It's strange to hear the words "incarnational" and "fad" together during this time of celebrating the incarnational birth of the Son. And I wasn't going to post anymore on "incarnational" and the missional church on this blog after the last post. But then Mark Van Steenwyk, on his excellent blog, quotes this piece from N.T. Wright (from a recent CT Article What Is This Word?) on the fad of incarnational theology. It kind of sums up the debate I was seeking to carry out this past month on this blog. Here's the quote:

There is a fad in some quarters about a “theology of incarnation,” meaning that our task is to discern what God is doing in the world and to do it with him. But that is only half the truth, and the wrong half to start with. John’s theology of the Incarnation is about God’s Word coming as light into darkness, as a hammer that breaks the rock into pieces, as a fresh word of judgment and mercy. You might as well say that an incarnational missiology is about discovering what God is saying no to today and finding out how to say it with him. That was the lesson Barth and Bonhoeffer had to teach in Germany in the 1930s, and it’s all too relevant as today’s world becomes simultaneously more liberal and more totalitarian. This Christmas, get real, get Johannine, and listen again to the strange words spoken by the Word made flesh.

For those reacting to evangelical fundamentalism like myself and many other emerging church types, this may sound sectarian, fundamentalist. Mark claims it may be Anabaptist in vision. Of course Barth and Bonhoeffer were none of these. In my posts below I was arguing against those who would reduce the gathering to a secondary function in the incarnational view of church and mission. Ironically, for me, N T Wright is close to doing the opposite here. Wright is close to going to the opposite extreme: reducing to "non-redemptive" all activity in the world that is not involved with the mission/witness of Christ in the church. Yet I believe either a Barthian primacy of the incoming Word (N T Wright?), or a Radical Anabaptist primacy of the faithful community (withdrawing from the world to maintain faithfulness), is inadequate on its own to address the church's "sentness" into the world. Neither is adequate for where we must go as "missional church." This is why many times I am blessed to turn to John Howard Yoder, a Radical Anabaptist who did his Ph.D. with Barth in Basil. He holds together the a.) radical Anabaptist vision together with b.) the Barthian radicalness of the inbreaking Word, with c.) the missional presense and aggressive posture of the "community for the world ," better than anyone else I know!

What's your take on N.T. Wright? and "incarnational"?

Peace ... on Christmas

It is last week of Advent and our church has gathered in the presence of His Coming for three Sundays. We've spent time together on Sundays in silence, before "enfleshed" artwork, heard the Scripture, sat around the Table of His presence praying "even so Come Lord Jesus," we've preached on "living Incarnationally." At the end of every time together we've been "sent out" into the world to live incarnationally. At the beginning of our gathering we hear stories of wonder of real engagements in incarnational mission. This month, we've heard great stories of God working in the prisons, at the Retirement Center, at the Soup Kitchen, in the workplace cubicles of someone in our gathering, in China through a business someone in our gathering has started. Incarnational. It's been a great time of hope, faith, love and joy. Hope you all have been blessed as well during this great season.

Here on the blog, I've been posting about the Incarnational Way and the Missional church movement (which I count myself as a member). I have asked whether a total rejection towards buildings, sacred space (Art) and the importance of the worship gathering can indeed work against the presence of the Body of Christ "incarnating" in the world. Maybe I've seen in our church this advent season that an old building, beautiful artwork and the gathering in worship all can truly be incarnational as well as breed incarnational mission into our community. These past weeks on the blog, I have thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. Thanks to everyone for letting me talk about these things without telling me I can't be missional/emerging if I subscribe to the SOMETIMES Incarnational value of buildings, sacred space and gathering. For me these things all need to be discerned more carefully, sometimes rejected but not always. The critiques of missional writers towards excessive buildings sucking us dry, too much indwelling of sacred space and the consequent ignoring of God's sacred working among the poor and lost, and the disgusting attractional mentality in many evangelical (mega) churches, are all great contributions of missional writers. So I heartily cheer that we need increased discernment anytime we buy buildings, create sacred space or spend too much time "producing" a gathering "experience" to answer a consumerist need.

