Dan Kimball on Missional Church Effectiveness
Dan Kimball has posted some of his misgivings about the effectiveness of the missional church on the Out of Ur blog. There is an excellent conversation going on there about it. Here is my comment…..
Dan, as someone who comes out clearly for the missional reframing of church, I do share some concerns about reproduction (fruitfulness). Anyone concerned with Jesus’ commission should be.
The comments so far are excellent and so I will just add a few more.
* I centainly don’t believe that attractional is not working. What I have said is that it has appeal to a shrinking segment of the population, and that persistence with a church growth style attractionalism, is in the long run, a counsel of despair. Are you suggesting that we simply stay with what we have got? Surely not bro?
* If we persist with our standard measurements for mission, we will miss the point. The issue is what idea of church is more faithful to the Scriptures. Genuine fruitfulness, surely, cannot simply be measured by numbers but by ‘making disciples.’ How does one measure that? By all accounts, current churches are made up largely of admirers of Jesus but few genuine disciples/followers–this is not a biblical idea of fruitfulness!
* Besides, the early church would not measure up to the current metrics!! If Rodney Stark is right, there was only 25,000 by year 100AD. Not exactly mind boggling church growth. Some attractional churches are larger.
* If we stick with the prevailing measures, we will miss the level of incarnational engagement with quantitative measures alone. How do we measure that? Incarnation takes time and loving presence (witness) among a people. Working with post-Christian folks ain’t easy because we have lost our credibility and have to work darn hard to regain it. I think there is much work to do here.
The only other thing I will say is that we as believers, live by a vision of what can be…we cannot allow ourselves to be constrained by pragmatics alone. Vision precludes that and is driven by holy discontent to see a greater manifestation of the Kingdom.
With love and respect.
AH
Forgotten Ways, The: Reactivating the Missional Church - Alan Hirsch
Forgotten Ways Handbook, The: A Practical Guide for Developing Missional Churches - Alan Hirsch, Darryn Altclass
ReJesus: A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church - Michael Frost, Alan Hirsch
The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21 Century Church - Michael Frost, Alan Hirsch
Thanks for responding, Alan. Your last bullet jumps out at me because as a missionary kid in Japan, I watched as mission boards stopped sending missionaries to Japan because it wasn’t deemed cost-effective. The hard reality is that incarnation takes a big investment of time, and the greater the cultural distance (m0-m4), the longer it takes. Dan is exceptional in many ways, but I’m afraid for most attractional churches, if they are growing in numbers, they are getting the “easy pickin’s”.
First thought… yes, attractional “works” when you have high quality preaching, music, energy, programming, etc. … yet not everyone is dynamic or charismatic or a superstar… not every congregational body can pull it off… what if you have people who have been faithful for 70+ years, plugging along, doing their best, with the intellectual and spiritual gifts they’ve been given.
Thought two… that’s where “missional” comes into play for me. Ordinary, passionate, embodying of Christ. Faith as an adventure. Choosing risk over safety. May or may not have numerical success.
Final thought… what is “fruit?”… and isn’t “fruit production” outside of our control?… be faithful… trust God… see what happens?
Peace, Tim
This is a good discussion.
I think this is what Willow Creek is wrestling through with Reveal.
Hi Alan. Some good thoughts, I think by Dan. I believe in a missional church because of its biblical-theological basis. And it is the only form of church that will reach a growing portion of the population.
I don’t think that worship is the initial place for evangelism, either biblically or for where most of where the unchurched is today. I do see that some in the missional movement seem to be against anything that might attract people, as if good preaching and good music and good children’s ministries are bad, or a church can only be 35 people.
I’m glad to hear of a church like the one that Kimball mentioned where half of those in attendance did not previously know Jesus.
Of course, hopefully those there are moving through a process of discipleship.
Alan,
Thanks for chiming in on the discussion. A number of us have been following this particular rabbit trail along very interesting paths.
I appreciate your response….
I must say Alan that I despair with the sort of attractional church growth models we have at present.
