I am part of a book club at the community of faith that I participate with. We are reading The Shaping of Things to Come by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch. This was one of the books we read as a cohort in the DMin program at George Fox. The following is one of the responses that I posted on our community book club reading board. I had listed several question from chapter 1 of the book and then reflected on one of them.
Here’s one of the questions that I am continually reflecting on:
"How does it feel to be a part of a community that is living “between the times,” (the concept of liminality, i.e., between the cultural shift from modernity to postmodernity (or what ever it will be called by history) and knows it?"
When one stops to think about the time we live in, we usually think “present” time versus “past” or “future” time. The NT provides us a concept that we really live “between the times.” The time we live in is referred to “this present evil age” and it fits between the “first coming” of Jesus and the “second coming” of Jesus. We don’t live in the “past” or in the “future” but in the “presence of the future” a “between the time” time.
Let’s apply that concept to now. We live between the cultural shift from modernity to postmodernity. We actually live in neither all the time. We are influenced by both modernity and postmodernity at the same time, a “between the time” time. There is a slight difference. Modernity has not disappeared and neither has Christendom. Postmodernity (or what ever it will be called by historians 1000 years from now) is not fully here. On has not replaced the other. It took modernity 1000 years to replace the middle ages. So we live in the tension of the “between the times” time.
As my wife, Donna Faith, stated to me, different personality types respond differently to life. Thus there is not a “single” answer to the question. There is only how one feels about it.
Personally, I love the tension. I seem to thrive on it. It excites me to think about some “older” things passing away and some “newer” things coming into existence. I love “older” things, after all I am one. I often wonder what wonderful things that my children will face in the years to come that aren’t even a part of my imagination in the present. The only constant thing is change and that is what living “between the times” brings. After all, nothing stays the same. I look at my hand and say, “yep, that is a hand,” but a year from now it will be completely new. Every cell in my hand today will have died and been replaced by new ones, while my hand looks “static” it is not. My hand lives “between the times” of being what is and becoming what it will be. Such is the destiny of VCC. She lives today as she is becoming what she will be tomorrow.
I think VCC knows she is a “between the time” community. She holds on to the “older” things that are not hindrances to creating “newer” things, a blessing from her creator.
Here is a link to the concept of Liminality by one of the authors of Missional Church. The Missionary Congregation, Leadership, and Liminality (Christian Mission and Modern Culture) by Alan J. Roxburgh
Posted by drwinn at July 31, 2004 02:34 PM