Liquid Church by Pete Ward is a book that I have been meaning to review for many months. At first glance you look at its hundred and eight pages and you think, “no problem”. The book is not a book of practices of a parish called Liquid Church but rather a collection of theories and ideas and each one of them must be thought about and mulled over in the context of you local church. On top of that, the book is visionary and gives a picture of a church that is not here or is only in its infancies.
What is Liquid Church? Liquid Church is a response to our rapidly changing society. Where the local parish at one time was built by farmers and manufacturers who were geographically stable. As we move to a geographically and culturally fluid culture where change comes in many shapes, ways and sizes, the church needs to be more flexible to move through, around, and in amongst today’s culture.
From friends of mine who read it, the response is “I really enjoyed it but I am still thinking through some parts of the book”. The more times I read the book, the more I learn and more fertile my mind is for its ideas to grow. This book is not for everyone. Those that Robert Webber defines as pragmatic evangelicals will find the lack of clear steps intolerable but for those who are engaged in the postmodern conversation will find the book challenging, visionary, and have a lot of ideas that are outside our box (churches need to pander to spiritual consumerism) that will generate much discussion.
Selected Insights
…liquid church does not exist yet. Moreover, please do not think that I have set up and run a successful, thriving liquid church. This means that what I say is an attempt to imagine rather than describe a different way of being church. – 1…we need to shift from seeing church as a gathering of people meeting in one place at one time-that is a congregation-to a notion of church as a series of relationships and communications. This image implies something like a network or a web rather than an assembly of people. – 2
Stuart Murray described this to me as the shift from church as a noun to church as a verb. So we can say, “I church, you church, we church.” For too long we have seen church as something that we attend. We might sign a few hymn or even play a more active role, but there is something passive and even a little alienating about the externalized and rather monolithic idea of church. If, however, church is something that comes about when we make it, then walls come tumbling down. Suddenly being church and doing church becoming an exciting adventure. – 3
How we organize and think of church today is the result of years of historical and social developments. The New Testament descriptions have been a theological starting point for the church, but a various times the sociological pattern of church life has had to be created and re-created. The historical expression of what it means to be the assembly of God as therefore gone through a series of changes and developments. What this means is that the way we organize church may be inherited, but it not preordained. – 8
If the Modern Era was a rage for order, regulation, stability, singularity, and fixity, the Postmodern Era is a rage for chaos, uncertainty, otherness, openness, multiplicity, and change. Postmodern surfaces are not landscapes but wavescapes, with the waters always changing and the surfaces never the same. The sea knows no boundaries. – Leonard Sweet. – 15
Solid modernity is based on our victory of the settled over the nomad; it is a culture of production rather then consumption and above all is linked to ways of organizing production that were first developed by the car maker Henry Ford. Modernity was shaped by the Fordist principles of expansion, size, plant, boundaries, norms, rules, and class orientated affinities and identities. – 16The local church may support many good and important activities, including mission trips, evangelism, youth ministry, social projects, and so on, but they are all assessed in terms of their effect or otherwise on regular Sunday attendance. People may turn to Christ through the youth mission or Alpha course, and this is good, but they are not banked, they really don’t count, until they start to attend Sunday services. – 17
I have sometimes felt that the real purpose of the church services is to enable clergy to count the congregation. This is probably a little cynical, but solid church finds its main sense of success in the number of people who attend on a Sunday. Regular church attendance is seen as being a significant test of spiritual health, and church growth is measured in size of congregations. The importance of Sunday attendance and congregational size can never be underestimated for solid church. – 18
The emphasis upon attendance at one central service enables ministers to see easily if people are starting to flag in their spiritual lives. We might attend to hear the preacher, but clergy often attend because they want to see us there. The system of counting sheep and making sure they attend can lead us into unhealthy relationships pf surveillance and control. Ministers sometimes express frustration with the way that a central service restricts their ability to experiment and be creative, and the weight of being responsible for the regular attendance of members can be intolerable. As a youth minister in a church I felt something of this pressure. When the numbers of young people sitting in the back pew increased, I was doing well, but if they started to decrease, questions were asked. The implication was that it was my job to look after their spiritual health, and this was assessed in terms of their regular attendance on Sunday mornings. – 19
In solid modernity the size of the factory building was a major sign of success. Extending the production facility was the aim of the business. Similarly sold church focus on buildings to hold more people and process more activities – 19
Solid church is built on the assumption that it is good for large numbers of very different people to meet in the same room and do the same sort of thing together. Worship therefore becomes a one-size-fits-all environment. The result is that we provide a rather bland and inoffensive diet of middle of the road music and safe spirituality. Variety in what we have to offer is severely limited by the tastes and prejudices of those who attend. Extremes are tempered because one of the key values is that we do not offend anyone who comes to church regularly. – 19
