Al and Debra Hirsch were speaking at the Christian Associates staff conference in the Netherlands last week. Al is co-author with Michael Frost of The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st Century Church and National Director of Forge Mission Training Agency in Australia. It was all good stimulating, bawdy, overstated stuff - an excellent antidote to the slow grind of church-planting. Most of us left wanting to be hip wild geese dudes like Al and Debra flying in spiritual freedom, not the fat domesticated creatures that waddle around farmyards. That’s the power of a metaphor!

The recurring problem of the tension between narrative-historical and personal-existential readings of scripture came up in conversation. Al’s not keen on an eschatology (like mine) that, on the face of it, pushes large chunks of New Testament content back into the past. He wants an eschatology that addresses the liminality of the present moment and generates communitas.

The terminology comes from Victor Turner’s study of rites of passage - the process by which members of a group make the transition from one social status to another. ‘Liminality’, as Hirsch explains it, refers to periods of seclusion from the group and ordeal - for example, the trial by nature that young boys must go through out in the bush before re-entering the village as men. ‘Communitas’ is the intensified, unstructured and egalitarian form of community that develops in liminal situations. It is found in the early church and in churches that are suffering persecution. The Hirschian argument is that this condition should be normative for the missionary people of God.

The question, of course, is whether it is possible to live in a perpetual state of liminality. The exodus and the exile were unsettling and formative experiences, but they were spasms in the history of the people of God, thresholds, transitions in and out of a state of being settled - and ideally secure and prosperous - in the land. The early church was bound to accept the Constantinian settlement and to mistake Christian civilization for new creation. Hirsch laments the fact that the Chinese church is going bourgeois round the edges.

There is something in the argument that the precarious cultural and intellectual position of the church in the post-Christendom, postmodern world is analogous to the social insecurity that the early church faced. But still, a lot of energy is going into answering the questions, developing a new consensus, alleviating the tension. The whole emerging church thing feels transitional. To misquote T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, mankind cannot bear too much liminality.

It occurs to me, incidentally, that the ‘emerging church’ is not the church that will emerge from the ruins of Christendom. It is a forward-looking conversation about what will emerge and it is an attempt to model or illustrate in small, ineffectual and often flawed ways what that renewed post-Christendom church will be like. The significance of the emerging church movement is that it helps us to envisage - experimentally, provisionally and prophetically - what the church is becoming. It shouldn’t, therefore, be taken too seriously. There’s a long way to go yet.

Al and Debra also both laid great emphasis on the centrality of Jesus and mission for our understanding of what the church is called to be. Nothing very controversial in that, but his formula christology defines mission and mission defines church got me wondering.

In the first place, at the Future of the People of God conference in 2004 Tom Wright argued for a slightly different formula: eschatology defines mission and mission defines church. So if we take as the final objective the renewal of creation (not escape to the heavens), we have a mission that is creational in scope and a church that is expansive enough and imaginative enough to embrace that mission.

Beginning with eschatology, of course, is simply another way of saying beginning with God’s calling of a people to be a renewed creation, which goes all the way back to Abraham (go forth, multiply, fill the land). The problem is that this people repeatedly becomes corrupt or trapped by history and needs saving or redeeming: from slavery in Egypt, from ‘exile’, from persistent rebellion against God. I would suggest that what Jesus or christology defines is not mission but the saving of the people for the mission of God. He came to save his people from their sins so that they could be a new humanity. The lordship of Christ over the church is likewise the means by which the people of God stays on track to fulfil that mission, above all through a willingness to give and suffer for the sake of others, a willingness to be marginalized, a willingness to locate ourselves where renewal becomes possible.

So a more complex formula seems appropriate: God calls a people to be ‘new creation’ in the midst of the world and to work out that calling in community as mission; the perennial failure of the community, however, necessitates redemption, decisively in the death and resurrection of Jesus, and renewal through the power of the Spirit of God. A string of long words demonstrates the circularity of the formula: eschatology → missiology → ecclesiology → christology → eschatology. ‘Ecclesiology’ in this case must be understood to refer to the people called since Abraham to reproduce the paradigm of a righteous, God-centred humanity.

The liminality model makes sense of this more elaborate pattern. The calling of the people of God is to model new creation, which is fundamentally a settled experience of community around the living God. Renewal is an ordeal, a crisis, an unsettled transitional experience at the margins, a narrow and dangerous path, embodied in the suffering Son of man. We can’t help but oscillate between the two.