Yesterday was one of those bizarre experiences when the micro and macro aspects of my life converged for a moment. I’m sitting at the DMV (department of motor vehicles) with my tag, “B003,” waiting for my turn, which might never come (despite the fact that I got there 20 minutes before it opened) because the computers were down. I decided to hunker down in my extremely comfortable plastic chair under the lovely ambience of the DMV fluorescent lights to finish my read of Roxburgh’s book, “The Sky is Falling: Leaders Lost in Transition.”
There I sat lost in the maze of the DMV reading about ”liminality,” the in-between stage where people have lost their known world, yet need to discover an alternative present. Webster’s defines liminality as “the condition of being on a threshold or at the beginning of a process.” Indeed, I was at the beginning of a process at the DMV, one that would inevitably take more time than I wanted. “Our computers are down, they will be up in 10 minutes.” Should I leave and come back tomorrow? (After I got here so early, and had hubby drive the carpool?) Should I stay and wait…hoping eventually the computers would be back up? Should I leave and drive to another DMV?
The commonality between the macrocosm of the church’s liminality and the microcosm of my personal DMV ordeal hit home. With the unexpected twist of–the “computers down”– the known path of arriving early and getting a good number would not necessarily get me the expected result. So also churches live in the between time, where the known paths might not get the expected results. These paths consist of doing certain types of programs, serving certain types of people, which are less frequently getting the expected result. There was a time when a pastor could preach a pretty good sermon, the church could have a pretty good children/youth program, provide a pretty good choir and the church would be fine. So church leaders wonder, will the time come when it will all snap back to normal . . .when we can cover these bases well and the church can continue just fine year to year?
I always know that a person is not ready to identify with the liminal stage we are in as the CHURCH when they say to me, “Well things are hard at our church now, but these things come and go. It’ll all shake out in the end.”
Of critical importance in looking at the church in the larger context is naming the fact that we can’t go back; we don’t know quite where we are headed, and no clear path exists to take all the uncertainty away. Liminal names this well. Similar to my wait at the DMV, the emotions that well up are confusion, anger, and sadness. Leadership in this time requires living in the tension. The leadership skills needed are helping people name what’s going on, grieve it, and find in our traditions/biblical stories the courage needed to adapt and create new forms of church life (with a big dose of the Spirit’s guidance).
The tendency of leaders is to try to comfort the people and ourselves with platitudes. I think of the guy at the DMV. When he first came out he said, “The computers are down, they will be back up in 10 minutes.” Then the next time he came out he said, “The computers are still down, they will be back up in 30 minutes.” Then the third time he came out he said, “The computers are still down and I have NO IDEA when they will be back up.” This is the key “aha” moment as leaders. The “I have NO IDEA” moment, when we admit there’s no logic in simply longing for things to be as they were, but we have no real idea exactly how it will be as the church is birthed anew.
Have you reached the “I have NO IDEA” moment yet in grappling with the larger context of the Church in the US?
Photo: “Ottawa River”
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