Category: Missional Church

As a church plant, we don’t do gas buy-downs, block parties, or candy-bar handouts. These attractional events are common fare in planting, so I realize we are going against the stream in not doing these things. We are a missional-incarnational church; however, this is not an attractional vs. incarnational post. Jesus did a lot of things that were attractional and incarnational. What I am concerned with is the kind of attractional events that we engage in as a church. How do we determine what attractional events we choose, like whether or not to participate in a gas buy-down or as someone recently suggested a coffee buy-down?

As I see it, there are theological and missiological principles that guide our discernment in what kind of attractional events to engage in. For instance, the gas buy-down is theologically and philosophically problematic for us for four main reasons:

1) Stewardship: we want to use our resources in a way that doesnt reinforce poor budgeting, consumerism, or indifference to the environment. Paying for people’s gas that they can otherwise afford is not the best stewardship. This rationale would also apply to buying a bunch of give-away stuff like XBoxes and Gift Cards for a block party. Instead, we would advocate using that money in more strategic attractional events like buying food for the homeless or paying for a baby shower or planting trees in our city.

2) Anti-Consumerism/Counter Empire: we want to avoid buying a bunch of superfluous stuff and giving it away because we don’t want to reinforce the consumeristic impulse. We want to deconstruct the unspoken notion that “you are what you buy.”

3) Love: We want our attractional events to be people-enriching and city-renewing. So we are up for paying to showcase a starving artist but not down with giving away Xboxes. Attractional events should pass the test of stewardship, anti-consumerism, and love.

4) God: Are attracting people to God or to our church? We want our attractional events to ultimately attract people to God, to his character, not to coming to a church service. However, we certainly hope that in attracting people to God, that they are attracted to Jesus in us–the church.

Missiological Rationale:

1) Contextualized: Gas-buy downs tend to be sub-urban events; we are an urban church. Buying bus tickets or something would be better.

2) Cynical City Culture: Urbanites can smell a buy-off a mile away. This is theological and missiological issue. The last thing we want to communicate to our fellow citizens is that they can be bought off or that we want to buy them off. Instead, we want to serve them and the city, not promote our church or cheapen them.

*Ironically, our country is approaching a gas crisis, in which case a gas buy down could become a city-renewing, people-loving thing to do, especially if gas prices shoot up more.

Check out Steve McCoy’s Missional Triad.

The term “unchurched” has become quite popular in missional efforts to re-evangelize and re-church North America. To be sure, there are a lot of unchurched people in the U.S. In fact, no county in the US has registered a greater percentage of church persons over the past decade. Church attendance has declined over the past few years by 10%, and the US is the only continent where Christianity is not growing! With these kinds of statistics, I wonder if “unchurched” language and perspectives are falling short of adequately describing the challenges facing the American church (more stats). Perhaps we should pick up the language of missiologists who have used the term “resistant.”

The resistant are those who have or are receiving an adequate opportunity to hear the gospel but over some time have not responded positively (Pocock, “Raising Questions about the Resistant”). The resistant are NOT unreached, though they are often unchurched. What constitutes “some time”? More importantly, should we shift our strategies and discourse to approach unchurched Americans as resistant peoples?

Not unlike the term unchurched, defining the resistant is has its problems; however, Timothy Tennent has helpfully pointed out that peoples can be resistant in at least four ways: culturally, theologically, ethnically or politically (Tennent, “Equipping Missionaries for the Resistant”). Depending on what area or peoples of the U.S we are considering, any one or combination of the four areas may apply.

In Austin, Texas many people are culturally, politically, and theologically resistant. The diverse cultural resistance to the gospel in Austin is unlike the cultural affinity in the rest of Texas. Harvard’s Pluralism Project reveals that Austin’s cultural diversity is due to a combination of factors–immigration, education, and the creative class ethos, and the so-called “attitude factor”. This pluralistic mix has fostered resistance and indifference to Christianity, allowing a wide variety of religions and spiritualities to flourish.

During 2004 presidential election, despite being home to President Bush, Austin was a blue dot in a red state. God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit are neither Republican nor Democratic, but unfortunately, there are churches and christianities that are partisan. Austin pushes back against the Republican right, often associated with fundamentalist christianity. The generally Democratic values of the environment, the poor, and so on are big for Austinites. As a result, Austinites are politically resistant to the gospel.

As I see it, a major challenge to reaching the resistant is to approach our christianity with redemptive suspicion, questioning what may in reality be christianity, but in fact is not Christ-like. Perhaps a renewed call to wisely distinguish Christ from culture, while not quarantining the gospel from society. To exegete the cultural, ethnic, theological, and political spheres of resistance, while lovingly engaging the people who inhabit them and depending on the power and sufficiency of the gospel to redeem and affirm people and culture.

By rethinking missional approaches to churching America, we might actually change our methods. Evaulating the areas of resistance among Americans is one way forward in fulfilling the Great Commission. At the end of the day, everyone will bow in worship to King Jesus, some by faith and others by force. It is our job to communicate the heart-renovating, mind-renewing, culture-engaging, city-renewing, community-developing, God-glorifying gospel in a wise and winsome way.

Interesting article on an interesting book:

Perhaps most helpful is Twitchell’s explanation of the economic concepts of branding. He writes, “While thinking about believers as customers seems almost too vulgar, thinking about consumers as believers is precisely what modern marketing is all about.” Purchases determine identity. Church leaders can’t afford to ignore the effects of living in a consumer culture. Today, the way people choose a church is almost the same as how they shop for groceries.

HT: GR