Customer Reviews

Missionary Congregation, Leadership, and Liminality (Christian Mission & Modern Culture)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Alan Roxburgh has written a small book (aprox. 67 pages), but it is the best use of paper and ink I have read in a long time. He sets forth a description of the double challenge facing the modern/postmodern and un-christendomed church, in clear, crisp and stark tones. Using a paradigm of "marginality," Roxburgh explains how that, within the matrix of modernity-modernization, the church was marginalized (pushed from the center) into a chaplain's role, but that with the onset of post-modernity (or hyper-modernity) the church now faces a culture that has been marginalized as well (now there is NO center). He calls this "double-whammy" facing us the experience of "liminality." This book offers a description of depth unlike the "five easy answers to ten difficult problems" approach we are usually given. It is a breath of reality we desperately need, a wake-up call to the complexity of the issues we face. But, by far, the most fruitful aspect to this work is his description of the pastoral leadership that the "missionary congregation" needs before the church will become a new community of faith. If you are a pastor, the images Roxburgh gives us here are deeply thought-provoking and as such they are an extremely helpful motif.

Alan Roxburgh, The Missionary Congregation, Leadership and Liminality (Harrisburg: Trinity, 1997)

Roxburgh has been a Baptist pastor and currently serves as a church consultant and adjunct lecturer for revitalising congregations for their missional context. In this book he argues congregations in the West need to learn to live the gospel from the margins rather than to expect public prominence. He examines Victor Turner's work on liminality, relating it to the church's experience of marginalization, and says liminality offers a model for missional engagement for our radically changing times. Rather than seeking credibility and identity as therapists, professionals or managers, he says today's missionary congregations needs pastors who are:

- poets who help the congregation hear their story as God's pilgrim people.
- prophets who imaginatively point to a vision of God's purposes in the world.
- apostles who lead through terrain where old maps no longer work and show congregations how to encounter culture with the gospel.

This is an academic but thoughtful booklet on the place of missionary congregations and their leaders.

Originally reviewed for D Cronshaw "The Emerging Church: Pioneering Leadership and Innovation Reading Guide", Zadok Paper (Forthcoming 2010).

"...we are faithfully to indwell the gospel in a culture that has disembedded itself from that tradition."

In a handbook for doing mission that you can read through in very little time and that'll take several readings and considerable pondering to understand and appropriate, Pastor Alan Roxburgh explores Victor Turner's book-length essay on liminality, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, (Cornell University Press, 1969) as a framework to help us understand the historical, contemporary and maybe even future call of the church. The experience of liminality, of being on the threshold between old and new, neither back where we were nor yet where we think we're heading typically applies to ritualized liturgical rites of passages that dissolve and dis-embed aspects of an individual's or a group's old identity and are at least the beginning of incorporation into a new group or community along with a new status. For Christians, baptism is our primal liminal experience. As we enter the waters, should we be prepared to drown? Yes! And we should be equally prepared to be surprisingly raised from that death by drowning! And then there's also the desert...

Although Pastor Roxburgh insists "The church's lived experience is marginalization," then he says center-margin language is obsolete and also cites the contemporary Spirituality Smorgasbord. And then he says a possible center-periphery relationship may exist between urban and non-urban, though he claims the urban center itself has no margins. This is fascinating and highly thought-provoking and brings us back to the tendency to equate modernization with urbanization as it evokes Max Weber and rationalization, too. Pastor Roxburgh strikingly observes (page 38): "...it is not marginalization that shapes our context but a liminality without center points from which to gain perspective or meaning." Continuing both/and, neither/nor language, marginalization presupposes a center and a periphery. Amidst all the talk about community, Pastor Roxburgh cites Christianity's shift to a "private, individualistic center." We still keep hearing far too much about a proprietary Jesus...

Pastor Alan reminds us that historically the church building - the physical church structure - was a place of refuge, a place of sanctuary. As people of the Good Book we affirm wherever God meets the people is holy, sacred ground, "sanctuary." In biblical - in covenantal - terms, it is God indwelling the people, it is God's encounters with the creation to which Godself so passionately has "attached" Godself that sanctifies life.

Pastor Roxburgh definitely is not talking about business models and parallels as he considers the leadership of the church in a time of liminality, which requires leaders whose identity is formed by the tradition rather than the culture and leaders who listen to the voices from the edges where the apostle, the prophet, and the poet are found.

"...leaders whose identity is formed by the tradition rather than the culture." But he doesn't explain how the tradition has formed the identity of those leaders. I also need to quote, "...they are cries that long to be connected to a Word that calls them beyond themselves into a place of belonging that God gives within a people." "The alternative community...is formed as the prophetic word addresses the pained recognition of our liminality." For Christians, baptism into the alternative, counter-cultural community that daily walks the way of the cross and lives the reality of resurrection is our primal liminal experience. And then there's also the desert...

Finally, we can consider the re-symbolization and professionalization of church leadership, as it has become and continues becoming yet another clubby priesthood with all of the occultisms, rituals, secrets, insignia, gnoses - and bureaucracies - associated with all of those other royal priesthoods...remember the Jerusalem Temple? I hope this short selection of ideas from The Missionary Congregation Leadership and Liminality will encourage you to read the book, which would be an excellent choice for study by a parish mission or outreach committee, council, session or vestry. There's enough material in its less than 100 pages (71, actually) for at least 5 or 6 serious discussions.