For: The Institute Of Contemporary And Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen’s University, Essentials Blue Online Worship Theology Course with Dan Wilt (ICEWS, eb 08)
I’ve joined 30 Vineyard worship leaders and influencers in another Essentials Blue course for the next 5 weeks. It’s exciting to see this group gather, from 8 different countries, all carrying the same DNA of the Vineyard movement.
If you are interested in tracking with some of their blogs, you can find them here
Already there’s a sense that we’re going to mine some gold with this group.
Nic Gee, has done a great post this week on liminal spaces which we attempt to provide as we lead others into worship.
Nic’s thoughts sent me off in a totally new direction as I made a connection with liminality found in Alan Hirsch’s book The Forgotten Ways. Alan has written expansively relating to the rites of passage in African people groups to the massive adaptive challenge the Western church is currently experiencing.
(I don’t want to get off on a tangent, but to come to grips with these primal shifts in community dynamics, anthropologist Victor Turner’s ideas of liminality and communitas are particularly useful. The study has linked liminality with communitas – where a community encounters God and one another in a new way. It involves adventure and movement, and it describes that unique experience of togetherness that only really happens among a group of people on a dangerous journey to unfamiliar places.)
As I consider the teaching Dan Wilt includes in the Essentials Blue course regarding liminal (‘threshold’) spaces, I’m exploring this dynamic of liminality further, as perhaps there is a strong thread connected to what happens to a community of faith, when they touch these God-initiated liminal spaces.
I am off to seek more understanding about this. If you are reading this, and can point me along the way of discovery, let me know!
Other sources:
1. A.J.Roxburgh, the Missionary Congregration, Leadership and Liminality, 1997, p 61
2. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (1969) and Passages, Margins and Poverty: Religious symbols of communitas, Part 1 Worship 46, 1972
Wonderful, Di.