We are so grateful to have rolled out an invitation this past week to churches, including your own, to join an emerging Community of Churches (if you happened to miss it we invite you to visit our website or click the FAQ button found below).

As we look to equip leaders and congregations in navigating change and conflict there are a couple of key and nearly universal challenges. In this Facing Change Series, we’ll explore several of these as we invite you to consider partnering in the Community of Churches. To get us started, Susan Beaumont writes about the challenges of liminal spaces in her book How to Lead When You Don’t Know Where You’re Going: Leading in a Liminal Season. These liminal spaces are threshold moments as individuals, congregations, and more move from what has been to what will be.

Beaumont writes:

“All significant transitional experiences… follow a predictable three-part process. Something comes to an end. There is an in-between season marked by disorientation, disidentification, and disengagement. Finally, and often after a very long and painful struggle, something new emerges.

1) Separation: A period in which a person, group, or social order is stripped of the identity and status that previously defined it.

2) Liminal Period: A disorienting period of non-structure or anti-structure that opens new possibilities no longer based on old status or power hierarchies. New identities are explored, and new possibilities are considered.

3) Reorientation: A reforming period in which the person, group, or social order adopts a new identity, is granted new status, and designs new structures more appropriately suited to the emerging identity.”

We encounter these liminal spaces as both individuals and churches. The North American church finds itself in a liminal space as we step away from a season of Christendom and move into more of a post-Christian existence. But this is not the only liminal space many of our congregations are experiencing. For some congregations the liminal space is trying to live within the changing context of the denomination of the CRCNA. For other congregations they anticipate a separation from the denomination and therefore their liminal space is yet undefined. Regardless of the specific context, so many of our congregations and very many of our leaders are experiencing this in-between and they long for a community that can support them through their wilderness.

If these challenges resonate with you, if you feel like you’ve been walking this journey alone as a leader or a church, and if you would like support in navigating with your church ways forward that lead to a reoriented reality in which you thrive, we invite you to consider joining the Community of Churches as it serves as a learning community (Click Here to access the interest form or Click Here to access the FAQ and Preliminary Calendar).

We hope you’ll join us in this two year journey by which you can be equipped, empowered, cared for, and surrounded by a community of leaders and churches as we center ourselves on Christ and steward our churches into God’s preferred future.

In Hope,

The Better Together Team