May 6, 2008...10:05 pm
Why the church must be attractional: an Anabaptist critique of the emerging missional church via Milbank
A few weeks ago, Hamo wrote an interesting post called ‘Why the missional incarnational church is screwed’. He quoted at length from the postliberal theologian John Milbank:
The church cannot be found amongst the merely like-minded, who associate in order to share a particular taste, hobby or perversion. It can only be found where many different peoples possessing many different gifts collaborate in order to produce a divine–human community in one specific location.
St Paul wrote to Galatia and Corinth, not to regiments or to weaving-clubs for widows. He insisted on a unity that emerges from the harmonious blending of differences. Hence the idea that the church should ‘plant’ itself in various sordid and airless interstices of our contemporary world, instead of calling people to ‘come to church’, is wrongheaded, because the refusal to come out of oneself and go to church is simply the refusal of church per se.
One can’t set up a church in a cafe amongst a gang of youths who like skateboarding because all this does is promote skateboarding and dysfunctional escapist maleness, along with that type of private but extra-ecclesial security that is offered by the notion of ‘being saved’.”
- From ‘Stale Expressions: the Management-Shaped Church’, Studies in Christian Ethics, April 2008 by John Milbank.
It would be wrong to focus on Milbank’s defence of the parish and how admittedly un-diverse many parishes are, rather than his critique of emerging-missional ecclesiology. I’m no great fan of the parish, but it’s these words and talking to Ian Packer while he was over that have helped consolidate my points of difference with EMC ecclesiology. As much as great things are happening with the EMC, I think it would be a mistake for me to lose the distinctive Anabaptist ecclesiology that I had clear in my head for a while and which Milbank has helped me begin to recover.
I need to re-articulate the fundamental point of disagreement between an anabaptist ecclesiology and the agenda laid out by Frost and Hirsch in The Shaping of Things to Come.
As much as EMC criticisms of church culture are valid, an anabaptist ecclesiology maintains that the church must be attractional. We mustn’t think the two choices are between ‘mega-church attractional beasts’ and ‘incarnational missional communities’. There is a third way…
The church is a counter-cultural community, a city on a hill embodying the gospel, a people called to be now what the world is called to be ultimately. It calls people into a new humanity living in the kingdom of God. It calls people to be baptised into this new humanity where their primary identity is no longer their subculture - whether that be skater, biker, twentysomething, mortgage belter, activist, gay, professional or artist (or Jew, Greek, slave, master, male, female) - but where their identity is in Christ.
The diversity of the church is part of the good news! It announces to the world that the old barriers have been broken down, the emnity between peoples has been overcome. Baptising subcultures as ‘churches’ misses this good news. It may even risk retaining an individualistic evangelical idea of what the good news is: ‘personal salvation’.
Where can this church be found?
It’s hard to find, and that’s why we need to articulate the hope, pray for it, and do what we can in the power of the Spirit to practice it.
For me, right now, it is found in Network Vineyard Church. Maybe part of my call is to help the church, right where I am, discover its call to diversity and to the body-life of the kingdom. I want people to know that when they break out of their comfort zone and reach across culture in church, they are partaking in the good news. It starts in small ways. It starts with who you talk to in the coffee break. It leads to you becoming family with people you wouldn’t otherwise associate with: different classes, different races, different outlooks.
8 Comments
May 7, 2008 at 7:51 am
Ah… Nathan…
Wait just a minute
I realise it may sound like playing with words (but then that’s what blogs are for) however I would distinguish between an ‘attractive’ church and an ‘attractional’ one.
I think church should always be ‘attractive’ - a beautiful community of people who woo others to Jesus by their lives.
But when I/we use ‘attractional’ it refers more to the things we do specifically to get people to come to our services. Attractional has a marketing flavour.
I am wondering what you mean by calling people out of the world, because I am guessing you don’t mean for the church and world to be separate?
I believe our challenge is to live deeply embedded in the world, but to humbly live an alternative life. Our own community ‘Upstream’ is named after that dream - to live in the flow of society, but to swim against its (negative) currents and show a better way.
I don’t think you do justice to the incarnational expression of church by suggesting it is incompatible with anabaptist thinking. No doubt we would diverge on points, but I reckon we’re pretty close!
