There has been a lot written about the importance of friendship in evangelism but I wonder if it needs a bit of a re-think. Maybe it needs dumping as a concept altogether.

Friendship evangelism pretty much suggests that evangelism happens amongst those who are… you guessed it… my friends. When we think about ‘friends’ most of us have to admit that we don’t have too many of them, and if we are happy with the ones we’ve got we’re probably not likely to seek too many others. Such is life in our busy world.

However ‘friendship evangelism’ (as I have understood it) tells me that I must first be in an authentic relationship with a person before I venture to tell them about Christ.

How long does an ‘authentic’ friendship take?

‘Authenic’ means what?

And then there’s the question ‘are you only being a friend so you can tell them about Jesus?’

Is that authentic?… or not?…

And what if your friends don’t want to hear about Jesus? Is evangelism a non event for you?…

This is a concept fraught with difficulties

Perhaps a better way to look at it is that we are called to tell everyone about Jesus and some of them will finish up being our friends… and some won’t. We might not even like some people who we tell about Jesus. I think that’s ok. I don’t like everyone I meet. Not everyone likes me. (No its true)

By linking evangelism to authentic friendships I think we have painted ourselves into a stupidly tight corner. ‘If I don’t really know you I shouldn’t open this topic up’…

Really?

Or… maybe its a convenient corner, where ‘I can’t talk about Jesus because I don’t know the person and don’t have the right to go there’. For those who shy away from publicising their faith this is a nice card to play. It sounds very respectful when maybe its just fear driven.

I don’t want to pull the ‘this is biblical’ line, because some of scripture is definitely descriptive rather than prescriptive, but… I wonder how much friendship evangelism we could really see in scripture?!

The other problem with ‘friendship evangelism’ is that I then don’t ‘do evangelism’ among people who aren’t my friends, so the people I don’t like, or just don’t click with, will never get to hear about Jesus from me.

If you’re feeling nervous right now then ask yourself why?

Am I saying evangelism is event not process? Noooooo

Am I suggesting we preach on street corners? Noooooo

Am I saying we vomit a verbal gospel over everyone we meet? Nooooo

But download snow buddies movie gingerdead man 2 passion of the crust download maybe we need to toss this idea of friendship evangelism and just get on with living and sharing the gospel with the people we meet, and along the way a fewof those folks will become friends and a whole bunch of others won’t.

And… That’s ok.

Note: Before you quote me on this post make sure you read the two paragraphs below! This is quite intentionally a polemic piece of writing, and while it reflects much of what I believe it is said in a way that I normally wouldn’t choose to say things. So before you either quote me or write me nasty emails read the fine print 🙂

I mentioned a few days back that Scott had asked me to write a piece on ‘Incarnational v Attractional Mission’. It was to be a maximum of one A4 page size 12 font… approx 500 words… How hard is that?!

Knowing the potential for biffo with this particular topic I often try to be a peacemaker, but here’s 500 words that go a little bit harder. I do this not to bash the attractional expression of church, (because many of my close friends live there), but because its hard to have a good debate if we’re all just being nice to each other. This isn’t quite ‘gloves off’, but it does get a little more pointed.

Here goes…

Over the last 7 or 8 years I have become increasingly convinced that the incarnation is the primary biblical lens through which we are to view the missionary activity of Jesus and in turn the church. When ‘the word became flesh and moved into the neighbourhood’ he had many options as to how he would live his life as the ‘son of God’. Yet, somewhat paradoxically it would seem, he spent most of that journey quite intentionally as the ‘son of man’, living a simple life in a small town for his first 30 years, prior to any recognised ‘ministry’. So much so that when he returned to preach the people laughed and mocked him saying ‘He’s just a carpenter” Mary’s boy” Who does he think he is?’ It begs the question, was Jesus a lousy missionary or was there something quite intentional and radically subversive about the way he approached his life and mission that we need to learn from and emulate? If Jesus were alive today and his mission was still to ‘seek out and save the lost’ what might he do?…

Would he hire a building, set up a sound system, develop a music team, drama team, and then do local letterbox drops advising people that they could come and be part of his church on Sunday? Frankly I don’t believe this approach to mission would rate a blip on his strategic radar. The so called ‘attractional’ mode of mission centres its focus on the church service and is dedicated to producing an event that pagans will want to come to. The theory goes that the more professional the service is, the funkier the music, the better the coffee, and so on” the more likely the punters will come, hence the term ‘attractional’. As such the success of mission in this mode is almost always measured by the number who attend on Sunday. While a small minority of larger churches do experience some success with this approach, the overwhelming majority of smaller churches attempting to be Hillsong clones continue to haemorrhage members every week because they cannot offer the same quality of music, preaching or other services that their mega-mall comrades down the road are able to provide.

