Being incarnational vs attractional
I've talked a little bit about the book The Shaping Of Things To Come previously. I'm still reading and thinking through a lot of the concepts in this great book (it's worth taking your time with). This idea of a believer or the church being incarnational vs. attractional is something that the authors spend quite a lot of time with and a topic which came to mind this morning when listening to an online sermon from a big, well-known American church this morning.
The theme that was spoken over and over is that we, as believers, need to give our whole selves into bringing our spiritually paralyzed friends to the feet of Jesus. There were many examples given of how this idea could look. These examples were all alike in that the believers were giving invitations to their friends to come to church. Every time it ended the same way...not in sharing spiritual truths about reconciliation and relationship with Christ, but rather about what is going on at their awesome church so that the friend(s) would decide to come and check it out.
This idea seems to still be stuck in the attractional mode of ministry/evangelism. This is the come and see (or hear) approach. We come up with brilliant ministries, programs, studies, attractions, etc to attract people so that we can share spiritual truths with them. I'm not saying that this doesn't work (neither are the authors of the book I'm referring to). But rather it does not seem to be a very effective overall strategy when so much of the growth that these churches are experience is transfer growth -- people attracted by the cool stuff going on.
No, I'm not calling for the breakup and disposal of any style of church. I'm calling for a rethink. Let me just ask you to think about what things could like like if we stopped putting the focus so much on what happens inside the church. What if (ooh I like those two words) we put our attention on what happens outside the church...we spend much more of our time there anyway.
The incarnational approach defines itself in our being Jesus in the community. Much like Col. 1:15 says -- that Jesus is the visible image of the invisible God -- we need to be that same image to the people of our communities. We need to just learn what that means and come to a better understanding of our role in God's redemptive plan for humanity.
Instead of going on further here I'll stop for now and revisit this tomorrow or shortly thereafter. As always, it helps me work through my ideas when I blog about them. All the better if there's anyone out there thinking through these things with me!
The theme that was spoken over and over is that we, as believers, need to give our whole selves into bringing our spiritually paralyzed friends to the feet of Jesus. There were many examples given of how this idea could look. These examples were all alike in that the believers were giving invitations to their friends to come to church. Every time it ended the same way...not in sharing spiritual truths about reconciliation and relationship with Christ, but rather about what is going on at their awesome church so that the friend(s) would decide to come and check it out.
This idea seems to still be stuck in the attractional mode of ministry/evangelism. This is the come and see (or hear) approach. We come up with brilliant ministries, programs, studies, attractions, etc to attract people so that we can share spiritual truths with them. I'm not saying that this doesn't work (neither are the authors of the book I'm referring to). But rather it does not seem to be a very effective overall strategy when so much of the growth that these churches are experience is transfer growth -- people attracted by the cool stuff going on.
No, I'm not calling for the breakup and disposal of any style of church. I'm calling for a rethink. Let me just ask you to think about what things could like like if we stopped putting the focus so much on what happens inside the church. What if (ooh I like those two words) we put our attention on what happens outside the church...we spend much more of our time there anyway.
The incarnational approach defines itself in our being Jesus in the community. Much like Col. 1:15 says -- that Jesus is the visible image of the invisible God -- we need to be that same image to the people of our communities. We need to just learn what that means and come to a better understanding of our role in God's redemptive plan for humanity.
Instead of going on further here I'll stop for now and revisit this tomorrow or shortly thereafter. As always, it helps me work through my ideas when I blog about them. All the better if there's anyone out there thinking through these things with me!
posted by Michael Shattuck at
2:51 AM
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