We now come to the end of Alan Hirsch, Forgotten Missional Ways, which book has continued to grow on me as a must-read for missional Christians. What happens when a growing, thriving, missional church gets captured by middle-class culture: it combines safety and security with comfort and convenience. Somehow it moves from a missional church into an institutional church. There’s more:
Hirsch’s own church went through this: they continued to grow, but it was through transfers and not as a result of missional work like conversions. They moved from a “me for the community and the community for the world” to a “the community for me.”
Communitas, the 6th feature of the missional church, describes what happens when individuals are drawn together through a common ordeal, experience, or mission. Communitas occurs during liminality — during a period of changing paradigms.
Communitas occurred during 9/11, during the tsunami, and during Katrina. People forged together to restore life and in doing they formed communitas to make it happen.
The danger to communitas is equilibrium. What we want is chaos — what we want is for the church to be challenged so that excitation occurs and this generates creativity and response to the conditions. This leads to self-organization and a life lived into the future (or shaped by that future).