Planting a new church, or remissionalizing an existing one, in this approach isn’t primarily about buildings, worship services, size of congregations, and pastoral care, but rather about gearing the whole community around natural discipling friendships, worship as lifestyle, and mission in the context of everyday life.
Click here for an expanded critique of Alan Hirsch’s Forgotten Ways.
I don’t know what it is with some of the missional books being published these days, but their titles can be so out of touch and ambiguous (cf. Off-Road Disciplines, Creps). The Forgotten Ways: reactivating the missional church (subtitle is much better) is no exception to lousy titles, but the content is certainly thought provoking and generally summative of some missiological thought (McGavran, Walls, Bosch, etc).
In Section one, Hirsch brings the reader into his own missional and not-so-missional story as missionary and church planter. At one point he claims to have planted 6 churches in 7 years, not all of them successful. Hirsch draws on his rich and varied experience as a church planter to critique recent models of church in the West. He concludes that in order to have a truly missional church one must possess Apostolic Genius (AG. another naming failure), which he describes as “something that belongs to the gospel itself and therefore to the whole people who live by it.”
AG is comprised of six components of missional DNA: 1) missional incarnational impulse 2) disciple making 3) communitas 4) organic systems 5) apostolic environment and, at the center 6) Jesus is Lord. The longest and Second section of the book is devoted to defining and describing just what and how this mDNA is and does.
I am currently finished with about a third of the book, so I will offer one critique and one praise before concluding this review in another post.
Praise: Hirsch creatively combines elements which appear to be essential to missional movements, while incorporating the frequently neglected theological center of mission: monotheistic christology (cf. Wright, Bauckham) or as Hirsch puts it christocentric monotheism.
Critique: Despite the incarnational component of his mDNA, Hirsch ends up baptizing the decentralized, “organic” modes of church and incorrectly oversimplifies the connections between the early church and the missional church. On page 64 he includes a chart that reflects his stated simplification, drawing tight parallels to the Apostolic church and the missional church of the past ten years. Two issues arise here: 1) the NT does not concretize any form of church, allowing for diverse expressions of church 2) the missional movement is only ten years old and it remains to be seen how much in common it will have with the early church.
Check out Richard Florida’s (of Creative Class fame) recent blog entry:
So I was ecstatic to meet Rod Garvin who was one of the 30 community catalysts in our Knight Initiative in Charlotte, and even more ecstatic to find this thoughtful post on Rod’s blog.
“As a Christian and a creative person by nature, Florida’s theories resonate with me on many levels….Florida emphatically stresses that everyone is creative, but we need an economy which allows all people to utilize that God given talent, especially those in the service and manufacturing sectors, so that they can contribute more ideas, and hopefully improve their compensation as well. The kind of conversations I am having as a part of this initiative should be happening in the church, and a few congregations are having this dialog. But, are Christians as a whole ready to tackle some tough and uncomfortable questions? What happens when society becomes more accepting of gays and lesbians than the church? Racism and ethnic separation is a global problem, but churches are far more segregated than most corporations and many neighborhoods. Poverty and low wages are driven by economic structures and policies, though personal choices can play a role. Do we have the courage to ask if our capitalist economy can be made better and turn scarcity into abundance? How do these issues affect our ability to bear witness to the Good News of God’s Kingdom? How can Christians become the creative Revolutionaries we are called to be?”
Rod and I talked for quite some time about this. It’s clear that creative types are moving away from organized religion to less hierarchical and more organic forms of spirituality and spiritual expression. And for reasons similar to other large-scale organizations, organized religions are having great trouble responding in a forward looking way.
