"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 to instead form themselves around a common mission that calls them onto a dangerous journey to unknown places - a mission tha tcalls the church to shake off its collective securities and to plunge into the world of action, where its members will experience disorientation and marginalization but also where they encounter God and one another 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 who actually attempt to do something about it."

Hirsch believes that this should be the normative condition of the people of God, not just a cultural transition or, better yet, an annual emphasis for a church's new member drive.

The stories of Scripture that inspire us, even the stories from Hollywood that inspire us, are all about adventure, risk, journey, and comradeship. One of my favorite films is the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Hirsch confirms the elements of communitas within the series.



The church, for too long, has created an artificial environment for believers to grow and develop. Hirsch compares us to fish in an aquarium, where all of our needs are taken care of, only to develop the fish to be sensitive to any changes in the environment. Most go belly up with the slightest change. But, out in the ocean, we find life, adventure, danger, but also the ability to sustain ourselves when the going gets tough.

We should be "placing ourselves in the new future and then taking a series of steps, not in order to get there someday, but as if you are there, or almost there, now. This is exactly the perspective of the kingdom of God in the New Testament. In saying that the future (eschatological) kingdom of God is already present in our midst, we are called to act in the knowledge that it is already here now and yet will be completed then. And so we are drawn up into God's future for the world. This "now" and "not yet" tension of the kingdom defines our reality and keeps us moving, growing, and adapting."

When we conceive that God is at work both in the church and in the world (unlike most expressions which only concludes God's activity in the world through the church), "our worship of God is always done in the context of our engagement with the world, and because of this it is forced to be culturally meaningful to outsiders....Church is not something tha tis done in abstract from the world. Our evangelism and social action are communal, we join with God in redeeming the world (he's already there), and our spirituality is of the all-of-life variety."

Tomorrow, I'll have some concluding thoughts on the subject.