As someone who grew up in the institutional Church – albeit one quite different in culture to the typical large Church of today – at 15 yrs old it became irrelevant to me spiritually, culturally and socially because it did not understand me, my youth culture or speak in a language I could relate to.
It took a very different expression of Church – a beachside coffee shop cultured holiday-period-long incarnational-missional-textured outreach to hippies and surfies of the early 1970’s which spoke relevant-ized Gospel messages and stories I could relate to in life - to re-engage me socially, culturally and spiritually to make sense of things at a time when I was heading in a wrong direction in life due to misconceptions and questions about God, Christ and His interest in me as person.
When I got `born again’ through that short-term missional expressional it was because some Christian youths of roughly my same age sat down at a coffee shop table with me over a period of several weeks, invited me to eat with them, spoke to me meaningfully through rock n roll music featuring the Jesus story, but most of all because they let me enter their journey as well as engaging themselves into mine without any Bible bashing judgmentalism. Maybe they called it Friendship Evangelism then. But it was some highly convoluted system of evangelising the heathen that they employed to expand the numbers of the pew sitters. No they would have befriended me and shared `table fellowship’ with me even if I hadn’t seemed to be as open to the Gospel – because I saw them do that time and again with many who were not open and who still came back again and again each night due to having formed good friendships at the Theos Coffee shop we were at. Generally most people stayed there from 7pm – 3pm and it was packed out because of its youth-cultural-relevance, its Gospel-shared-stories applicableness to ours stories through skilled story-tellers, its music being our music, its inclusiveness, its good and generous supplies of finger food, and because everyone was made to feel welcome, night after night.
Many of the members of that outreach team went on to become major shakers and movers within the missional-incarnational church even before the term became A popular topic with contemporary missions book authors of today. If I mention people like Ross Langmead, John smith, John Uren and others who were involved in this missional and incarnational movement I’m sure Alan would be able to confirm their 40 odd years of positive influence on today’s formation of the missional-incarnational-emergent church movement. We have built on their legacy of hard, costly work.
Now let me say that the Jesus People movement did attract many people to it for a variety of reasons. But by and large it was missional-incarnational in its approach because it went where churches were not venturing in those times – taking the Gospel and its messengers to the streets to live among and make and become community with a generation lost to the mainstream church.
I remember sitting on a lawn outside a small house in Bayswater with about 500 other young people – almost all long-haired hippies and bikies in their late teens and early 20’s and many not yet “saved” in the traditional sense of the word - listening to preachers who dressed, spoke and looked like them. God Squad CMC preacher John Smith and countless others of his community shared the Message of Jesus in new ways which “connected” with them emotionally, politically, socially and culturally. It was raw, genuine, authentic, bold, prophetic, loud, but heart-inspiringly hope engendering, relevant and practical. It was not shy about the need for forgiveness, grace and repentance. The movement was very much one which discipled and included people into the life and ministry work of the faith community.
It was both attractional – just as Jesus attracted thousands to mountains where he shared the Sermon on the Mount , this movement was very popular in its day and attracted many – many of whom actually got converted. But it was most of all a missions focused movement which encouraged “no bums on pews” or “pew-sitting on the Gospel”, but challenged all involved to actually do things Missionally which challenged their comfort zones (eg. talking to street people, street `witnessing’, busking with Jesus rock songs etc). [In my case, God’s House Street Church – like several others – became a 24/7 missional incarnational ministry to hippies, drug-addicted youth, counselling service, rock n roll festival cum late night coffee-shop-dropincentre, cum communitas where everybody had a role and say and embraced it with zeal and joy, messy-ness, chaotic creativity, political involvement with the locals and so many things besides. Everyone was welcomed. There was no elite. But sad to say most of the churches like that died out with the onset of the Prosperity-Doctrined,mega-attractional, overly consumeristic, and overly individualistic and me-emphatic 80’s Church Growth Movement which was, I argue a very strong departure from the missional-incarnational approach in nature because it relied on attractional faddism and was extremely lazy in its attitude toward “Going” to the people outside itself with the Gospel.
