A word that crops up frequently in the discussions around the Missional Church is the word liminal, or liminality. Liminality has to do with that disorienting whitewater experience between the known past and the yet-to-be and unknown future for which there are no patterns. That’s where we are, that’s what we are experiencing in the North American church at present — and it can be a bit disorienting. Yet, we shouldn’t really be all that surprised. We’ve been getting the prophetic warnings now for decades. But for (what I consider) a remarkable emerging generation of younger adults, it has provoked a creative quest having to do with the essence of the church.
My ministry path has led to years of exposure to this emerging generation.
I was formed in the very safe precincts of the mid-century Presbyterian Church, went to church conferences, spent summers in Montreat, attended a church college and seminary, was ordained — all the routine stuff that was expected for one who had some vision of serving the Lord in pastoral ministry. I spent forty years doing all the things that one does as pastor, except much of that time was in university neighborhoods and dealing with university students who do have the unsettling proclivity of asking the brutally honest questions about every dimension of Christian experience. Their questions created in me some lurking sense that God’s design for the church must entail much more than most of the ecclesiastical housekeeping along with the preservation of this dehydrated gospel that I was being exposed to.
Then I spent another ten years with a denominational renewal organization mentoring seminary students and encouraging seminary faculty on a dozen or so seminary campuses. What became apparent was that these ultimate questions about the essence of the church in the design of God, or any serious grappling with a missional ecclesiology, were practically unknown. All the while the culture around us was in major transformation (chaos?). This emerging generation was being formed in a post-Christian culture radically different than the secure culture in which I had been formed.
In some ways this shouldn’t have surprised me. There had been prophetic voices calling the church to a ‘reality check’ for all my adult career: Emil Brunner and Hans Küng early on. Then the more strident voice of Jacques Ellul, who spoke of the “subversion of the church,” followed by Lesslie Newbigin and David Bosch alerting the church to its mistaken default mode, that which was formed by Christendom. On the fringes were the creative voices of Germans such as Christian A. Schwarz (Natural Church Development) and Gerhard Lohfink (Jesus and Community). But these were a bit out of reach for the rank and file of the Christian community.
It has been the recent arrival of an unexpected voice speaking into the post-Christian and postmodern cultures that has captured the attention of a growing number of the younger generation of thinking disciples of Jesus — this in the person of Brian McLaren. He was a university professor who became the chosen leader of a new church plant that took its missional task in this new culture seriously. He wrote and people read, and around his voice the Emergent Church movement has arrived to challenge the church to engage intentionally and redemptively in conversation with a whole new kind of culture and with the persons it produces.
Back to me: after fifty years I found myself in a fascinating new passage of life. (I am reminded of Flannery O’Connor’s comment about loving to come home to her farm in Georgia after big book-signings in New York, because “my peacocks didn’t know I was a celebrity.”) Here I was, out of the ecclesiastical limelight, out of denominational leadership, no longer “the reverend,” and in a very authentic community of younger adults (half my age and younger) in a much larger and traditional congregation — and they were asking so many of these same honest questions about the purpose, the essence (teleology?), of the church and the community of the Kingdom of God. Why is the church? What does it have to do with my discipleship, my role in the mission of God? How does it demonstrate God’s New Creation (Kingdom of God)?
I found myself in numerous coffee-cup conversations with several engineering grad students, who were not at all antagonistic about the church, who were not hostile — just trying to get their keen minds around the integrity of the church as they searched Scriptures. They sought me out only because I was an older Christian brother and a mentor, had long time experience in the church as a teacher, and had “been around the block” on a lot of these questions. What these young friends succeeded in doing, however, was pulling out of my closet all of my own long-hidden misgivings, unanswered questions, unconvinced convictions, along with my suspicion that I had missed something along the way.
The result of these conversations has been a book entitled Enchanted Community: Journey Into the Mystery of the Church (Wipf and Stock Publishers). Is it always hazardous for a person my age to try to communicate across several generational cultures and get into the mind of those who could be my grandchildren? With their help both they and I were transformed by the experience. My intent all through these conversations (which go on to this day) has been to assist and encourage my young friends to negotiate this disorienting (liminal) church scene between the patterns set by Christendom and the yet unknown post-Christian future. Brian McLaren is an encouraging voice in our mutual quest.
My desire has been to contribute to their quest by looking at what can be discovered of God’s design for the community of God’s people as it dwells in dynamic relationship to the Triune God, as it expresses God’s divine nature and mission, as it demonstrates communally God’s New Creation in Christ. It has been an interesting journey.
Robert T. Henderson (retired) has been a Presbyterian pastor, on a denominational staff in evangelism, mentor to seminarians and young adults, and the author of several books on the church and its mission.
