Attractional, missional, exponential and many more “al” words

This post is somewhat of a follow up to this post and my experience last week at the Exponential Conference.

There has been this debate/conversation in the church world over a philosophy of doing church.  It typically is cast as an either or.  You can either be an attractional church or missional church.

I have always wondered, “But shouldn’t we be attractive to those not in church?”

And at the same time I have wondered, “Jesus certainly said to GO, so we need to live missionally as well.”

Two things really helped clarify a distinction that we have to be careful about:

In The Tangible Kingdom, Halter and Smay present there alternative church lifestyle as A way and not THE way.

The real meat of the book comes at the end where they describe the kind of life that creates incarnational communities.  They offer a different way because of the central question to the book (in my words):

Does the way we typically do church where so much focus is on the Sunday service prohibit or limit our ability to actually be with and minister to people?

Their answer a lot of the time is yes.

So, their focus has been on getting their faith communities to be with people and use Sunday mornings mainly for the purpose of vision casting and encouragement but not outreach. Outreach is what happens when life touches life in a conversation or an act of service.

Unlike so many books that advocate this, they do not tell everyone that is involved in an attractional form of church to leave do what they do.  Instead, they encourage anyone that resonates with what they say to experiment within their context.

And then a second clarifying thing: This past week at the Exponential Conference, Alan Hirsch said something that really turned a light bulb on for me.  He said that a better word for “attractional” is “extractional,” because that’s the danger of only focusing on Sunday morning.  People are extracted from their mission field to spend more time at a church building.

If I’ve learned anything in planting Suncrest-East it’s that people naturally want to make church about a building or place, and it’s not!  So the tension I wrestle with is this:  How do we gather for the sake of cooperate worship and teaching without making it all about Sunday morning?

And this: “How do I as a pastor, not just work in the church and on the church but live missionally?

 

Alan Hirsch on “Missional”

This breakout was primarily about what it means to be “missional.”  Here’s my rough notes:In defining missional we are tempted to apply it to everything we do.

Truth is sustained in the clarity of words.
The word missional and everything it represents carries the full weight of the future of the church.
More of the same will not get significantly better results.
The problems of the world cannot be solved by the same type of thinking that created those problems.

It is not:
-emerging – largely a renewal movement
-simply being evangelistic; just because it’s outreach doesn’t mean it’s missional; typically done by telling people they have to come to our “culture”; to be missional is to be a sent people
—you should be attractive, but what happens is “extractional”; people are extracted from their culture
-social justice – part of it, but not exclusively; an expression of it;
-simply church planting – a tool that missionaries use

All mission in the West should be cross-cultural.

Every church planter needs to think like a missionary.
-missionary stance in relation to culture
-missionary distance – attractional works when people are only slightly removed; but in a far removed culture whre missionaries deal attractional is actually extractional;

It’s not so much that the church has a mission as much as the mission has a church. God is a mission in the world and we can join him in that mission.

You do not bring God into a place. He is already there.
The job is to disern the hand of God in people you would normally write off.

Mission is the outward thrust, not collection but a driving out.
Incarnation is the way the sent God comes to us.
-God is in the neighborhood for 30 years and no one notices. That says a lot about his patience, respect for culture, and how we should engage the world. Subversive.
-Mission best expresses itself incarnationally.

What are the marks of the church?
-People
-Jesus
-Covenant community
-Transformation/discipleship
-Mission
-Worship

Most churches center themselves around worship.
When we say missional church, we mean that mission is the organizing principle.

 

Dinner with Ed Stetzer and Alan Hirsch

So I had dinner tonight with Ed Stetzer and Alan Hirsch…along with about 50 of my closest friends.  Actually Mary Beth, Tim, Kevin and Andy are here in beautiful Orlando for the Exponential Conference.  We had an opportunity to attend a dinner put on by the Upstream Collective and hear from two great thinkers and practitioners in the church planting world.  Here’s a few highlights from Ed and Alan:

Ed Stetzer:

• A lot of people fall in love withtheir model before they fall in love with their mission.

• The how of ministry is determined by the who, what and when.

• Does our model create spectators?

• Watching a great communicator is good, but we need to reproduce the great communicators as well.

• The term “missional” has become a theological junk drawer. We see in the word what we don’t like about the current church.
• Missional in our context, mission minded in the global context

• Every culture has things we can:

-adopt
-adapt
-reject

Alan Hirsch

• Plant in the hard places.
• Live missionally and let the church come from that.
• You have to unlearn and then relearn before you can plan.

• Question about what he specifically would do if he moved into a new neighborhood:

-Find where the social hotspots are and hang out.
-Make friends outside the church.
-Get the church out of the comfortable zone and into public places.

• 3 keys in living missionally:

-Proximity
-Frequency
-Spontaneity – to invite them to your home

• You become a chaplain to the system if you can’t challenge it.

Great stuff and this was just a little precursor.