I would argue that the Jesus People Movement demonstrated in its own day that the missional-incarnational approach to mission is not only the right and authentic and Biblical approach to mission, but it will attract many to it as well. i.e. the right sort of Church growth – that of disciples rather than just consumers of religion will occur – especially as the arts of preaching, servanthood, inclusion, APEST, discipleship, total community (all member) involvement in mission work at the base core zones of localization etc are rediscovered.
Having said that, it is imperative that Missional-Incarnational leaders of today not only write stuff to inspire Christians to think Missionally, but to develop actual projects for them to exercise being missionaries. I think Mal Garvin, John Smith and other such leaders have always been good at enlisting new people who showed them they wanted to into missional/ministry teams – that’s my experience of them. We need the creative project/ideas people who can imagine all Christians `big and small’ involved in open crowd projects like Aussie Awakening Easter festivals and marches. We also need project developers who can think of small, relevant, local projects that will `re-engage’ Christians back into their local settings. We also need leaders who can tell the truth about doing mission – that its not just the job of bible-college-educated ministry professionals, but for all Christians to be involved in as part of their Luke 4
calling – and who can excite and inspire, enlist and train the `non-experts’ to become dynamically-equipped, emboldened and competent , activated partners of missional-incarnational small and big project teams.
Yeah. I’ve written a lot. But I think the main reason we are not seeing a lot of missional incarnational stuff happening despite all the recent talk happening about it is because many Christians simply do not know how, and have not been provided with suitable project frameworks to work within by their leaders to enable them to be reactivated as missionaries. To most Christian a missionary is not them – it is someone special who is hired by a parachurch NGO, pastor, employee, a person being stewed in a cannibal’s pot wearing a pith helmet and dog collar – IT IS NOT THEM BECAUSE IT HAS NOT YET BEEN ALLOWED TO BE THEM – despite all the appearances from mission-talk saying otherwise!
I reckon I can say this and get away with it because I’ve worked both as an `official’ missionary and know how they talk on so about it all. And because I am someone who like many, is highly missionally-prepared-theologically and by training, but was utterly under-utilised by Church (depressingly) for years – and so, no longer am all that engaged with it in the normal Sunday-sense of it ( like so many others I know in the `same boat’ who are trying to build better alternatives, despite finding it such a hard slog doing it), I think I can see it from several different slants. To me current models of Church Growth, which exclude the missional incarnational, which neglect the training and engagement of all-members into meaningful missional expression, but rely on attractional fanfare extravaganzas each week to grow their churches, mission the main point. Getting the most bums on pews in some weekly concert is not what Jesus is about. It is not true Church growth! True Church Growth is when the Church – the people – progressively become transformed to be `like’ Jesus, who dynamically transformed people’s lives often through `simple’, but meaningful acts of service, risky `words in season’, washing feet, eating meals with the socially unimportant and outcaste, etc. If we help `ordinary’ Christians become that, they will become credible and noticed by all around them. They will incarnate Christ through practical and simple acts of risky servanthood love toward others. And non-Christians will see Christ in them because of that love, want it too, and become the real Church Growth the Church needs – new disciples who `follow’ Jesus in his Way, not just people coming through doors to partake in a weekly couple of hours religious festival to fund it and keep the Sunday event going and pastor in paid work each week.
Building a faithful and Christ-like Church is far more important than building a `Big’ Church.
I’m sorry I’ve been so long-winded about this. But I am very passionate about this issue and very frustrated with the Attractional/Church Growth movement.
Another thing I need to say – this time I’ll be short – is that many of our theological training institutions recruit students into training based upon Church Growth presuppositions due to business sustenance and growth reasons. That includes so many who now preach missional incarnational philosophies of mission.
What I am saying is that they recruit more because more is better because it increases the odds that at least some students will become outstanding.
I heard once someone at a college speculate, “If we get 10 out of 100 who are good, we’ve achieved something. The Church will grow because of them”.
That same person speculated that the rest will just either go back to secular work, or fall by the wayside. He described it as a `fact of life’.
My point being that if each year so many Christians are being graduated out of Bible/Theological colleges – and I think the numbers would be huge worldwide – and given that most would do their degrees because they want to be employed by the Church – where are all those people now and why isn’t the western church growing rapidly because of those probably huge numbers.
