The Missionary Congregation, Leadership, and Liminality

The urgent question for Christian mission in North America today has to do with churches and congregations and the crisis of their identity in the culture of modernity. Alan Roxburgh argues that the crisis is not merely one of internal identity or structures but involves the massive changes that have transformed modernity, including the shifting of the church from the center of culture to the margins. Chapter 1 reviews the marginalization of the churches and their self-under-standing of that context; chapter 2 examines Victor Turner's work on liminality (a term describing the transition process that accompanies a change of state or social position), relating it to the church's experience of marginalization; chapter 3 outlines leadership characteristics required in today's missionary congregations. Alan J. Roxburgh is Senior Pastor of West Vancouver Baptist Church in British Columbia, an adjunct faculty member of Regent College in Vancouver, and author of the recently published Reaching a New Generation.