May 7, 2008 at 11:07 am
Hey Hamo, thanks for your wise comments! I agree that there is so much common ground. This is me just recovering a point where I have traditionally differed.
I like your distinction between ‘attractional’ and ‘attractive’. I need to look more into the connotations of ‘attractional’.
I think the model of what you are doing with Upstream is excellent, and the way you are doing church is how I’d like to do it.
I need to work out how ‘incarnational’ fits in what I’ve written above. I haven’t thought through that side.
May 7, 2008 at 6:42 pm
PS: Church and world as separate? Well, yes and no. The church is a sign of God’s grace and love in the world, and must be at the coal face helping redeem broken people and broken structures. But I also do believe in the church being distinctive, salty, and counter-cultural. (As I’m sure you do.) The church is a new and strange world!
I haven’t resolved these tensions yet. I probably have a stronger impulse toward the church being distinctive to the ‘world’ than many in EMC circles.
I don’t have answers at the moment, as strong a response as Milbank’s words did bring out in me. I’m just thinking aloud. Hope I haven’t offended; I certainly see EMC as an important dialogue partner for Anabaptism and as a mission and church partner too.
May 7, 2008 at 7:59 pm
One of my favourite quotes from Bonhoeffer: “the church is at its most false when it seeks to preserve a separation from the world”
I think the church must be distinctive, but perhaps the ‘distinctives’ need to be better defined. The ‘wowser’ image has hurt us badly and we really need to shake that.
I’d hope we were known in the world as the ones who love boldly and give generously, who forgive graciously etc etc.
Everything that depicts the kingdom in its fullness would be my dream for the church.
Good conversation
May 10, 2008 at 7:10 am
I agree about the wowser image hurting us. That’s not the gospel. We have to be distinctive for the right reasons. Being a place where diverse people groups are reconciled to each other in a new humanity is distinctive for the right reasons!
I don’t know what to make of the Bonhoeffer quote. If he means we have to be involved in the world’s problems, I agree entirely, and he gave us an amazing example.
But I would not want to take his words to mean that the church and the world should be indistinct. We are baptised into a new world, a new humanity.
May 13, 2008 at 5:06 pm
Hi Nathan
I remember a conversation with Andrew Menzies, a Baptist pastor in Camberwell, where he made the distinction between ‘attractive’ and ‘attractional’ and I heartily endorse that. ‘Attractive’ suggests there is something inherently winsome and exemplary going on in the Christian community as it is noth gathered and scattered.
Part of what needs to be recovered by some who are involved in the necessary conversation the ‘emerging’ and ‘missional’ church advocates is a sense of the gathered community as part of the goal of Christian mission–sign and foretaste, and not just an agent. All the excited talk about ‘context’ and ‘being missional’ etc etc can simply become a new form of jargon which lacks theological depth. And without a genuine grasp of the biblical story about God’s desire to dwell among an authentic human community characterised by shalom, this talk and the conception of the church becomes merely instrumental to ’same ol’, same ol” evangelism… though perhaps with a labyrinth and candles and wine nearby…
If we’re going to train leaders who can rise above all this, ethics, ecclesiology and eschatology have to be at the forefront of missional thinking. If we don’t put the hard theological work in, I fear much or all of this ‘emerging’ conversation will go to waste…
May 13, 2008 at 5:23 pm
Do you think part of the problem has to do with the church growth roots of some EMC? That EMC might be seen as a post-church growth movement?
I very much like your description of the gathered community as part of the goal of Christian mission. I see EMC practictioners for whom this is a goal too!
May 13, 2008 at 10:02 pm
Part of my sermon on Sunday night involved me saying that the church is the primary unit of christian life - not the individual in their relationship with God.
I see this as critical to us actually making a dent in this world, so I would certainly affirm the place of the community - and rigorous community at that.
But we do ask a lot of people in this!
What I was also saying was that our current western way of life simply mitigates against creating the kind of community that really does result in healthy discipleship and mission.
We have created quite a monster.
I think Bonhoeffer is simply saying that any church that is not immersed in the world as salt/light has completely missed the whole idea.
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