Pt. II

Expanding on the three flaws of the current church: ATTRACTIONAL, DUALISTIC, AND HIERARCHICAL.

The current mindset in the church is that it has to get it "right" and people will come flooding in to be changed by the gospel. That we have to "attract" people. If the teaching is interesting enough, if the music is good enough, if the children's program is quality and the lighting is perfect then the community will come flocking into the services. It as if everything has to do with the service itself, as if people are looking for a service to attend on Sunday morning, just that they haven't found the one that is perfect yet. This is the problem with attractional. It is a COME-TO-US attitude instead of a GO-TO-THEM mentality which is clearly the more biblical of the two.

Dualism is the act of separating the sacred from the profane, the holy from the unholy, and unfortunately what has become "religious and secular". It produces a gap between belief and everyday life. We talk about the "world out there" and "us in here". Clearly a Christ-like way of seeing it. (sarcasm there if you missed it).

Heirarchical leadership is dominant. What about Paul's radical dissolution of the traditional distinctions between priests and laity, between officials and ordinary members, between holy men and common people? "The first Christians radically reshaped the language of "priesthood" and "sacrifice." In one sense all are priests; believers are their own priests for all have immediacy of access to God's grace in Christ. What priests have performed for others before, believers can now do for themselves. In another sense, none can be appointed priests in the Christian church, for Christ has fulfilled the priestly role once for all." To say it clearly, there needs to be a recognition that the common layman has as equally important, and needs to be equipped for such as much as any "pastor" or "minister." It is a recognition of the ministry of a daily life. This is not doing away with leadership, for that is biblical, but rather a shift needs to take place in the understanding that we all have ministries, we all are priests, we all are "sent-ones" and there is no such thing as a high-calling to the pastorate or the mission field. Check Ephesians 4 and the concept of a body with Christ as the head, heirarchical or apostolic leadership? Quite clearly it is the latter and as the church we have gravitated to a top-down model with someone other than Christ as the head.




So then, these trends must be reversed and what emerges is a missional church, which by its very nature will be an anti-clone of the existing traditional model. Rather than being attractional, it will be incarnational. It will leave its own religious zones and live comfortably with non-church-goers, seeping into the host culture like salt and light. It will be an infiltrating, transformational community. Second, rather than being dualistic, it will embrace a messianic spirituality. That is, a spirituality of engagement with culture and the world in the same mode as the Messiah himself. And third, the missional church will develop an apostolic form of leadership rather than the traditional hierarchical model.


(Again, these are quotes and thoughts taken from The Shaping of Things to Come.)