I accept there are missional-incarnational based forms of theological training which rely on internships etc.
But I suspect so many theologically trained graduates aspiring to work in churches and do mission work don’t actually end up in work that they believed they were called to because the system and reality just not work out that way.
My rapidly increasing theological library indicates my strong commitment to and passion about theological training and theologies importance to develop Christians formationally for mission.
However, it does not `gel’ with me that if so many Christians are being churned through all that training nowadays in Western Church theological training systems, why aren’t that many finding work in their chosen field – ministry work ?
And why aren’t they being told the realities in terms of their future work prospects by theological colleges before they start their courses?
Answer. Because most Theological Colleges run as profit making businesses. And the more students they can recruit the better profit margins to keep those businesses self-perpetuating with the paid cleric/academic employees they already have. It is a reflection of `Church Growth Model’ thinking – i.e. the more we put through, eventually the odds are the bigger we will get.
I would like to see more development of internship models of training in missional-incarnational projects such as with Forge, UNOH, and similar because it actually engages those who feel called into exposure to the realities of vocational work to journey formationally with that.
However, in writing this I also want to confront what I think is sometimes a con-job by theological colleges who recruit as many students as they can just because it keeps them in business, but whilst knowing full well that many aspirant church workers will never enjoy any chance of being ever employed by their Church despite faithfully and sincerely believing, however naively maybe, that they were `called by God’ into the `job’.
Again I refer back to my argument that the problem lies in the `veiled’ Church Growth Movement presuppositions and clouded ethics that many theological training institutions operate under today. That in turn it filters into how the wider Church operates and thinks (its philosophies of mission and church growth) very, very much – and to its long-term missional detriment I allege.
Made a typo on 2nd last blog. I said “But it was some highly convoluted system of evangelising the heathen that they employed to expand the numbers of the pew sitters”.
Meant to say “But it wasn’t…”. Should’ve waited for Lucy to edit it for typos. Reckon you’d know what I meant anyway.
I read through most of the Out of Ur comments and Alan I cannot agree with you more. There is one thing that disturbs me greatly. Dan K. talks about “whatever works” being the basis for effectiveness. When will we leave behind mechanistic thinking? The deeper problem with the whole discussion is that it is still based on a worn-out worldview. Secondly, instead of just sayng one or the other (attractional or missional) I believe one has to look at the city or region and look at the total ecology of the church in the area. There has to be diversity, even of size, however how many Godzillas do you need in a city of 500K? What is key as Alan says time and again is the church (whatever the size) making disciples? The whole discussion in the Blog is what T. Kuhn pointed out about paradigms, it is like two different groups speaking with each other that live in different worlds.
Good point Michael. Its what I call ‘the clash of imagination’ of how we conceive of the church more than it is anything. The problem is that we are so stuck in attractional ideas of the church, its hard to see the vision contained in the missional idea of church.
Alan,
I believe it is important that when we say attractional church “works” (same goes for missional-incarnation, for that matter), we need to define what we mean by “works”. Do we mean it works at gaining an audience, a listen, a crowd? Does it work at making genuine disciples? It is working to grow church attendance in America, but we agree that Jesus didn’t commission us to grow churches…he sent us to make and grow disciples, who evolve into churches. I very much know where you stand on all of this but I believe it would be good to clarify what you mean by attraction is “working” in certain places.
I’m a new reader of your blog (well, a long-time reader/lurker but just now provoked to respond!). I just wanted to say that I have followed this debate/conversation with great interest as my husband and I are preparing for church planting. I’m wrestling through what I think about all of this and I appreciate these types of insighful posts.
Andrew: What happened to the people who came to faith in the places you talked about? What kind of Christian communities have they been part of since then?
Alan, I left a few comments at Ur also, refering to these stats: http://www.ncls.org.au/default.aspx?sitemapid=213
Growth figures need to be broken down to understand what is really going on. When switching reaches high levels, as it does in some of the churches, it can actually mask that more people are deconverting than converting through them. Such growth is only sustainable while there are enough nearby feeder churches. Its no surprise, for instance, that Hillsong emerged out of Sydney’s bible belt. This is not to put them down. At least they have ’some’ growth to speak of, which is more than I can say for some other churches. But it is to say that maybe their growth is not as impresive as it appears at first glance.
