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Following the m.o. of my friend, Dr. Mark, I am going to blog through certain chapters of Frost and Hirsch's book, The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st Century Church. This is partly a way to share condensed bits of information to people who have not yet read the book or to refresh the memories of those who have read it already. Moreover, this is an opportunity for me to share my questions with all of you to foster dialogue about these ideas. My ideas and/or questions will be presented in brackets.

Implications of the Incarnation for Mission:

1) "The Incarnation provides us with the missional means by which the gospel can become a genuine part of a people group without damaging the innate cultural frameworks that provide that people group with a sense of meaning and history" (37).

2) "[I]ncarnational mission will mean that in reaching a people group we will need to identify with them in all ways possible without compromising the truth of the gospel itself" (37).

3) "[I]ncarnational mission implies a real and abiding incarnational presence among a group of people" (39).

4) "[I]n terms of its missional stance in relation to context, incarnational mission implies a sending impulse rather than an extractional one" (39).

5) "[I]ncarnational mission means that people will get to experience Jesus on the inside of their culture (meaning systems) and their lives because of our embodying the gospel in an incarnationally appropriate way" (40).

Read Jake's thoughts...

[I'm on board with most of what Frost and Hirsch are suggesting. I, along with most emergentish folks, have become disenchanted with the attractional church that is only concerned with it's own membership numbers. I wonder though, if pitting a centrifugal approach over and against a centripetal approach seems to err in the opposite direction. They note clearly that they do believe people can experience God in a church setting (p. 41). However, this seems to be a throw-away line in the context of their incarnational push. I get the impression that they are calling for a kind of institutional red-Rover, whereby all of the "missional/incarnational" people abandon the "institutional/atractional" folks in their decaying buildings. Who, I wonder, will be left to minister to those people when all of the missional folks leave? We can talk all we want about "organic, dynamic, and noninsitutional" modes of Christianity. I'm concerned for Bill, a 78-year old man at my church who loves his Sunday School class and high-church, traditional worship. Ought I, as a minister of the gospel, tell him, "Sorry Bill, there is no 'sacred space.'" This will never be real to him--he who never fails to mention it when I don't wear a tie to worship.

Frost and Hirsch even make reference to Len Sweet and his that suggestion the church be both inward and outward looking (pp. 45-6) but every anecdote or hypothetical they offer is centrifugal in nature. Why?

Frost and Hirsch use Moltmann's work on the church that resists homogeny and makes room for the Other, which I like. However, the Moltmann references seem to run cross ways with the idea of forming intentional communities centered upon common interests (e.g., the Christian car club on p. 43). They spend the better part of twenty pages vying for an incarnational approach that absorbs the rhythms and vibes of a community in its particularity. How do they suggest we incarnate the gospel in keeping with the five principles I recount above and be utterly open to heterogeneity? They do offer an anecdote about St. Thomas' Crookes approach (p. 53) of vying for homogeneous cells that meet together occasionally. So is this how church should be?

Lastly, I don't like the language they use in describing people traditionally labeled "non-Christians" or "unchurched" as "not-yet-Christians." This smacks of evangelical arrogance to me. It reminds me of the criticism of the "anonymous Christian" motif developed by Rahner and expanded by Hick. If you are a Christ-follower, how would you like being called a "not-yet-Muslim"? I think this type of language is unhelpful in a postmodern, post-Christian world.]

The Incarnational Approach

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