Attractional vs. incarnational

One benefit of having some outside help now from Anna is that I have more time for reading and creative reflection. This is important now as I try to discern with others what direction God has for la Fonderie and the ministry team with my organization that I am supposed to lead and coordinate. Since our 3rd child arrived 8 months ago, I have felt frustrated about not having time, energy, or space to do this creative thinking that I have enjoyed doing for most of my adult life.

I was able to do some reading yesterday of Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch's The Shape of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st-Century Church (Hendrickson: Peabody, Massachusetts, 2003). Much of what I read resonated with the stirrings of my heart regarding ministry during the last 18 months or so. In particular, as we are getting more connected with people in our neighborhood who are outside the Church, I've wondered more about what a faith community for them would look like.

One of Frost and Hirsch's critiques of the traditional Christendom Church is that it is attractional, versus being incarnational. Here is what they write in the section

Attractional Versus Incarnational (pp. 41-42)

The relationship between the traditional Christendom mode of church and the world around it can best be described as being fundamentally attractional. The church bids people to come and hear the gospel in the holy confines of the church and its community. This seems so natural to us after seventeen centuries of Christendom, but at what price and to what avail have we allowed it to continue? If our actions imply that God is really only present in official church activities--worship, Bible studies, Christian youth meetings, ladies fellowships--then it follows that mission and evangelism simply involve inviting people to church-related meetings.

In fact, this is one of the core assumptions that the attractional church is based upon--the assumption that God cannot really be accessed outside sanctioned church meetings or, at least, that these meetings are the best place for not-yet Christians to learn about God. Evangelism therefore is primarily about mobilizing church members to attract unbelievers into church where they can experience God. Rather than being genuine "out-reach," it effectively becomes something more like an "in-drag."

Now, we are not suggesting that people can't experience God in a church service. Of course they can, for in the preaching of God's Word and the worship of God's people his true voice can be heard. But if the church limits God's agency in this world to particular times and places that the vast majority of not-yet-Christians have no access to, or no desire to attend, then the gospel is effectively hobbled. God becomes mute to the vast majority of people in the Western world, people who cannot interpret the church culture that has effectively imprisoned the good news within its cultural system. The only means to evangelize people becomes organizing little "patrols" to go into the world in order to rescue them and bring them back to the safety of "church." Many westerners in our post-Christendom era report that they've tried church and found it wanting. If they don't want to go back, what then?

If they won't come to us, we have to go to them. This approach, being incarnational, is the opposite of being attractional. It implies something of a Go-To-Them approach to mission and evangelism. Instead of asking non-Christians to Come-To-Us, to our services, our gatherings, and our programs on our terms, the incarnational church seeks to infiltrate society to represent Christ in the world.

That is why we propose that a radical shift needs to take place in this time--a shift from the attractional mode to an incarnational one. This is no mean request, because the vast majority of churches in the West (ninety-five percent?) operate in a nonincarnational mode of mission. An incarnational mode creates a church that is a dynamic set of relationshiips, friendships, and acquaintances. It enhances and "flavors" the host community's living social fabric rather than disaffirming it. It thus creates a medium of living relationships through which the gospel can travel. It emphasizes the importance of a group of Christians infiltrating a community, like salt and light, to make those creative connections with people where God-talk and shared experience allow for real cross-cultural Christian mission to take place.

The missional-incarnational church starts with the basic theological understandings: God constantly comes to those who are the most unlikely. For example, the Hebrews were the world's outcasts. God chose them. The Old Testament story of Ruth is profoundly missional. It is part of the continuing story of God's future plans emerging through the strangest and most unlikely people and places. In that story God revealed that his future for Israel was to be fulfilled in and through a gentile (Ruth). If we are to take incarnational mission seriously, then we must see that God's future--his new creation--is not just among "his people" (churchgoing Christians) but it is among the "ordinary" people--the lost, strugglers, and listless ones of our world."