Following is a good conversation between Alan Hirsch and Ed Stetzer. Topics include, among other things, the theological foundation of the missional conversation, the importance of recognizing the missionary nature of God, how missiology must inform our ecclesiology, and how existing congregations can begin to make a missional transition.
Check out these two challenging and inspiring talks by Micheal Frost from the recent Upstream Collective Vision Tour in Prague.
Shortly before he died in 1998, Lesslie Newbigin recorded a series of eight radio programs on the basic themes and central characters in the Bible. Newbigin used his gift of story telling to present the grand narrative of Scripture — from Genesis through Revelation — in an accessible and engaging manner.
I was excited to learn recently that Barefoot Ministries (located here in Kansas City) has republished the wonderful little book (approx 70 pages) titled, “A Walk Through the Bible.” I would highly recommend the book for those who are new believers and need a good summary of the biblical narrative; as well as those who may have forgotten how extraordinary the biblical story really is.
When I posted the two videos last week from the AND conference I wanted to include a shorter, more concise, Q conference presentation that Alan Hirsch did on the same topic of cultural distance. However, the link to the Q presentation had been eliminated. After contacting the Q site they have reposted the video, titled “Post-Christendom Mission.” You can now view the presentation here.
I find this conversation to be crucial on two fronts. First, it provides a conceptual tool to understand the cultural barriers that exist in a Post-Christendom context. Second, it provides a nuance of language (“extractional” rather than “attractional”) that adds clarity to the missional conversation. You can find a brief written explanation on the topic in the final chapter of Alan’s and Lance Ford’s new book Right Here, Right Now. Below is a excerpt from that chapter:
When we use the term attractional, it is an attempt to describe how we conceive of our church in relation to our culture. In other words, it describes our missionary stance or the expectations we have about the role that church plays in our contexts.
To grasp the importance of this, consider the idea of cultural distance. This is a tool that we can use to discern just how far a person or a people group is from a meaningful engagement with the gospel. In order to determine this, we have to see it on a scale that goes something like this:
m0 m1 m2 m3 m4
l——————l—————-l—————-l—————-l
Each numeral with the prefix m indicates one significant cultural barrier to the meaningful communication of the gospel. An obvious example of such a barrier would be language. All would agree that if you have to reach across a language barrier, you have got a problem and it’s going to take some time to communicate meaningfully. But others could be race, history, religion/worldview, culture, etc. The more boundaries one has to cross, the harder meaningful communication will be. So for instance, in Islamic contexts, the gospel has struggled to make any significant inroads because religion, race, and a whole lot of history make a meaningful engagement with the gospel very difficult indeed. But this is not limited to overseas missions; it is directly related to missionality right here, right now. . . .
And remember the obstinate little truth that it is we who are the “sent” people of God, and whatever that means to our identity as God’s people, it must also sometimes mean we must go to where the people are. If we fail to “go” to the people, then to encounter the gospel meaningfully they must “come.” This is the inbuilt assumption of the attractional church; and it requires that the nonbeliever do all the cross-cultural work to find Jesus, and not us! Make no mistake: for many people, coming to church involves some serious cross-cultural work for them. They have to be the missionaries!
Another very important fact must be remembered here. We know from old research that within three to five years of a person becoming a Christian, they will have no meaningful relationships with anyone outside the church. So, assuming that we bring them to our church, and we happen to do a good job at it and effectively socialize them into our church community, we are in effect snapping the natural, organic connections that they have with the host community they come from. This is very problematic because we know that the gospel travels along relational lines. Sever the relationships and we effectively stop the outward movement of the gospel into the broader culture. In other words, attractional evangelism in missionary contexts results in extracting them from their previous relationships and cultural context.
Below are two very helpful videos presentations by Alan Hirsch from last year’s AND conference at Granger Community Church. The bulk of the first video is spent on the very important topic of cultural distance and the problem it creates for meaningful communication of the gospel. Building upon the cultural distance discussion, he then proceeds to examine the “missionary problem”, of having the majority of American churches attempting to reach the same population segment, that is 95% of churches in America are trying to reach the same 40% of the population.
This leads to what he refers to as the “strategic problem”, which recognizes that 60% of the population has no interest in identifying with the contemporary church that is represented by 95% of the churches. The last several minutes of the presentation is spent in a time of Q&A. When viewing the first video you may want to skip over the the opening song, as well as the goofy skit on the tension between missional and attractional that precedes Alan’s talk.
The second video deals with the five-fold ministry of Ephesians 4. Alan argues that we will never create or sustain a movement until the church recaptures the role of the Apostle, Prophet and Evangelist.
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In chapter 13 of The Mission of God’s People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission, Christopher Wright provides an excellent analysis on mission and the public square. Wright acknowledges that the mission of God’s people is far too big to be left only to “missionaries.”