What would really impress me would be a megachurch emerging in a highly multicultural and multireligious region of Sydney where there are no feeder churches.
Sure one measure of missional effectiveness should be a comparison of church demographics to community demographics. If the church is much older, whiter and more educated than its community that should be signalling a culture gap problem to leadership.
But this is where I think that some valid criticisms can be made of the-formally-known-as-emerging-church movement. How white is it? How male is it? How techie is it? How much of it involves just as much church switching as the other churches? Personally I would rather move beyond the missional vs attractional conversation to a missional vs even more missional conversation.
Where are they now?
Eric, I’ll put it like this. I was talking about Baby Boomer Jesus people who were as much “Children of the Revolution” as secular hippies, mods, yippies, punks and other cultural creations of the 60’s-70’s Rock n Roll and anti-Vietnam Era.
I would describe the youth of that generation in Western cultures as typically anti-establishment (anti-institutional), often left-wing-inclined politically, idealistic, experimental but also often fundamental and `in-your-face-about it’ when it came to religion, artistic, experiential, hedonistic and anti-materialistic in their general sociological leanings during the late 60’s to mid 1970’s.
A lot of what the current emergent-missional-incarnational movement is saying today about mission was being said and done – probably in less theologically sophisticated ways – by Jesus’ revolutionaries of that era.
However, by about 1976 (1975 signified end of Vietnam War & related student movement protests) – I’ll put it this way – “the spirited heat” and “revolutionary” momentum had gone out of the Jesus People Movement for many of those Baby Boomer converts. Many had opted out of Church all together. A lot more became re-engaged back into now more culturally-modernized (i.e. churches they previously rejected became acceptable because they `contemporised’ things like their music to appease a generation of Baby Boomers) mainstream churches. An emerging and popular charismatic movement, with all its hopes for new financial prosperity, spiritual giftedness, revivalism etc. engulfed many into it. Some of the leaders became employed within the mainstream church as pastors, theological college teachers – a few who are key figures in the emergent-missional-incarnational movement of today.
But let me say this. When Hans Kung said back in the early 1980’s (?) “Today there are many Christians – good Christians – who have left the [mainstream] Church” because they cannot find a place for themselves within mainstream today’s church, I think maybe he was including Baby Boomer generation Christians possibly `born again’ in the JPM days who became disenchanted with attractional-Church Growth Movement sorts of institutional churches as well as the older denominational types.
In the 1980’s, Church reasserted itself in Western society as a predominantly middle-class phenomenon – of a community which overwhelmingly saw itself as embracing the sorts of values which the US Religious Right conservatism prided itself on as being the only way to see and do things because it was “God’s way”.
Many Jesus People Movement Christians would not have been able to relate to that stuff and I think opted out of church altogether.
Others I know fully reverted and embraced things like prosperity doctrines etc and even still preach that stuff.
If, as Jim Wallis says, there are now a sizeable number of new Generation Y pastors who are rediscovering “the countercultural character and message of Jesus and his kingdom of God [and] moving away from the consumer ethics of suburban “seekers”…[And Jesus’ call to Christians] to sacrificial service on behalf of broken humanity”, then that represents a renewed sense of hope for the health of contemporary Christian mission. Wallis says there is a brand new spiritual revival in the air, which is directly connected with a revival of God’s justice for the poor and in terms of incarnational-mission. To me, the rejection by evangelical Christians in the US of the Religious Right for a more social-justice emphatic Barak Obama is a sign of things to come. Rich Nathan of Vineyard Columbus describes these new Christian leaders “as children of the [new] Reformation [who] believe the Bible is our final authority for faith and practice”, especially in terms of coming back to the basics of practising God’s justice for the poor through missional-incarnational work on the fringes of society where social epidemics such as HIV, world debt etc occurs.
