Tag Archive - The Tangible Kingdom

Attractional, missional, exponential and many more "al" words

April 29, 2009 in Church Planting, Doing Church, Exponential Conference with 4 Comments

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?

The Tangible Kingdom by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay

December 3, 2008 in Book Notes, Church Planting, Leadership with 2 Comments

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).”