I would argue that this ‘attractional mission’, while effective for a few, is actually a case of putting the cart before the horse. Deciding on a form of church and then trying to make it so that people want to come is mission in reverse. There is a growing awareness that pagan Aussies do not want to come to church and simply making the Sunday event more attractive is not the answer to this problem. Perhaps the question we ought to ask ourselves is ‘why do we think they would want to come to church?’ Was it ever Jesus’ intention that non-Christians should seek us and desire to attend our worship events? Or didn’t he say quite clearly that it was his calling, and now ours to ‘seek out and save the lost’ to ‘go’ to their world and enculturate the gospel there. Little Bo Peep evangelism (leave em alone and they’ll come home) is fast running out of steam as the Christian story ceases to be the dominant framework for Australian people to interpret their spirituality.

By contrast the incarnational approach to mission is refreshingly simple. It requires us to live amongst the people in our communities, love them, share the good news of the kingdom both in action and in speech and then as people become followers of Christ to form up indigenous communities of faith that reflect the specific context. This requires no great resources or buildings, no slick marketing plans and no highly talented people. In incarnational mission the gatherings exist to support the believers as they move out in mission rather than being seen as the place to bring people to. While attractional churches will continue to dominate the landscape of the Christian world, I strongly believe that hope for the future lies increasingly with an incarnational approach to mission that takes both gospel and context seriously and sends Christians out as missionaries rather than calling pagans to come and attend church.

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Ok… fire up!

I came across this image on Flickr today.

I reckon its a great picture of what I hope happens with our community and other missional communities around the place

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Gordon Crosby once said that in all his years of service he has never (and he emphasized ‘never’) seen a group go from community to mission. Rather, he said one should organize around mission and community will follow.

From Paul

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After the Forge paper of last week that is currently being re-written Steve has a podcast of an interview with Hirschy, commenting on that issue and the distinctions he sees between the different shape the so called ’emerging church’ is taking around the world.

Also about to happen is a look at the future of the church watch beer for my horses in divx and Scott has asked me to write a paper on ‘incarnation versus attractional mission’, with my focus to be on why I would choose ‘incarnational’. Normally I approach these issues with a very diplomatic approach and try not to bring any offense. I don’t want to bring offense and I don’t go seeking a punch up. I see other Christians as my brothers and sisters who are hearing God differently and that is not my issue.

But… I would like to write something a bit more provocative and confronting. I believe deeply in the incarnational approach to mission, and I am convinced it has much stronger biblical and missiological credence than the attractional approach.

But in 500 words!?…

That’s the tough bit.ratatouille dvdrip

Here’s a link to an article a mate sent to me today where the author reflects on baby boomer reluctance to accept the change that may come with an emerging generation or to embrace ‘change or die’ statements.

There are telling lessons in us for those of us re-imagining church and mission to hear at this end of the journey. In light of recent discussion it is also interesting that the author uses the term ’emergent’ to describe those who “like dark sanctuaries and slow reflective music”. I’m not sure if the author sees the missionary character of the ’emerging missional church’ which is defined not by the nature of the gathering but by the practice of enculturating the gospel into whatever context we find ourselves within. (Which may or may not result in “dark sanctuaries and slow reflective music”)

Here are a few snippets from the article:

“Eventually we won-we enshrined our own preferences as standard operating procedure in the church-“tradition.” In the process we became our parents-we got protective of our own traditions”

“And to be quite honest with you, as we boomers have aged we are less sure that we actually did the right thing in the violent overthrow of our parents’ traditions. We are admitting to each other that we did some pretty manipulative things to overthrow the oldsters and now we’re not totally sure we made a gain for the kingdom. Have we really reached the tons of unbelievers we claimed our musical styles would bring in? Is the quality of discipleship greater now than when we took over? We are doubting this now that we are approaching 60 as a generation.”

There is a call to humility in this article and to recognise that whatever our sense of calling may be and however we see the future of the church, there have been those who have gone before us who also have felt like they have ‘found the answer’.