And so having said all this, having applauded all of the challenges made in the name of missional church, here's one last challenge: Let the missional church become a place of resistance incarnationally to the enslavements of modernity: individualism, consumerism, and transactional-ized "for me" salvation.

It was 400 years ago, amidst the battlefields of Europe in the Religious Wars, that Descartes crawled into a large wood burning stove, holed himself up in there, and wrote the famous words of Meditations 3: "Now will I close my eyes, I will stop up my ears, I will avert my senses from their objects, I will even erase from my consciousness all images of things corporeal; or at least … I will consider them all empty and false." Thus began the trek towards modernity and its attempt to secure truth in the foundations of the thinking mind separate from the world. The hope was we all come to the truth as individuals with no need for authority, mediation or of course war.

But this ignored the Incarnation - which Gods works in flesh and blood, creation, in the real lives of people. To disembody the gospel from the senses, from the way we live together in the Spirit, from God working in contingent history and indeed creation …to make the gospel a content to be translated, spoken, argued about (and lived only secondarily), missed the whole point (of the Incarnate God). Instead, this modernist turn "toward the subject" enslaved us to self-doubt, separated us as individuals qua individuals, shaped us towards hubris and arrogance, and led us into even more wars (Descartes was hoping to rid us of Religious conflicts).

This is why I resonate with the incarnational emphasis of our missional movement. But at the same time, this is why I warn against the rejecting of the incarnational presence in the formative gathering in place, time, beauty and liturgy (as I have argued in my most recent 3 posts). Without the gathering, we could all be cast adrift into the seas of modernist individualism. We could be left alone to resist the consumerist nihilisms of our day. Without formative practices in time, space and history, even in bands of twelve, we might succumb to Gnostic - even narcissistic interpretations - of the gospel. I've seen it happen. I believe the forces of hyper-modernity -late capitalism are so over whelming, that missional church planters have little chance to build communities of resistance and mission without the basic core practices of being "the Body." And I don't believe the gathering, a building in its proper usage and missional context, and sacred space need work against "missional" all the time. Indeed, done with discernment, each of these becomes the location of His presence in powerful ways.

I love what Michael Frost says in his recent book Exiles. ",,,if the sum total of my communal experience of following Jesus is limited to occasional, irregular gatherings of people who have neither asked for a commitment from me nor offered any to me, something is surely missing." (p.144) His proposals in the chapter on "Fashioning Collectivities of Exiles" are simply awesome. And although I don't believe it is the only way, many of his proposals I have followed in leading a former community to Life on the Vine (Metanoia Community). And many of these articulations we follow at Life on the Vine to this day. (The great thing about them BTW is that these guidelines can be followed by groups of twelve!). All this to say, we cannot do Incarnational by ourselves. We cannot do missional without being Christ's Body. We need to enter the practices of being the Body (gathering, worship, hospitality, potluck meals?).

So at this great time of Advent, on the eve of celebrating Christ's birth - let us truly manifest His presence, in our life together, in the way we celebrate, see and live missionally in work, play, engaging the poor, homeless, destitute, lonely, lost, sick and dying. Lord Jesus Come!

In the last two posts, I spoke some caution towards what I see as overreactions in the missional church conversation - the reaction against all buildings and the reaction against sacred space (art and symbol). I think in each case missional authors are rightfully concerned about the dangers of Christendom models of church. In doing so however, some go to the extreme ignoring how buildings and art can be incarnational in themselves. Before I leave the subject, "Contrary Thoughts on Being Incarnational," I'd like to speak caution one more time towards just another potential overreaction - the reaction against the importance of the worship gathering. In missional church, I see the great emphasis on what happens external to the gathered people, in the world. Often I hear, "let's look for where God is already working, and let's join up with it!" The missional priority is the joining of God's people with what God is already doing in the world, and a corresponding downplay on the gathering of Sunday morning (or Sun evening or Saturday for that matter). Hirsch and Frost say for instance, that in Christendom, "the church bids people to come and hear the gospel in the holy confines of the church and its community … " The mode and impulse is inward (p. 41, The Shaping of Things to Come). They in turn suggest the mode and impulse should be the opposite - outward. And although never spoken, many pick up from this that "the gathering" somehow becomes secondary to the mission of God in the world.