Furthermore, most Christians live in the ordinary everyday world, “working, making a living, raising families, paying taxes, contributing to society and culture, getting along, doing their bit.” But in what sense is the life of believers living in the “ordinary” realm – what we call the public square – part of the mission of God’s people?
Is God interested in the public square? Many Christians seem to operate on the everyday assumption that God is not. Or at least, they assume that God is not interested in the world of everyday work for its own sake, as distinct from being interested in it as a context for evangelism. God, it would seem, cares about the church and its affairs, about missions and missionaries, about getting people to heaven, but not about how society and its public places are conducted on earth.
The result of such dichotomized thinking is an equally dichotomized Christian life. In fact it is a dichotomy that gives many Christians a great deal of inner discomfort caused by the glaring disconnect between what they think God most wants and what they most have to do. Many of us invest most of the available time that matters (our working lives) in a place and a task that we have been led to believe does not really matter much to God – the so-called secular world of work – while struggling to find opportunities to give some leftover time to the only thing we are told does matter to God – evangelism.
Dispersed throughout the chapter Wright offers four questions to readers on their view of work as part of God’s mission. The questions provide a great challenge not only of our view of vocation, but also how our work relates to, and affects the work of others in the public square.
The first question we need to ask those who seek to follow Jesus in the marketplace is: Do you see your work as nothing more than a necessary evil, or only as the context for evangelistic opportunities? Or do you see it as a means of glorifying God through participating in his purposes for creation and therefore having intrinsic value? How do you relate what you do in your daily work to the Bible’s teaching about human responsibility in creation and society?
The second question we need to ask of all those who seek to follow Jesus in the marketplace is this: Where, in all your activity, is the deliberate acknowledgment of, and submission to, the divine auditor? In what way does accountability to God impinge on your everyday work?
The third question we have to ask of those who follow Jesus in the marketplace is: How do you perceive the governance of God in the marketplace (which is another way of seeking the kingdom of God and his justice), and what difference does it make when you do? Is it really the case that “Heaven rules” on Sundays, but The Market rules from Monday to Friday?
A fourth question arises for the follower of Jesus in the marketplace: In what ways is your daily labour transformed by the knowledge that it is all contributing to that which God will one day redeem and include within his new creation?
Below is an excerpt from an excellent paper (originally the Fuller Theological Seminary Payton Lectures) by Darrell Guder titled “Walking Worthily: Missional Leadership after Christendom.”
In this section, Guder is discussing the attempt that was made by himself and a group of other theologians and missiologists to identify what exactly a missional congregation would look like. This effort was made shortly after the completion of writing “Missional Church” in 1998. It is not surprising that the group discovered that there were no models, but instead they were reminded of how churches are “converted” towards a missional vocation by the work of the Spirit and serious engagement with Scripture.
What would a model of a missional congregation look like? We discovered in the process that we were being archetypically Western, late modern, and American pragmatist with our “model” question. We were looking for the solution to a problem, the stencil that could reproduce the successful missional church. We were operating from classical cause-and-effect thinking. We were forgetting modern mission shaped by Western Enlightened assumptions. We turned to scripture and found in 2 Corinthians a different world of inquiry. We were challenged to think about ourselves as clay jars, as unlikely vessels whose unlikeliness was precisely part of the witness to the extraordinary power of God that was, by his grace, at work in us.
Guided by these texts, which David Bosch had powerfully expounded for Mennonite missionaries many years earlier as a “Spirituality of the Road,” in his book of the same title, we turned away from the self-confident search for models and began to look for patterns that witnessed to God’s spirit converting congregations to their missional vocation. In a great diversity of congregations, we found that the formative role of scripture was a central factor in their ongoing change processes. But we also found that this rigorous scriptural formation was always hard, demanding, and challenging, and it often evoked resistance.
Later in the paper, Guder elaborates on the crucial role of Scripture in the continuing formation of missional congregations. This means, at least in part, that all elders, pastors, and deacons are to function as “Word-equippers.”
However, this also means that every believer is a witness who belongs to and represents Christ, and should therefore be equipped to interpret and communicate Scripture missionally. In the following excerpt, he speaks to one way that our language prevents that from happening.
There are, however, subtle ways that we resist this broad and inclusive understanding of the ways that the Word equips the saints. Again, our vocabulary itself reveals a lot. Terms such as “preaching” and “proclamation” tend to narrow our understanding of the enormous variety of ways in which, in the New Testament, the communication of the scriptural Word actually works in community.
