Today's world has driven the church into a situation where it must find a new paradigm and not simply an adaptation of the existing one. While this is starting to happen in new, but ancient expressions of the church, those sticking to the old paradigms are challenging and resisting the new. In "The Forgotten Ways" by Alan Hirsch, he takes a look at some signficant movements of the church in the past and present to see how they accomplished what they did. The methods they used he calls "Apostolic Genius," while the elements that make it up he calls "missional DNA."
The first two chapters chronicle his experiences of the institutional ways of doing church meeting the organic ways and how he dealt with the many issues that come with that confrontation. The fact is, most people are reporting a "God? Yes! Church? No!" type of response when it comes to spirituality. They generally want to be part of a Christian community, but don't want the organized religion that comes with it. What Hirsch calls the evangelistic-attractional model of church; one based on a consumerist model catering to the ideas of comfort, convenience, safety and security, simply doesn't work in our world. Yet this is the primary church-growth model that is used today. It appeals to a very small segment of the population and therefore, you have a bunch of these churches competing for the same slice of a shriking piece of pie.
The biggest step toward this model came in 313 A.D. with the Edict of Milan. The emperor Constantine brought Christianity from being an underground movement to being at the center of culture and society by combining church and state and institutionalizing the Christian religion. This turned the church into a worldly system with a Christian theme, which has remained mostly unchanged for the last seventeen hundred years. This system has become a major stumbling block to the spread of Christianity in the West. We need a new paradigm of the church based upon a missional-incarnational model. This model is an organic system that takes its characteristics from the study of living systems and the remarkable Jesus movements of the past and present.
Six major elements (mDNA) define the missional-incarnational model of church:
1. Jesus Is Lord - The Christian church in general has fallen into a practical polytheism where Jesus is Lord on Sunday, but other "gods" await the rest of the week. The worship of the gods of wealth and consumerism are perhaps the most notable in the Western world. The way we do church in isolated buildings encourages a mental dualism that separates sacred and secular. This must be eliminated so that every sphere of our lives is under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. (Eph 1:20-23)
2. Disciple making - The key to successful movements is the high level of commitment to its cause that is expected of its participants. Enemies to discipleship include everything that competes for our loyalty and allegiance. The biggest threat to that in the Western world today is that of consumerism. Our sense of identity, meaning, purpose and community is not found in God alone, it's found in products. We've developed a religious connection to things because of what they do for us and the feeling they give us. Ninety percent or more of the people that attend services are passive consumers of religious goods and services.
3. Missional-Incarnational Impulse - The evangelistic-attractional model demands that people come to us, on our turf and in our cultural zone. The missional-incarnational model involves Christian community in the midst of people as a functioning part of the existing culture and life of that people group. The gospel was meant to travel along the relational fabric of a given culture. This must determine the nature, function and forms of the church.
4. Apostolic environment - The Constantinian form of church will not survive the challenges of the twenty-first century. One reason is because it has rejected the presence of apostolic leadership. Part of the reason for this rejection is the fact that many who have claimed to be apostles have actually functioned like CEOs. But that disempowers people, whereas true apostolic leadership empowers. Does your leadership leave and you are left empowered? Or does it leave and the organization fall apart? It is no coincidence that all the historical denominations that by and large have rejected apostolic leadership find themselves in long-term systematic decline in every context in the West.
5. Organic Systems - By looking at the characteristics of organic systems, we find the patterns for the structure of the church. To find a pattern of church closer to life is to move closer to what God intended in creation in the first place.
6. Communitas, not Community - This involves intense feelings of social togetherness and belonging brought about by having to rely on each other in order to survive. It really only happens among a group of people inspired by a vision to accomplish something big.
Hirsch does a great job of recognizing where we're at in the world today, how the church is relating to it and what we need to do about it. It's a very wise practice to ask why and how things are the way they are now and have been in past. My personal experience with the book was that it will make for a good reference for the future study of each of the six elements of "mDNA" that he talks about. Although rich in content, I found myself around page 200 trying to finish reading the book instead of enjoying it. I felt the information could have been presented a little more directly without so many stories and illustrations, as well as repetitious points. I wouldn't recommend it for someone just getting into the concepts of organic church, but would if it's not a new subject for you and you want a challenging read that will get to the heart of the matter when it comes to our church life. You can purchase the book through the suggested reading link in the left sidebar.
