There’s a conversation in the church world surrounding the issue of being attractional and/or incarnational.  Attractional is by far the most dominant way of doing church.  This is where Sunday morning is the main event.  This method mostly works from the philosophy that “if you build it, they will come.” It’s not the only thing, but it is the main thing that is offered to attract non-believers.

The other approach that is being purported as the truly Biblical way of church is the incarnational approach.  This approach is harder to define in general because there are a wide variety of examples and philosphies.  The Tangible Kingdom is an effort to describe how faith communities can be birthed out of simply “doing life with people.”

Disclaimer:  Those descriptions are oversimplifications, but for the sake of brevity they’ll have to work at this point.

Here’s some quotes from the book with some thoughts to come tomorrow:

“Lost” in ancient times meant something to be treasured, worth looking for, but just missing.  “Very different from our moern-day meaning of being clueless, spiritually stupid, or arrogantly anti-God (40).”

“In the name of ‘getting someone saved,’ we have primarily focused on communicating a message of truth to the world.  There’s nothing wrong with that, except that we’ve prioritized the verbals over the nonverbals, the message over the method, that is to say, the proclamation over the posture (41).”

“If people aren’t asking about their lives, then we haven’t postured oru faith well enought or long enough (42).”

The missionary as an advocate:
“To be an advocate means that when people are in need, they know that we’ll be on their team, and that we’ll be there whenever they need us, for just about anything (43).”

“The friend who can be silent with us ina moment of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not-knowing, not-curing, not-healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is the friend who cares (44).”

“We must remember that people will always be interested in good news if it is observable (66).”

“The best and most natural way to win someone’s heart is to model a way of life that’s attractive to them (78).”

“What you give your leadership to will always grow (104).”

“Since we know that most Sojourners don’t wake up Sunday morning looking for a good sermon, we’ve decided to put our enrgy, efforts, and focus into the incarnational aspects of our church instead of the presentational aspects (105).”

“We simply want to show that this structure of attractional church makes it very hard to communicate, show, or create a place of belonging where the whole gospel can be discovered.  It’s not a matter of the heart; it’s simply that the structure limits missionality and the ability to be incarnational as a community (105).”

“Pastors should provide only what the followers of Christ can’t get on their own (111).”

“Today, if we met someone who loved Jesus but didn’t know he was God, I doubt we would call that person a Christian, let alone use them in ministry. Yet Jesus did.  I submit that for the entire time the disciples were with Jesus, they were what we would now call ‘Sojourners’: spiritually disoriented God seekers (119).”

“In order for us to change the incorrect assumptions that people have about God and his followers, we’ve got to get to the point where they consider us one of them (125).”

“It’s about replacing personal or Christian activities with time spent building relationships with people in the surrounding culture (127).”

Quoting Henri Nouwen:
“I wonder more and more if the first thing shouldn’t be to know people by name, to eat and drink with them, to listen to their stories and tell your own and let them know with words, handshakes and hugs that you do not simply like them – but truly love them (145).”