Incarnational.
Food for thought as you prayerfully choose
your “Missional Commitment.”
When God came into our world in and through Jesus, the Eternal moved into the neighborhood and took up residence among us (John 1:14). And the central thrust of the Incarnation as far as we can penetrate its mystery, was that by becoming one of us, God was able to achieve redemption for the human race. But the Incarnation, and Christ’s work flowing out of it, achieved more than our salvation, it was an act of profound affinity, a radical identification with all that it means to be human – an act which unleashes all kinds of potential in the one being identified with. But beyond identification, it is revelation: By taking upon himself all aspects of humanity, Jesus is for us, quite literally the human Image of God. If we wish to know what God is like, we need look no further than Jesus. We can understand him because He is one of us. He knows us, and can show us the way.
Following from this we can identify at least four dimensions that frame our understanding of the Incarnation of God in Jesus the Messiah. They are…
Presence: That in Jesus the eternal God is fully present to us. Jesus was no mere representative or prophet sent from God, he was God in the flesh (Jn.1:1-15, Col.2 2:9)
Proximity: That God in Christ has approached us not only in a way we can understand, but in a way which we can access. He not only called people to repentance and proclaimed the direct presence of God (Mk.1:15) but he befriended outcast people and lived life in close proximity with the broken and ‘the lost’ (Lk.19:10.)
Powerlessness: In becoming ‘one of us’ God takes the form of a servant and not that of someone who rules over us (Phil.2:6ff. Lk.22:25-27.) He does not stun us with sound and laser shows, but lives as a humble carpenter in backwater Galilee for 30 years before activating his Messianic destiny. In acting thus he shuns all normal notions of coercive power and demonstrates for us how love and humility (powerlessness) reflect the true nature of God and are the key means to transform human society.
Proclamation: Not only did the presence of God directly dignify all that is human, but he heralded the reign of God and called people to respond in repentance and faith. In this he initiates the Gospel invitation which is active to this very day.
The Incarnation not only qualifies God’s acts in the world, it must also qualify ours. If God’s central way of reaching his world was to incarnate himself in Jesus, then our way of reaching the world should likewise be incarnational. To act incarnationally therefore will mean in part that in our mission to those outside of the faith we will need to exercise a genuine identification and affinity with those we are attempting to reach. At the very least, it will probably mean moving into common geography/space and so set up a real and abiding presence among the group. But the basic motive of incarnational ministry is also revelatory—that they may come to know God through Jesus.
To say the Incarnation should inform all the dimensions of individual and communal life is surely an understatement. In becoming one of us God has given us the archetypal model of what true humanity, and by implication true community, should look and behave like. This has major implications for our lives as well as our mission. So using the same grid, let us apply this to the mission of God’s people…
Presence: The fact that God was in the Nazarene neighborhood for 30 years and no-one noticed should be profoundly disturbing to our normal ways of engaging mission. Not only does it have implication for our affirmation of normal human living, it says something about the timing as well as the relative anonymity of incarnational ways of engaging in mission. There is a time for ‘in-your-face’ approaches to mission, but there is also a time to simply become part of the very fabric of a community and to engage in the humanity of it all. Furthermore, the idea of presence highlights the role of relationships in mission. If relationship is the key means in the transfer of the Gospel, then it simply means we are going to have to be directly present to the people in our circle. Our very lives are our messages and we cannot take ourselves out of the equation of mission. But one of the profound implications of our presence as representatives of Jesus is that Jesus actually likes to hang out with the people we hang out with. They get the implied message that God actually likes them.
Proximity: Jesus mixed it up with people from every level of society. He ate with Pharisees as well as tax collectors and prostitutes. If we are to follow in his footsteps, his people will need to be directly and actively involved in the lives of the people we are seeking to reach. This not only assumes presence but also genuine availability which will involve spontaneity as well as regularity in the friendships and communities we inhabit.
Powerlessness: In seeking to act in a Christ-like way, we cannot rely on normal forms of power to communicate the Gospel, but have to take Jesus’ model with absolute seriousness (Matt.23:25-28, Phil.2:5ff.) This commits us to servanthood and humility in our relations with each other and the world. Sadly much of church history shows how little we have assimilated this aspect of incarnational Christlikeness into our understanding of church, leadership, and mission.
Proclamation: The gospel invitation initiated in the ministry of Jesus remains alive and active to this very day. A genuine incarnational approach will require that we be always willing to share the gospel story with those within our world. We simply cannot take this aspect out of the equation of mission and remain faithful to our calling in the world. We are essentially a ‘message tribe’ and it means we must ensure the faithful transmission of the message we carry through proclamation.
….This practice of incarnating the gospel informs some of the most remarkable people movements around today. God’s Squad, a missionary order doing mission among outlaw biker gangs takes this approach. Over the years, they have become an actual part of the fabric of the subculture and are there when people get to talk about God, Jesus, and meaning, as all people do in their own way. They have brought Jesus into the imagination of the underground biker culture of which they are such a vital part. But his practice need not be limited to subcultures, the poor, and ethnic groups. It must become a part of our practice in dealing with the many people that exist around us in everyday life. There are now over sixty pub churches in Australia and no doubt many more in the United Kingdom and the United States. In the desire to incarnate the gospel into a pub we an see the same impulse at work.
Incarnational ministry essentially means taking the church to the people rather than bringing the people to the church…. The net effect of these various expressions of incarnational mission is to seed the gospel into local areas or people groups and thus make it part of the intrinsic fabric of the culture. Furthermore, genuine incarnational presence gives a deeply personal feel to mission as well as creating credibility for proclamation and response. We must never underestimate the power of incarnational practices to bring the gospel near to any people group.
By way of contrast we have distorted the meaning of incarnational mission when as Western missionaries we have imposed fledged denominational templates on Third World nations. Not only does this diminish the validity of local culture, but it alienates the local Christians from their cultural surroundings by transposing a Western cultural expression in the place of local ones. The net result is a poor black man in the middle of the bush in Africa, dressed in robes and standing outside a gothic style church building, calling people to worship in ways that barely make sense even to the cultures that started them. In these cases no attempt is made to contextualize (localize) either gospel or church, and yet we wonder why these have little lasting effect on the surrounding populations. While the error is easier to spot in the middle of Africa, we do the same thing all across the highly tribalized West.
(Excerpts from The Forgotten Ways by Alan Hirsch, pages 132-137. For more examples of incarnational ministry see these pages.)