I must add that none of the folks I know behave like they ‘have the answer’, but sometimes we can ‘fight’ for our preferences rather than for what Jesus would see as important.

Anyway… just read it!

While the paper linked to below thou shalt not kill except divx download was intended to deal with Don Carson’s critique, the comments and emails that have been recieved would indicate a perception that Brian McClaren has been unfairly portrayed.

At least for the short term I have de-linked the paper in its current form and I’d ask that others who have it just hang onto it for a bit and not circulate it. It is not our intent to either hurt Brian McClaren or damage relations with friends in other countries. We are very sorry for the hurt this has caused and apologise for that.

As I indicated in the comments below, we are most definitely open to learning and changing and aware that we have our own blind spots (which we obviously can’t see…) It may be that after some review we still stand in a slightly different position to other groups, but its not our purpose to be adversarial and condemn our brothers.

Alan Hirsch has commented a response in Tall Skinny’s post and it is worth reading as it speaks to where we are at:

Please be assured that what we have written is not a dismissal of Emergent and certainly not a distancing from Brian McLaren and what he stands for. I have immense and abiding respect, nay, reverence, for Brian. Our primary concern in drafting this document was to try and distinguish elements that make us different in terms of nuance and focus in order to try offset the collateral damage on the Australian missional church that has, and is, sadly taking place due to Carson’s book. The context for this is that we have labored long and hard to try and establish a small beach-head of legitimacy within the broader Aussie church, and we feared (with reason) that this debate could set the cause of the emerging missional church in Australia back significantly. Unfairly so. Hence the paper.

I am truly sorry that this might play itself out badly on brothers and sisters in common cause. We will try and limit any misunderstandings that our document might have caused. Brian, you are a legend. Stay true!

Once a document is ‘out there’ its obviously irretriveable however you may wish to not circulate it while some questions are resolved.

Thanks

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Don Carson has certainly kicked up a bit of dust lately with his book Becoming Conversant With the Emerging Church.

He is a significant biblical scholar and as such he adds weight to the number of people who critique the ’emerging church’ for its approach to mission and church.

But is he on the money?

When you write books like these you really want to make sure you have your facts straight.

As a Forge team here in Oz we have been discussing our own response to Carson. As a result Al Hirsch and Mike Frost have written a response on our behalf that details what we see happening.

It has helped us clarify our own understanding of what we are about and how we see Carson’s critique.

Update: I have deleted the paper. See the above postlast of the living divx online

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Another tacky tag line from the people who brought you WWJD… But I get the sense that this is what God is saying to me personally at the moment.

‘Pray until something happens.’

We had a great time at our church gathering on Sunday, discussing the idea of God giving us his spirit and us having ‘dreams and visions’. Danelle asked us to think thru what our dreams and visions are.

One of mine is to see God’s presence very evident in our community and to see people encountering him in undeniable ways and radically re-orienting life around his agenda. In more churchy-speak I think we would call it ‘an unmistakeable move of the holy spirit’.

Yesterday I sensed God giving me a really big kick up the butt in regard to praying for that. There simply is no other action I can take that can make this happen.

Its easy to say ‘we don’t pray enough’ and its also probably true. I know I don’t have sensational prayer experiences to speak of. It just feels like very very hard work at times to pray. Its easy to feel guilty about not praying enough. That’s not a great motivator at all either…

But I can pray.

And if I choose to then there is no reason why I can’t make space in my day to do the ‘work’ of prayer. Yes, prayer is not just about intercession – I know that – its been one of the learnings in this new church experience, but it is also important to still do the work of praying for others and praying for our community.

I probably won’t wear a t-shirt or arm band though…paths of glory online

The Rev is coming to stay with us on Friday…

He’ll be sharing some stories of what he has learnt over many years of church planting in many different communities.

He’s supposed to be a no rules fighter of some sort. I have two kids who I wrestle with every night. Reckon I’ll kick his butt when he gets here…

Seriously… if you’re up for a great night then get along to the Warehouse Cafe in Shenton park, 7.30pm this Friday night. There is no entry fee, but we are intentionally taking an offering to give to John. He is here on to work with Forge and relies on support from family and friends. Right now he could use a hand with that side of things, so come along, enjoy the night and dig deep to help a top bloke.matrix reloaded the divx download