As indicated in my previous post 'liminality' is a threshold place. Accordingly, sometimes when people talk about us living in a 'liminal' period in regards to the Church they envisage a period of change between what has gone before (Christendom, modernity, inherited Church etc) and a new future of a new way of doing and being Church. (Note that Frost and Hirsch in 'The Faith of Leap' offer a more sophisticated reading than this).
This idea of passing through 'liminality' to a different future has both problems and dangers. One of the problems is that 'liminal' times, such as rites of passage may be periods of 'threshold' but in fact they are designed not so much to transform the wider society but are contained within it in order to maintain it. E.g. a person moves from child to adult in a rite of passage and returns to the society in a new role but in the same old structure and society. To put that differently, for an individual or group a period of time may be 'liminal' but that very 'liminality' is managed by wider society for its own ongoing self preservation. Turner recognised this reality in his discussions of the 'liminal' particularly in older agrarian societies and accordingly while such periods were ones of novelty and involved the playing with traditional symbols and included the 'potentiality' for change in wider society they need not result in such. He writes 'Thus the tribal liminal, however exotic in appearanc, can never be much more than a subversive flicker. Tt is put into the service of the normativeness almost as soon as it appears.' [Turner, ‘Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology’ in From Ritual to Theatre: The Human seriousness of Play, by Victor Turner (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982), 44-45.]
This potentially limited nature of the 'liminal' period can be compared to the way in which events such as Carnival can be seen and accepted as a place in which people 'let of steam' in order that they then return to the more stable structure and way of things. I recently saw some fairly scantily dressed Carnival dancers led by a singer who on his hat had pictures of the Virgin Mary and Jesus! In turn the limited nature of liminality can also be related to ideas of the way in which the dominant system of Consumer Capitalism can even manage protest against it to self serving ends.
For the Church this limited nature of the concept of the liminal can be instructive:
It perhaps warns that present missional concerns and changes may simply be a letting off of steam which will settle down again.
It perhaps indicates he way in which potentially transformative 'movements' within the Church can be constrained and restrained and perhaps even used to simply maintain the status quo of the Church as ideas and practices are modified according to overaching established normative ideas. E.g. the Emerging Church movement was perhaps nullified as a reform movement from the moment that its ideas and books were being sold in mainstream Christian bookshops under such headings as 'evangelism' or 'Messy Church' can be not a new way of doing or being Church but simply the description for an occassional alternative (all age) service held now and again while 'real' services remain the stable diet and if not the fundamental structure of the institution in its politics remain the same.
At times I engage with 'missional' writers to critique their ideas not because I am against transformation in the church but precisely because I often think that that which is being presented as 'radical' are behaviours ultimately deeply controlled by the normative and inherited ideas of a particular way of being the Church rather than actually changing the status quo.
All of this said the concept of the 'liminal' remains interesting and important for thinking about our present situation as do other ideas associated with Turner. in this respect I think that the ones which are more instructive are 'the liminoid', 'communitas' and 'liminal people'.
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