In defining Missional,
Alan Hirsch creates a false dichotomy between what he calls the missional
church and the attractional church. The
concept of the missional church, if it is not placed carefully in the larger
context of the Great Commission, runs the danger of being a partial truth. The underlying question is, “What exactly is
the mission of the church?” Hirsch says,
Many churches have
mission statements or talk about the importance of mission, but where truly
missional churches differ is in their posture toward the world. A missional
community sees the mission as both its originating impulse and its organizing
principle. A missional community is patterned after what God has done in Jesus
Christ. In the incarnation God sent his Son. Similarly, to be missional means
to be sent into the world; we do not expect people to come to us. This posture
differentiates a missional church from an attractional church.
The attractional model,
which has dominated the church in the West, seeks to reach out to the culture
and draw people into the church—what I call outreach and in-grab. But this
model only works where no significant cultural shift is required when moving
from outside to inside the church. And as Western culture has become
increasingly post-Christian, the attractional model has lost its effectiveness.
The West looks more like a cross-cultural missionary context in which
attractional church models are self-defeating. The process of extracting people
from the culture and assimilating them into the church diminishes their ability
to speak to those outside. People cease to be missional and instead leave that
work to the clergy.[i]
Hirsch has failed to
recognize that the culture in the Book of Acts was pre-Christian, and that there was
a tremendous shift as the Church at its outset reached out to the Gentiles and
incorporated them into what originally was a Jewish church. Hirsh’s analysis seems to assume that the
history of the Church started with the Protestant Reformation, and if applied
to moribund Protestant Churches in the West it is at least partially correct. As a Benedictine my experience is very
different. Our monastery, St.
Scholastica, has planted over forty schools and five hospitals. To this day sisters, who are able to, work
outside of the monastery in a variety of pastoral roles. It is perhaps “missional” to a fault and as
our sisters age the monastery community is shrinking.
The early Church was
both attractional and cross-cultural. In
Africa and other places where the Church is growing the model hasn't changed. If the model has lost its
effectiveness in the West it is not because it is wrong, but rather because the
fire of the Holy Spirit is missing from the Western Church.
In the Great Commission Jesus proclaims:
All authority in heaven
and on earth has been given to me. Go
therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that
I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.[ii]
What Hirsch misses is
that properly conceived the Great Commission is both “missional” and
“attractional.” His rude expression “in-grab”
misses the true purpose of the “in-grab”.
That may be due to the common weakness of many contemporary protestant
churches. The Pentecostal Scholar Simon
Chann of Singapore has made some surprising statements, surprising because they
come from the Pentecostal expression of the Christian Faith. The statements
are: “Worship is not just a function of
the Church, but the Church’s very reason for being;” and “What is the mission
of the Trinity? The answer to that
question is communion. Ultimately all
things are to be brought into communion with the Triune God. Communion is the ultimate end, not
mission. Communion …is ultimately,
seeing God and seeing the heart of God as well, which is his love for the
world.”[iii] In short, “in-grab” is the purpose of
mission.
St. Paul expresses this
mission of the church in this way: “I have written to you very boldly by way of
reminder, because of the grace given me by God to be a minister of Christ Jesus
to the Gentiles in the priestly service of the gospel of God, so that the offering
of the Gentiles may be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit” (Romans
15:15-16). The language is sacramental
language. The minister is the liturgist,
the priestly service is precisely that which the priest does Sunday by Sunday
as the liturgist of God at the altar.
The word for offering, is prosphora, that which is offered on the altar
of God. This offering is sanctified,
made holy by the Holy Spirit, the Ruach Elohim of the Old Testament and the
New.
The offering that we
offer is actually the “offering of the Gentiles.” specifically the fruits our
work of evangelism. In love and
adoration we present to the Father those whom we have brought to salvation in
his Son Jesus Christ. That is the very
essence of “in-grab.” This offering is
possible only through Christ, and is a work directed by the Holy Spirit. What strikes me is the awesome responsibility
we bear in this matter. If we are
insensitive to the call of the Spirit, we will be left standing on the road
that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza while the eunuch makes his way back to
Candace the pagan queen unconverted.
Worship, communion with
the God of love, should awaken the love of God within our hearts. Love demands that we reach outwards in order
to bring people into the Body of Christ and into fellowship with the living
God. When that does not indeed happen,
it signals that our communion with God is actually abortive and all our
religious posturing is precisely that.
We are hypocrites, in the Biblical sense of that word, wearing the
assumed mask of piety. To us then, the
Christ will say, “Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot
nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth (Rev. 3:15, 16).
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