One size fits all is made into a virtue by those who run solid church. Everything about regular Sunday worship is designed to make us feel that even if we don’t like it, we should still attend because it is good for us. As with cough medicine, we endure the bad taste because we are told that it is doing us good. – 20
Solid church does not disappear in liquid modernity; rather, it experiences a subtle mutation. Just as in modernity the premodern aspects of church continued, so in liquid modernity the premodern, parish-based church and the modern congregation or gathered church also continue. But while they may exist, they do not remain unchanged by the fluidity of people’s lives and the surrounding culture. Liquid modernity brings out the mutation in the parish and in the congregation. These changes have emerged almost imperceptibly, so much so that many church leaders may not have noticed what has happened. Those running parishes and congregations think that they are doing what the church has always done. Unfortunately neither the congregation nor the people in the wider parish have stood still. Liquid modernity has seeped under the church door and into the sanctuary. – 25
This change in community at a local and a collective level has made churches mutate. Whereas once they reflected a social reality beyond themselves, now this is less likely to be the case. This means that since church does not reflect a wider community it must in some way compensate for this lack. At the same time those attend church do so with a different set of social needs. Now church is seen as a personal lifestyle choice among many others. – 26
Solid church generally mutates in three ways: as heritage site, as refuge, and as nostalgic community. 26
…the mutation of solid church into heritage, refuge, and nostalgic communities has seriously decreased its ability to engage in genuine mission in liquid modernity. These mutations degrade the gospel genetic code of the church. – 29
Believers are one with each other because they are joined to Christ. The temptation is to reverse these priorities, so that by being joined to the church one is joined to Christ. – 36
It is worth reflecting for a moment on the difference between these ideas of what it means to be “in Christ” and what immediately comes to mind when we use the phrase “in church”. When we say, “in church,” it is hard to get some kind of building out of our minds. This imagery is the heart of the debate about liquid church. We need to find some way if imagining church that reflects the fullness of Christ in whom all things join together. Paul was able to combine a dynamic lifestyle of being in Christ with the idea of being on with other Christians in the body of Christ. – 37
…the failure to reverse the order and say that that body of Christ is the church means that we are often unable to imagine ourselves outside of the institutional church. – 38
We need to let go of a static model of church that is based primarily on congregation and buildings. In its place we need to develop a notion of Christian community, worship, mission, and organization that is more flexible and responsive to change. – 41
Just as congregation is key to solid church, network will be essential for liquid church. Connection to each other and to Christ will be enabled by an emphasis upon communication rather than gathering. The body of Christ will be reenvisioned as a series of dynamic relational contacts. – 48
Liquid church takes as its starting point the change in Western religious life, a change that Grace Davie describes as “believing without belonging”. – 57
To shop is to seek for something beyond ourselves. To reduce this to materialism is to miss the point, or more importantly it is to miss an opportunity. For this “reaching beyond ourselves” indicates a spiritual inclination in many of the everyday activities of shopping. Rather than condemn the shopper as materialistic, liquid church would take shopping as a spiritual exercise. – 59
Solid church has often criticized consumption, but this criticism has not prevented contemporary worshippers from generating a Christian sensibility that is built upon consuming spirituality… Solid church has grown most successfully from attracting those who are already Christian, and not just those who have newly moved into the area. Many of our biggest churches have quietly grown by adding to their number people who join them from other churches in their town and city… we hear of exciting new things at a church near by and we go and check it out. This is Christian consuming, the spirituality of the seeker, and it is alive and well in our churches. – 61
…Barth identifies the mark of the true church as being the right preaching of the gospel and the right administration of the sacraments. That the church claims to be preaching the Word of God should not mislead us, says Barth. The proclamation of the church “is and always will be man’s word” At the same times these human words make a claim to be God’s Word. What the church says, however, is not necessarily or inevitably God’s Word. Through God’s action it becomes “proclamation”. – 68
We move from liquid church as an imaginary concept to liquid church as a reality by working with two simple assertion. 1. Everyone has a spiritual desire. 2. Church should be designed around people’s desire for God. – 75
With Moltmann’s suggestion that we should regard the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Life we see how the dance of God can start to connect not just to human culture but to creation as a whole. Very few of us believe that God is confined to our churches, but we may have prayed and acted as if this was the case. – 84
The last chapters takes these insights and gives some examples of what Liquid Church could look like in today’s culture. From Greek Orthodox Worship to Greenbelt to a network of Christian parachurches supporting churches instead of traditional denominations. The vision for a new church is laid out for all of us.
If you are an idea person or something that is looking for what the future of the church looks like, you will love this book. If you think all the church needs is time and the postmoderns will return, you probably aren’t reading this review.
You can find the book at Amazon.com.
Steve Collin’s visualization of a network church and his excellent Liquid Church postcards.
