living out-carnationally

By living incarnationally we not only model the pattern of humanity set up in the Incarnation but we also create space for mission to take place in organic ways. In this way mission becomes something that ‘fits’ seamlessly into the ordinary rhythms of life, friendships, and community and is thus thoroughly contextualized. Thus these ‘practices’ form a working basis for genuine incarnational mission. But they also provide us with an entry point into an authentic experience of Jesus and His mission.  Lindy Croucher, a missionary to the poor in a order called UNOH, likens living incarnationally to the scene in Mary Poppins where Mary takes hold of the children’s hands and steps into the painting.  She says that for her, incarnational mission has been like “stepping into the Gospels.”  She feels that she is “living inside the Gospels” for the first time.

The incarnation must therefore inform the way we engage the complex multi-cultural world around about us.  The members of InnerChange (a missional order among the poor) in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Vietnam, and Cambodia take this very seriously.  Not only because they work with the poor and that identification with people in their poverty is essential to a meaningful dialogue with them, but also because it is so thoroughly Biblical.  It fully reverberates with God’s own means of reaching us. In order to identify with the poor, all InnerChange workers live voluntarily under the poverty line, spend 80% of their time in the neighborhood, and work to support themselves so that people cannot say ‘you are paid to be among us.’ They also plant indigenous faith communities that become a genuine part of the various people groups they are trying to reach.

This practice of incarnating the gospel informs some of the most remarkable people movements around today.  God’s Squad, a missionary order doing mission among outlaw biker gangs, takes the same approach. They have over the years become an actual part of the fabric of the sub-culture and are there when people get to talk about God, Jesus, meaning, as all people do in their own way.  They have brought Jesus into the imagination of the underground Biker culture of which they are such a vital part. But this need not be limited to sub-cultures, the poor, and ethnic groups.  It must become part of our practice in dealing with the many people that exist around us in everyday life.  There are now over 60 pub churches in Australia and no doubt many more in the UK and the US.  In the desire to incarnate the gospel into a pub we can see the same impulse at work.

Incarnational ministry essentially means taking the church to the people rather than bringing people to the church.  In San Francisco, a remarkable urban missionary named Mark Scandrette embodies the ‘4 P’s’ of incarnational practice in his neighborhood.  By actively being part of numerous local groups of artists, community activists, businesses, he brings the presence of Jesus into the lives of people significantly alienated from the church as they know it.  His ministry is hard to measure in purely numerical terms, but what is unmistakable is that this invaluable ministry has brought the Kingdom of God much closer to many unchurched people than before.

In the Seattle/Tacoma region, two churches (Soma and Zoë) have chosen to collaborate in reaching students and musicians by actively moving into the social rhythms of these groups and ‘de-churchifying’ their previous expressions of ministry.  In order to do this they have rented and purchased buildings and developed them as night clubs, coffee shops, and have established recording studios with direct links to the various musicians in the area.  Zoë in particular has taken drastic measures to limit the attractional appeal of the ministry in order to wean members off the consumptive attendance at a ‘service’ and to get them all involved in local expressions of mission.  Whilst passive attendance at services is down, the community is now highly engaged in various expressions of local community and the missional reach has been significantly increased through incarnational practices.  They all feel that they are now much closer to what it means to be disciples in community.

The Navigators in the US are undergoing a major rethink around missional approaches.  One of the newest arms of the movement is called BetterTogether or just B2G. Led by visionary Gary Bradley, groups of friends are partnering to bring the Gospel of Jesus and his Kingdom into their daily environments, as channels of grace and blessing. Alert to where God is working, their aim is to join him in the realities of discipleship in the missional context. Their credo? “Right where you are, God is moving to draw and connect people into the depth, risk and reality of knowing Him.” They also aim at the development of transforming communities incarnating in every sphere of life. Gary’s aim is “to see the story of Jesus planted in new ways among the next generation.”

In Melbourne, Urban Life, a major Pentecostal church has sold its substantial property and buildings to invest in a local shopping mall and to become a direct and active presence in this heart of suburban social life.  In the mall they will be fully responsible for creating the social fabric and injecting spirituality into these all too soul-less aspects of modern life. Not only are they financial stakeholders in a profitable project, they are in a real sense bringing the Kingdom into the places where people inhabit on a daily basis. Christian worship and presence has come into the public space.

These are just some of the many ways in which individuals, churches, and missional agencies are moving away from the safety of attractional church and engaging in ways that are missional and incarnational. The net effect of these various expressions of incarnational mission is to seed the gospel into local areas or people groups and thus make it part of the intrinsic fabric of the culture.  Furthermore, genuine incarnational presence gives a deeply personal feel to mission as well as creating credibility for proclamation and response. We must never underestimate the power of incarnational practices to bring the gospel near to any people group.

By way of contrast we have distorted the meaning of incarnational mission when as western missionaries we have imposed fledged denominational templates on Third World nations.  Not only does this diminish the validity of local culture, but it alienates the local Christians from their cultural surroundings by transposing a Western cultural expression in the place of local ones. The net result is a poor black man in the middle of the bush in Africa, dressed in robes and standing outside of a gothic style church building calling people to worship in ways that barely make sense even to the original cultures which started them. In these cases no attempt is made to contextualize (localize) either gospel or church and we wonder why these have little lasting effect on the surrounding populations.  And while the error is easier to spot in the middle of Africa, we do the same thing all across the now highly tribalized West.

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