Gerhard Friedrich pointed out that Martin Luther used one German verb – predigen, meaning preach – for the translation of more than thirty Greek verbs having to do with verbal communication. If only the few who are clerically qualified can validly articulate the world of God, then missional formation is not likely to happen. Certainly if we Reformed Christians are to take missional vocation seriously, then we should emphasize that not only are the elders, deacons, and pastors all Word-equippers in their various ways, but all Christians are called to share in the communication of the gospel and should be equipped to do so.
I am often asked to recommend a book that does a good job of introducing the missional church conversation. While there are several great resources that deal with missional church issues, I sometimes struggle with recommending the precise book because the majority of books written in the past decade are directed either towards church leaders or academic circles.
I am excited to say that the latest edition to the missional church literature, a book titled Right Here, Right Now, co-authored by Alan Hirsch and Lance Ford, will make the task of book recommendations much easier. Not only is “RHRN” an excellent introduction to the missional conversation, but it is really the best attempt to date, to equip all believers to live missionally regardless of “vocation or location.” The book is designed, as stated by Alan in the preface, to “make missional church what it should be: a movement of the whole people of God in every sphere and domain of society.”
The format of the book is unique to most co-authored books. As stated in the introduction, “The contents of the book are sandwiched between a briefing chapter (“Right Here”) in the beginning and a debriefing chapter (“Right Now”) at the end, both written by Alan. These are designed to provide a framework for new thinking and acting. The middle sections are written by Lance, but Alan inserts himself into the conversation all along the way, like a resident heckler or a built-in commentator of sorts.” I found this format to work well.
In Alan’s briefing chapter he provides an excellent summary of key missional ideas. This very accessible overview is organized around four movements, including the need to: move out (into missional engagement), move in (burrowing down, or incarnational living), move alongside (engaging in relational networks), and move from (challenging certain aspects of our culture). I believe this twenty-nine page chapter would serve as a very helpful introduction to anyone new to the conversation. In the last chapter of the book Alan challenges the reader to do more serious reflection on the nature of the church, mission and evangelism.
Sandwiched between Alan’s “bookend” chapters, Lance provides nine, very practical, yet significant chapters on topics including: cultivating “missionary eyes”, beholding others, rediscovering the joy of hospitality, and a chapter on the collective power of scattered believers living on mission, creatively titled “Salt Blocks and Salt Shakers.” While each of the nine “middle” chapters are replete with helpful illustrations and practical encouragements, in my opinion the most effective (or biting) chapters include a series of three chapters where Lance deals with the topic of Western affluence and the stranglehold it places on our attempts to live a truly missional lifestyle. One of my favorite lines in this section comes from a chapter titled “Freeing Ourselves to Live Missionally” where Lance writes, “Storage units have become the ‘spare tire’ around the waistline of American consumption.”
The bottom line is that there is much to like about this book. I am thankful to Alan and Lance for taking the time to create a resource that helps to turn theory into practical reality. The sub title of the book, which is “Everyday Mission for Everyday People” is certainly fitting. They have also created a website with additional resources, including videos that coincide with each chapter. You can find the site here.
More and more, the desire grows in me simply to walk around, greet people, enter their homes, sit on their doorsteps, play ball, throw water, and be known as someone who wants to live with them. It is a privilege to have the time to practice this simple ministry of presence. Still, it is not as simple as it seems.
My own desire to be useful, to do something significant, or to be part of some impressive project is so strong that soon my time is taken up by meetings, conferences, study groups, and workshops that prevent me from walking the streets. It is difficult not to have plans, not to organize people around an urgent cause, and not to feel that you are working directly for social progress. But I wonder more and more if the first thing shouldn’t be to know people by name, to eat and drink with them, to listen to their stories and tell your own, and to let them know with words, handshakes, and hugs that you do not simply like them, but truly love them.
- Henri Nouwen
Another way of framing missional theology is to understand mission as the concrete implication of the good news that God’s love for the creation results in God’s action to restore, heal, reconcile, and make new this rebellious creation. The event of Jesus Christ is the culmination of that action, and now, the salvation accomplished on the cross and ratified at Easter is to be made known to all people.
For that to happen, God continues the strategy of calling a particular people to be his witnesses, to make it known that God so loves the world that he has sent Jesus. The gospel of salvation generates the called and sent people, the ecclesia; mission, as Martin Kahler famously argued, is the mother of theology. God’s mission necessitates a missiological ecclesiology.
This understanding of missional church implies a radical revision of traditional ecclesiologies, which have, as I noted, largely neglected the central biblical theme of mission. The doctrinal challenge is to develop every theme and subtheme relating to the theology and practices of the church from the central and foundational understanding of the church’s missional vocation.
Whether we are discussing the church’s worship and liturgy, its structures and organizational forms, its practices and disciplines, or its ordered ministry, the thematic door by which we enter is the missional vocation of the church.
From Walking Worthily: Missional Leadership after Christendom by Darrell L. Guder
