Session Retreat 2020 Preparation

The Promise and Perils of Liminal Seasons

Liminality as in-betweenness – neither here nor there

Discomfort, but promise:

“Liminal seasons are challenging, disorienting, and unsettling… we feel as though we are trudging through mud, moving away from something comfortable and known, toward something that can’t yet be known.

Liminal seasons are also exciting and innovative. The promise of a new beginning unleashes energy, potential, and passion. All truly great innovations are incubated in liminality. God’s greatest work occurs in liminal space.”

You have reflected on how God has been doing God’s work during this liminal time of our community. 

The liminal period can be an incredibly freeing season in which old structures are released, new identities and possibilities are explored, and power is reassigned.

The Bible and faith story filled with liminal experiences. They tell stories of characters who wander in and out of liminal times and spaces, being shaped further into the likeness of God through the power of liminality.

• Adam and Eve: humankind leaves the garden and begins an ongoing journey toward redemption and salvation.
• Ruth gives up identity as Moabite, period of wandering into Judah.
• Joseph: liminal time in Egypt.
• Abraham, Jacob: leaving comfort and familiarity for an unfamiliar place to which God called them.

Through liminal experiences human beings are transformed and brought into deeper relationship with God. “All transformation takes place here.” “If we don’t encounter liminal space in our lives, we start idealizing normalcy.”

During liminal seasons we stand on both sides of a threshold. We have one foot rooted in something that is not yet over, whereas the other foot is planted in a thing not yet defined, something not yet ready to begin. 

During liminal seasons, our destination is not yet clear.

Entering the Liminal Season

The three part process of all significant transitional experiences:

1. Separation: something comes to an end
2. Liminal Period: disorientation, disidentification and disengagement. But opens up new possibilities no longer based on old status or power hierarchies. New identities are explored, and new possibilities are considered.
3. Reorientation: something new emerges.

1. Separation

The starting point for any kind of transition is not the outcome you are moving toward, but the ending that you must make to leave the old situation behind.

A liminal organization needs to unlearn old behaviours, challenge the status quo, experiment, take risks, and learn.

2. Entering the Liminal State

Liminality is simultaneously dangerous, alluring and sacred.

Danger: great disorientation leading to anguish and existential fear, facing a void and collapse of order and status as we have come to understand it. We become nameless; if we are no longer that, then who are we? Or whose are we?

Predictable behaviours in the liminal space:

• Anxiety rises; motivation falls. People question their attachment to the organization or cause. They wonder if they want to continue the relationship.
• Attendance drops off. Some people stop attending altogether, planning to take a break until the liminal season is over. Others attend but with less frequency, deciding that this is a good time to pull back, take a bit of a break, and wait to see what emerges next. The detachment of some places additional stress on others who find they must pick up the slack of those taking a breather.
• Old weaknesses, long patched over or compensated for, reemerge in full bloom. 
• Personnel are overloaded. Signals about what is important are mixed, and systems are in flux and therefore unreliable. It takes more effort to accomplish everything, even the most mundane daily tasks.
• People in the organization are easily polarized between those who want to rush forward into the new thing and those who long to return to the old familiar ways.

Alluring: situation invites experimentation and risk-taking. It invites originality, generativity, and creativity. 

The primary work in leading people the liminal phase is to normalize the experience and to frame/define the season as acceptable and even desirable. The effective leader invites the people to examine and adapt attitudes, values, assumptions and behaviours – to understand the loss as something productive.

Key Question: What are called to do or become in this season?

Sacred: encountering communitas

• In the liminal period, something marvelous and transforming can occur. Communitas might emerge (unstructured community in which people are equal). And that has the potential to change everything and everyone.
• In communitas, a sense of common humanity emerges in which all members are experienced as equals. We are free to experiment and learn.
• Early years of wilderness wanderings by Israelites.

3. Readiness for a New Beginning

Reorientation, a reforming period in which the person, group, or social order adopts a new status and structures more appropriately suited to an emerging identity.

A new beginning doesn’t happen according to schedule or plan. True beginnings follow the timing of spirit, mind, and heart. A new beginning happens when the people are spiritually and emotionally ready to move out of liminality and into a new chapter of life. 

The work of the leader is as much about presence as it is about action.

The leader provides interpretations and gives meaning to what the people are encountering.

A liminal season requires a personal presence that is different from leadership during stable times. Leading in a liminal season requires helping people manage their anxiety, embrace the freedom of unknowing, explore new possible identities and pathways, and resist the temptation to reorient people before they are ready. 

Leadership in a liminal season rarely looks outstanding. 

Moses’ leadership presence during the wilderness wandering was not remarkable for the mileage covered, the growth of the community under his leadership, or the productivity of the community. Moses’ leadership during liminality is remarkable because of the new national identity that he birthed following God’s lead.

Moses does not enter the promised land with the people. His part of the biblical story only involved liminal season leadership. Moses emerges at the end of an era; he watches over the disintegration of the social structure that oppressed his people in slavery. Moses guides them through their liminal era and then turns the leadership reins over to the next generation. There is little in the way of accountable success in Moses’ story, and yet he is one of our greatest leadership heroes.

Liminal leadership requires leading from a place of open wonder and curiosity. We can be led by the future itself as we discover the mind of Christ for the heart of the Church.

Summary of Reflection Questions

1. How have we responded to this liminal season during the pandemic?
   1. How has the disorientation affected us? How have we been challenged? Unsettled?
   2. How has God’s work shown the promise of new beginnings?
2. What endings do we need to make?
   1. What are some old behaviors or elements of the status quo that we need to end and leave behind?
3. Which dangers or predictable behaviours have you noticed in our church?
4. What do you think we are called to do or become in this season?
5. Have you witnessed any of marvelous and transforming communitas emerge?
6. What kind of leadership and presence is required of the Session during this time and season?
7. What wisdom, spirituality and skills do we need to cultivate to be that kind of presence?