Right now at Missio Dei, we’re in a tough spot.  The whole situation with Augsburg (read previous post) derailed our plans.  We were getting read to start a more attractive Sunday meeting on an attractive campus.  We’d put an ad in the paper.  All of these things lend themselves towards being attractional rather than incarnational.  This felt like a good and necessary step at the time, because we have been really small and struggling as a church.  We lacked momentum and most of our church hadn’t really made connections on the West Bank (read more about my mindset here).  It seemed like the only viable way forward.

Last night for our prayer meeting, we prayed and then discussed the situation.  I think I frustrated a few people when I invalidated the path we’ve been on in recent months and expressed my desire to be an incarnational church and not try to rely upon attractional methods to help us grow. 

I wish I could go back into a time machine and start over.  I’d get a job down here and find a few friends to be incarnational with me.  And after a while, we would have developed an ecclesiological way forward out of our experiences.  If you’ve read my recent posts on incarnational practices, you could see a basic map about how I would have started out. 

But we didn’t start out that way.  We started with some unnatural hybrid in embryonic form.  We had the values and heart of an incarnational church, but were starting with attractional methodolgy.  And because we weren’t passionate about being attractional, we ended up sucking at taht too.  I guess I thought if we got a solid enough group of people, we could switch to being really incarnational and things would be great.  Wrong. 

Our central gatherings have always had low attendance.  We’ve never felt like they served a real purpose.  We have our house churches, which are better attended.  In the past, I’ve resisted the idea of going to a monthly central gathering, as many house church networks do…but maybe its time.  I guess I’ve hoped that the central Gathering could give momentum and a missional cohesion.  But it has done just the opposite, I fear. 

And so about a dozen of us gathered for prayer at Augsburg–about half of our number.  There wasn’t consensus on how we ought to proceed, but a number of people said something to this effect: "If we’re going to be an incarnational church (and not attractional), then how should we do our central gatherings?  Should we even have them at all?"

And that is the question I pose to you, blog friends.  Should we cut back on the frequency of our Central Gatherings? What do we do to our Central Gatherings to foster our incarnational focus?  I’ve got some of my own ideas, but I’d like to hear yours first.

(This chart from TallSkinnyKiwi may help your thinking).

About Mark Van Steenwyk

Mark Van Steenwyk is a member of Missio Dei. He is a speaker, writer, educator, and grassroots organizer. With the support of the Central Plains Mennonite Conference, he travels to radical and intentional communities around the country to help network and offer support.