I certainly endorse Frost & Hirsch and their assessment of what happens when a church becomes attractional. The dreaded "attractional" model has been made even worse when the practices of worship become commodified into a goods and service for which Christians shop for and consume. There is an all out loss of missional incarnational presence. And so I heartily endorse the engagement of mission where our people already are! I heartily endorse the church's presence manifest in the contexts of mission where the strangers live, the poor struggle, and the oppressed live enslaved to capitalism etc. I endorse the trashing of programming missions and instead focus on daily mission in the contexts where people already are.

Nevertheless, I wonder if this missional mantra against the attractional can inadvertently stigmatize the importance of the gathering? I believe that many, after reading Frost and Hirsch, are prone to polarize the missional versus attractional in such a way to devalue the worship gathering as a secondary unessential shaping event to the missional identity of the church. Does anyone else see this danger?

And so, out of this final angst towards potential extreme reactionary versions of missional church, I offer the following four rants. I suggest that indeed the gathering itself is incarnational, the Body, the presence of Christ in flesh and blood in the world, and the basis of being “sent out” missionally in the world. In this sense, the gathering is necessarily “the priority for” but not “the majority of” (not even close) what missional churches do. Here’s 4 quick rants.


1.) You cannot have a missional people without formation!! Missional people do not "grow on trees," fall from the sky, or "spring forth ex- nihilo, like its natural or something to just be missional. In fact one's vision of reality must constantly be shaped by the reality of God, who He is, and what He is doing in the world in order to be missional. Deleuze has taught us, we're all being shaped into and by "the forces." It is unrealistic … to think that anyone can come out of a consumeristic therapeutic me-first culture and somehow be shaped, motivated, directed and enlivened with the vision for God's mission in the world apart from the gathering of God's people to worship, reenact and proclaim the Story of God and His Mission in Christ into the world.
The worship gathering therefore is a priority for the missional way. In worship we are formed and shaped to be missional.

2.) "They" say we need to join up with what God is doing … but in fact how would we know what God is doing out in the world? Unless we assume that God is at work in everything. Indeed there are plenty of Christians who believe God is at work in the violence of the Iraq war, or programs to reduce welfare. I just say this to show that it is not at all obvious what God is doing out in the world. And I suggest that those who believe God is at work in War or the reduction of welfare state have not sufficiently worshiped God in a gathering that shapes our vision for who God is, where He is taking the world and our role in it. Indeed, community and worship is necessary for any kind of discerning where God is working. It is what makes possible the missional transformation we seek. As Yoder says, “Transformation is meaningful … only when those who call for it have a place to stand." (Authentic Transformation p. 74 This gets back to the inherent Reformed nature of much missional thinking. Because there is a heavy reliance on Common Grace in all of culture, there is less of a need for a discerning process, or a communal discernment which for the Anabaptist makes possible missional engagement in the first place).

3.) The Eucharist forms us into a politics of peace, unity and reconciliation. The Eucharist helps us see that we are One, born out of sacrifice for mission "til He comes." As Hauerwas tells us, it is the Eucharist which trains us how to think about "ownership," war, capital punishment and care for the poor (See In Good Company page 161-63). I don't believe you can be missional without a Eucharisticly formed politics.

4.) Lastly, yes we have a big problem with the attractional model. Anyone who has read me will know I agree with that. But it is inherent in the logic of the gathering, that WE ARE SENT OUT! First we gather, then we are shaped by Word (Confession, Prayer, Affirmation) and the Table, THEN WE ARE SENT OUT into mission. The whole logic of the gathering is formation for the sending. The gathering therefore is prior to actual sending out as that which forms the base for mission.

So let us not neglect the importance of the gathering for being missional. Let us be intentional about our "gatherings," that they not be attractional, but instead be formational for the sending of the church into mission.

Peace to all this Advent