Review - Liquid Church

Liquid Church

Pete Ward
Paternoster Press, 2002, £9.99
1-84227-161-X

Sometimes a book doesn’t live up to a good title, but Ward’s stimulating and occasionally annoying material swirls about in Liquid Church to produce a provocative and generally encouraging analysis. It was one of postmodernity’s great commentators, Zygmunt Bauman, who came up with Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2000) and this provided the metaphor to examine the postchurch realities of a Britain where 72% describe themselves as Christian, although only 5% regularly sit in the pews.

Ward recognises what others have called the McDonaldization of the church. It has become a spiritual commodity in the postmodern marketplace and some church growth ‘methods’ have capitalized on that. Many Christians not only shop for the style of church they like, but they also choose the time, place and degree of involvement that suits their fluid lifestyle. So some of these “72%” are part of a network of relationships rather than a gathered assembly on a Sunday morning. The commodification of spiritual resources becomes the means of sustaining the life of this decentred and unstructured Christian network. Liquid church ‘will need to develop commodities that can circulate through networks’ asserts Ward. (p.47)

Solid Church (some will be glad to hear) doesn’t disappear in Liquid Modernity, for there are still islands of Solid Modernity floating in the postmodern sea. Ward suggests that this solid church mutates into three different expressions of traditional congregational church: heritage site, refuge (and sometimes holiday resort), and nostalgic community. Most of us will recognise ourselves in these descriptions.

If all this is completely new to you, then the last chapter of ‘Dreams’ about Liquid Church is a fascinating insight into postmodern and premodern ways of being church and of worshipping God, with lots of actual examples.

The challenge is how we adapt church structures to service and in some ways guide this growing manifestation of ‘being church’, if indeed we accept it as genuinely ‘church’. A moot point, which although the book is not heavily theological, Ward does spend a couple of chapters discussing in the light of traditional ecclesiology.

Not all will agree with Ward that as part of the continual reformation of the church, there needs to be a conscious shift from solid church to liquid church. But we will all find food for thought and action and perhaps a melting of our too solid views.

Church Times