Incarnational Practice 1: Move and Observe
Written by Mark Van Steenwyk : August 8, 2005
You are church before you do church. So any talk of mission preceeding ecclesiology is in some sense an excersize in arbitrary distinction-making. However, conceptually, one proceeds the other. If a few friends engage in mission together, the fact that they are gathered together to serve Christ makes them an expression of the Church. However, their focus is mission, yet an ecclesiology is being formed. The lines aren’t clearly defined.
So, now that I’ve made that disclaimer, I’m going to move ahead in the first of 6 incarnational "practices." These are the sort of things that a group of Christians can do out of their existing church, but I think it is better for a group of Christian friends to practice these sorts of things BEFORE a church is established…as they engage in these sorts of practices, they’ll begin to meet people and know people and as those people need to be discipled and grow in their faith, an ecclesiology for that context should begin to emerge.
So, these practices are written with church planters in mind, but should be helpful for the rest of y’all as well.
Practice 1: Move and Observe
If you’ve you want to minister in a neighborhood taht you don’t live in, you should move into that neighborhood, or at least very close to that neighborhood. It is difficult to be incarnational if you are a commuter. You need to cultivate similar life patterns and center your life on the same sort of places and institutions as those to whom you want to befriend.
Once you move in the area (or if you already live in the area), spend time just observing. Don’t get frenetic…don’t start doing things until you understand the ethos of the neighborhood. Let the spirit of the place make its impression. Fall in love with the little things. Get to know the people. If you start "doing your thing" before you are familiar with the place, then you’re forcing things to much. Ministry should fit with how God is already working in a place. If you start pushing your agenda before you start making friends with the neighbors and finding out about their lives, then you’re a salesman, not a minister of reconciliation. And throughout it all PRAY. PRAY for spiritual eyesight. It is the Spirit’s job to reveal Christ…not just to "them" but also to "you." Pray that you can see Christ’s fingerprints in your neighborhood…pray to see the face of Christ in the face of those who live around you. Pray for the Spirit to show you what is WRONG in your area, and also what is RIGHT. Seek to understand.
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Amen!Amen!Amen! This is exactly what God is teaching me as I seek to plant a church in downtown Cincinnati. I live in a suburb area right now and I have been driving into downtown 2 or 3 times a week at least. It hit me about a week ago that my wife and I are going to have to move if we want to make a real impact on peoples lives. Good stuff.
The only caveat I would give is that you’re describing a culturally defined way of doing mission. Moving into an area and observing is an approach to reaching people who are in a concentrated urban area, whose jobs are probably in or near that neighborhood, who fit a certain sub-culture of being present enough in the neighborhood for you to reach them. This approach would not, for example work if your mission was to travelling salesmen, or flight attendants. Less drastically, it might not be as meaningful to people in a suburban area, or to certain groups of people in an urban area (college students, recent immigrants with ties to well-entrenched, second-generation immigrants.) But maybe I’m jumping the gun, maybe you were going to talk about that in one of the coming posts.
Any suggestions I could give about being incarnational would have to be thought through contextually. I don’t think anyone should just take these ideas and just apply them directly to their situation. However, there is a certain universality to the idea that you should overlap your life with the lives of those to whom you are called. If it is flight attendants, then one should become a flight attendant or fly a lot. If it is students, then one has to understand how students live. The more “neighborhoody” your mission, the more applicable this post will be, but there are always ways to be incarnational.