The Missional-Incarnational Mandate

In our last post, we contrasted the prevalent model of attractional church with the missional mandate that Christ has bestowed upon His people. Many have better termed this model exemplified by Jesus the missional-incarnational model after His attempt to reach mankind through His incarnation. In His attempt to bring His message of love to us, God actually became one of us to meet us in the midst of our fallenness and sin. As Eugene Peterson paraphrases John 1:14 in The Message, “The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.” At the incarnation, God chose to send not a representative to us, but came Himself in the form of a humble man, with “no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him” (Isaiah 53:2). In so doing, He demonstrated sincere affinity and identification with us in His attempt to draw us to Him.

It is this same missional-incarnational approach that we as the church must adopt in relation to our culture today. As Jesus said in John 20:21, “As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.” Just as Christ stayed not at a distance but “moved into our neighborhood,” so we as His followers must incarnate Christ to a watching world by being directly and actively involved in the lives of those we seek to reach.

Yet too often, the church prefers to be sequestered and removed from our culture, believing that mission starts in the barns rather than the fields. We’ve built for ourselves some very nice barns we meet in on Sunday mornings, with their high quality sound systems, heated baptistries, and Disney inspired kids areas, but as Neil Cole points out, such an approach to evangelism is as foolish as the farmer who builds a barn and calls the crops to come in. God never intended for the seeds of His love to be stored in barns on Sunday mornings, but seeks for us to sow His message in the fields at large, dirtying our hands in the soil of those far from Him.

We all likely agree with these concepts, but have you and I both missed this call to the fields? Christ has commanded us to “go, and make disciples of all nations”, but has this missional mandate fallen on deaf ears? After his extensive polling of American Christians, George Barna reported that the typical American Christian will die without leading a single person to Christ in their lifetime. Sadly, I must completely agree with the validity of Barna’s conclusions as I look at my own life and the lives of other Christians I know. The fact is unarguable: without drastic changes in my life, I fear that this lack of fruit will be my fate and perhaps yours.
We must not postpone our obedience any longer. We must act, and quickly, if we are to be the “salt of the earth” as Christ has called us to be. He has called us to be agents of His grace, peace, and light to the world, the “sent ones” who change the landscape of our culture through the message of His love. By God’s grace, may we realize this noblest of callings our Leader has given us.

In our next post, we will explore what such a missional-incarnational approach might look like in our day.