In liquid modern life there are no permanent bonds and any that we take up for a time must be tied loosely so that they can be untied again as quickly, and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances change.
Those words, published in the book Liquid Modernity (2000) by Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, provide a prophetic single-sentence description of the global (and ecclesiastical) state of things for the new year and beyond. Bauman’s life story itself is the stuff of novels. As Jews, Bauman and his family faced Polish anti-semitism long before the Nazis marched in, escaping the Holocaust as refugees to Russia, where he served in a Polish unit of the Soviet army, receiving honors for his bravery under fire. Turning to communism, he returned to postwar Poland, only to be expelled in 1953 when that Soviet-bloc country purged Jews from army and government. A refugee in several European countries, he wound up at the University of Leeds, England, as chair of sociology, retiring in 1990. In announcing his death on Jan. 9 at age 91, the Washington Post reported that his more than 50 published works “explored the fluidity of identity in the modern world, the Holocaust, consumerism and globalization.”
For Bauman, the term “liquid modernity” described the rapid change and permanent transition that characterizes human societies on a global scale. Modernity — the application of new discoveries, new knowledge, new freedom, new technologies — often “profaned the sacred,” shattering “the protective armour” of traditional “beliefs and loyalties.” Modernity appears to dethrone “the sediment and residue of the past in the present,” and produce a “new and improved,” but even more “solid” society.
That hasn’t happened, Bauman believed. Rather, continuing change, “liquid modernity,” has become normative for individuals, institutions and cultures. Writing in 2012, he described the current era as “a time of ‘interregnum’ — when the old ways of doing things no longer work, the old learned or inherited modes of life are no longer suitable for the current conditio humana, but when the new ways of tackling the challenges and new modes of life better suited to the new conditions have not as yet been invented, put in place and set in operation.” Bauman concluded that, “most importantly, unlike our ancestors, we don’t have a clear image of a ‘destination’ towards which we seem to be moving.”
Which brings us to the church. In 2017, the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, many American churches and religious institutions confront “old ways of doing things that no longer work,” evident in declines in traditional denominational systems, evangelistic methods, financial support, and even ecclesiastical identities. Across the theological spectrum, congregations are aging, often divided culturally and politically, and struggling to articulate the gospel to a growing number of Americans who distance themselves from faith communities. A 2013 study noted by Huffington Post, suggested that 4,000 to 7,000 American churches close each year. Such liquid spirituality compels us to reexamine and renew “a clear image” of the church’s own spiritual, theological, and communal “destination.” I hope to do that in this space throughout the Reformation Year.
In this “interregnum” time, when old ways aren’t working but new ones seem a long time coming, what if every American congregation determined to revisit its own mission in the gospel and the world — not simply revising its “mission statement,” but asking what that mission means and how it shapes communal, regional and global witness? Although born in the late Middle Ages, Protestantism became a willing child of modernity, taking advantage of transitions in technology — travel, printing, education — to promote its developing mission. Trade, shipping-commerce, and colonialism led to a redefinition of mission as necessarily global. William Carey defined the church’s mission as an “obligation to take the gospel to the heathen,” taking his family to India as the “modern” mission movement took shape.
Zygmunt Bauman saw it differently, insisting that modern Europe “unloaded” modernity and populations to “premodern lands,” exporting some 60 million Europeans across the globe during the heyday of colonial imperialism. Now the tables have turned and refugees/immigrants from those countries are descending on first-world nations demanding the promise of modernity not realized or thwarted in their homelands.
In 2017, churches that revisit their current mission might well begin with their response to the “stranger,” the immigrant, the refugee that has come to us. Many U.S. churches are doing that, often one immigrant family at a time, many struggling between their gospel “obligation” to ministry and their concerns for “internal security.” Bauman’s poignant commentary speaks to church and government alike, warning that “by stopping them [refugees] on the other side of our properly fortified borders, it is implied that we’ll manage to stop those global forces that brought them to our doors.”
In 2017 and beyond, Christians should take seriously the impact of liquid modernity on the social, demographic, and theological realities around us. But we also have opportunity to say again, know again, who we are as a gospel people. After all, in the great paradox of faith, Jesus remains both the church’s “permanent bond” and a change agent for grace, since the first day he said it out loud: “The kingdom — God’s New Day — has come near you.”