I've been pondering this for some time now so here goes. About four years ago i wrote an article for a journal exploring contemporary emerging missiology, one of the conclusions that i came to was something called a hermeneutic of communitas. As the years progress I'm getting less convinced of the missiological significance of communitas, i think that is maybe as ineffective as short term mission, and that the focus should be more on aggregation than communitas...let me explain further.
Communitas arises out of situations of liminality of being on the margin, a term borrowed from Arnold van Gennep's concept of rites de passage. The transitional experience of a rite de passage is marked by three phases: separation, margin or ‘limen’, and aggregation. A participant in a rite de passage, whether in the formal sense or the informal is first separated from the social structure he or she formally occupied, then experiences a period of time on the margin during which the subject is in some way transformed and introduced to the new situation he or she will occupy next. A re-gathering or "aggregation" back into the structure of society follows and completes the process. It is the middle phase that seems to interest most writers in the emerging church, the 'liminal' period, when one is neither here nor there in terms of social structure. One is marginal and Turner calls the experience one of liminality. The experience of marginal people, experiencing liminality, is one of communitas.
Frost in Exiles (which I'm still to be convinced by) develops the notion of communitas further and has a tendency, with Turner, to glamorises communitas over community for example: ‘Attending a middle-class church in a respectable middle-class neighbourhood isn’t a liminal experience. Joining a peace movement in a neighbourhood obsessed with military might is. Travelling to Indonesia to help with the international relief effort after a tsunami is. Joining a church-planting team is’ (123, 2006). This is an unhelpful polarity as all these experiences can be an experience of liminality, or they can be incredibly safe. Experiences of communitas need to be aggregated back into the life of the wider community, or communitas becomes a short-term unsustainable mission team and hence the ideal of communitas becomes another name for short-term mission rather than long-term meaningful transformation.
Frost, to his credit, mentions that the reintegration of the communitas into the mainstream church can be a profound experience for both involved, indeed Turner suggested that it is in the dialect between communitas and normal society that the future hope resides. This dialect, or the aggregation, is therefore the most significant part of the experience of communitas. Communitas is unsustainable short-term mission whereas aggregation is the point of profound transformation for both communitas and normal society.
This is where i think that my vocation is, to be a point of dialect with the communitas and normal society, between the emerging church and the church catholic. I think that this is a step on from some of the early emerging churches, who were not interested in dialect, but only communitas. This is not a a value judgement as we would not be able to have the current dialect without the earlier experiences of liminality.
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