Spend any time around church planting people these days and you’ll hear the word “liminal” come up in conversation. What does the word “liminal” mean?
I did a deep dive to try to understand this word, which was new for me. I recall my college literature professor scolding the class for coming across a new word and brushing it off, instead of looking it up and learning its meaning. It’s good to put energy toward your curiosity.
The most useful way of understanding it that I found was to connect it to another word that I already know: subliminal.
Liminal is the space between subliminal and supraliminal.
Subliminal means “below your consciousness,” as in subliminal messaging. Something that is NOT NOTICEABLE but still may affect the way you think.
Supraliminal is “above your consciousness,” which is a bit of a trippy concept. I understand it to be something that is VERY NOTICEABLE, but yet so much so that you don’t focus on it, like background chatter in a busy restaurant.
Liminal is the threshold between these two extremes.
In common parlance it simply seems to mean, “in-between.”
For church planters or people interested in how humans gather, think, and search for meaning in life, it seems to speak to the changing attitudes about church and how sometimes we feel like we are in between different modes of operating. And probably lots of other uses that I’m not yet understanding.
Other interesting things about the word liminal
Some people have attributed a particular aesthetic to the word, and there’s a Facebook group dedicated to this.
Of course there is something to learn from the dictionary
In its most common extended meaning now, it describes a state, place, or condition of transition, as in “the liminal zone between sleep and wakefulness.” The closely related word subliminal means “below a threshold”; it can describe something inadequate to produce a sensation or something operating below a threshold of consciousness.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
I liked this description that I found on Reddit:
The core concept is “between-ness.”
“Liminal” comes from “limen,” or “threshold.” “Liminal,” or “threshold-like,” means being between two things, being partly both while not wholly belonging to either.
A a door is the divider between indoors or outdoors; sunset and sunrise are on the border between day and night; a teen is hovering in the limbo between childhood and adulthood.
Spaces are liminal:
A) if they lead from one place to another;
B) if they are passing from one state into another;
C) if they are in stasis, caught between one stage and another; or
D) if you see them in a context in which they’re not usually experienced (and so, between purposes).
The Simpsons
If you made it this far, I’ll leave you with this: the word made it into an episode of the Simpsons (although I don’t think the way they use supraliminal is accurate here).1
Hope you enjoyed coming along on my journey today!
Footnotes
- In my understanding “Supraliminal” isn’t shouting something at someone, which would be consciously understood, rather, it’s “above consciousness.” Also, related: the YouTube title for this Simpsons clip uses the word “SUPERliminal” which is not a word at all (it should be SUPRAliminal). But there is another similar word, SUPERLUMINAL ,which means “faster than the speed of light.” What a great word! ↩︎
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