Conference Vision
Some call this is a ‘liminal season’ — a time when individuals and institutions are struggling with surprising forces inside and out, often experiencing disorientation, disengagement, and disenchantment. Leadership in ministry today requires dexterity in navigating the ‘known and the unknown’ of this time.
“There is a sweet spot between the known and the unknown where originality happens, they key is to be able to linger there without panicking.”
—Ed Catmull, computer scientist and animator, co-founder of Pixar
Susan Beaumont, author of How To Lead When you Don’t Know Where You’re Going: Leading in a Liminal Season [2019]) suggests that leadership in a liminal season is different than leadership in stable times: “An effective leader must help individuals and groups remain in a liminal state for the time that it takes to get clear about identity and to discover new structures that are more appropriately suited to their emerging identity.” (20) Recalling Moses, she suggests that leadership in a liminal time is ‘incredibly dangerous’ because people are unhappy and uneasy in the time of grief, loss, and letting go. Also, like Moses, liminal leaders might not get to the Promised Land. We don’t know the full story in this moment.
Limin, from Latin, is a transverse beam in a door frame, the threshold. You cross the threshold to go from outside of a building to the inside. A new and different space. Liminality, emerging first as a concept in anthropology, was later picked up by Victor Turner in the late 1960s who applied it to social, political, and behavioural sciences. Religious commentators have offered various insights into the experience of liminality in congregations, denominations, and other institutions. Adaptive leadership (Heifetz, Linsky et al) offers people in leadership an approach to the liminal space of organizations. “Regardless of how we characterize this epoch,” writes Beaumont, “one thing is clear. We are engaging in a transformation, the outcome of which is presently unknowable.” (8)
“In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors”
—William Blake
… known and unknown…
It’s a suggestive phrase. Perhaps a bit vague. Intentionally so. Open to possibilities and creative thinking.
Blake may have been the originator of the phrase, linking it also with the idea of threshold, limin. “There are things known and things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception,” was the way that writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley picked up the theme.
Even more interesting, perhaps Urban Legend, but rock singer-song writer Jim Morrison is said to have taken this quote and shaped it into the name for the band, The Doors: ‘There are things known and things unknown and in between are the doors.’
At this Vancouver School of Theology conference, we have invited presenters, workshop leaders, worship leaders, and preachers to offer wisdom into this liminal season from a variety of perspectives. We hope that students, alumni, and church leaders will engage and connect across diverse experiences to live into this liminal season with faithful leadership.
Where are we going now? And where will we find ourselves in months and years to come?
Coming at the end of the Lilly Endowment funded Pathways Project — Leaders for a New Day — which has focused on renewing and strengthening Theological Field Education (TFE), we hope this conference will be attentive to ‘transitions’ and ‘integration’ as we all seek to attend to the threshold or liminal moments that face us. TFE engages this integrative work explicitly but not by itself; other areas of the theological curriculum do so as well. Perhaps what we are proposing here is an opportunity for ‘putting it all together’ — not in a final way but in a constructive and meaningful way — for an unknown future work with what we know and trust.
… millions … who say they have no religion in particular are actually “liminal” in that they may leave religious communities “only for a season.” It would help bring these liminals back if religious communities pursued “a truer, wider path toward the common good.”
—Steven Tipton, professor emeritus at Emory’s Candler School of Theology, in his new book, In and Out of Church:The Moral Arc of Spiritual Change in America.