This is a new generation of believers who Wallis says believe that “fidelity to Jesus Christ comes before politics”. Being “like Jesus” means actually “being good news” to the poor in through good works/deeds and not just theorizing about it. It also means being culturally relevant, but also more theologically conversant and formed, as well as less institutionalised in their systems and structures of mission/ministry expression.
I hope and pray that these Gen Y leaders are in fact the Reformational leaders sent from God to this current world. God knows the Church, and the world desperately needs a new Reformation now.
And I don’t think that Reformation will occur within predominantly Attractional church settings. I think it will occur as these new Jesus Revolutionaries break Christ’s Gospel out the vaults of church buildings and back into the wider world where it belongs and needs to be, to be Good News to the poor, liberate captives, prophetically challenge dominant powers etc.
I just hope that the new Gen Y Reformationists will be far more able to stay with the task than their Baby Boomer Jesus People Movement parents were.
But having said that, a good many of today’s key emergent-missional-incarnation leaders are from the Baby Boomer generation – many who had affiliation with the late 60’s-70’s Jesus People Movement as youths (e.g. Brian McLaren for instance). A lot have `kept the faith’ during very hard times through the 80s-early 2000’s, when keeping missional-incarnational was not on the agenda for many churches (e.g. John Smith of St Martins Church, Melbourne has constantly and often effectively challenged and re-challenged the Aussie and Global church about it. I can think of others …Campollo, Tim Costello, Al Hirsch…).
[Man! I only meant to write a short paragraph here!!!]
Personally I don’t find the generation shift story all that helpful. Firstly, our church has some pretty wonky generational demographics which pretty much rule out a Generation Y led rescue. We’ve got plenty of Builders, Generation X and Generation Z but no Boomers and Generation Y. So no use waiting for others, its us or bust. Secondly, since over 40% of our community are migrants, generational diversity is only one source of diversity amongst many. So I don’t find it a particularly helpful metanarrative for articulating the future of the church. May be different for others but that’s my experience.
In many ways our church fits the contemporary attractional model, but as our community diversifies we’re learning that the only attraction we can offer that has truly universal appeal, cross-culturally, is loving, accepting community grounded in who Jesus is and what he has done. Many still care about the music, but there is increasing recognition that many aren’t especially drawn by that and that its no magic bullet. Its not about events, its about process; its not about extraveganzas, its about presense. The things that we do are just opportunities to be. I would like to see our community grapple more deeply with the implications of the world landing on our doorstep, but while its slow it is starting to happen. There is more risk taking, there is more communitas. More misisonal than before, but still more to go.
Statistics do tell us something… but they don’t tell us everything. Abraham had to wait 29 years to have a son after God first called him. It wasn’t exactly a great “success story” within his lifetime… the father of a great nation only managed one legitimate heir with his wife Sarah. In some ways we can only measure “success” by the impact on our children’s children’s children (etc.)… and even then, (as has been noted) we are called to faithfulness and obedience… results are up to God.
Too true. How do you gauge growth in faithfulness though? I think that’s where these conversations often grind to a hault. What sort of substantiative evidence can we offer that missional churches nurture faithfulness more than attractional churches? I am talking about the sort of evidence that would convince the not already convinced.
Yes well Matt. We have no evidence for that. And I am not really sure the missional church movement has got to that level of maturity yet. Sadly, I don’t see any serious qualitative difference yet.
Yeah, I’d agree, so I think that’s where we need to focus more. There is no doubt in my mind that we’re being called to move beyond Christendom-style thinking, but if we’re to take more than the dreamers and prophets with us the body is gonna need to see more evidence of growth in faithfulness. This is where the lordship of Christ comes in, who is the true source of missional transformation, not our missional techniques.
Hey Matt, did you get a review copy of reJesus? I did send you an email saying that if not, contact DAve Dixon of Strand. He’ll get you one.
Haven’t received yet. Don’t recall getting the second email either so not sure what happended there. Send email to http://www.strandbooks.com today. Is that the right one?
Hi Alan,
Appreciate this - very helpful thoughts. I am going to make some comments about this on my blog - so as to introduce some Dutchies to this conversation.