Menu

Mission

Pantokrator Icon

Jesus is Lord: The Central Strand of mDNA

, , , , , ,

We took a one week hiatus a week ago from the blog but continue this week after Thanksgiving with our series on Alan Hirsch’s five characteristics of genuinely missional churches, the mDNA that constitute Apostolic Genius. This week, however, isn’t so much one of the characteristics, but the central definitive feature that permeates all of the mDNA: the living encounter with the Lord Jesus Christ, God in the flesh. Hirsch refers to this as the epicenter of the missional movement and identifies it as the “biblical consciousness of God” (Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways, 84). A central biblical passage is Romans 11:36: “for from him and through him and to him are all things.” It is the awareness and recognition that in the encounter with Jesus through the proclaimed Word God’s creatures encounter the one, true, and living God the Creator who reigns over all his creation. And he does so through the death and resurrection of His living Word, His Son.

               Hirsch contends that in the New Testament and in all vital missional movements the encounter with Jesus as the Lord (Christocentric Monotheism) propels the mission and the message. As Hirsch says, “The desperate, prayer-soaked human clinging to Jesus, the reliance on his Spirit, and the distillation of the gospel message into the simple, uncluttered message of Jesus as Lord and Savior is what catalyzed the missional potencies inherent in the people of God” (86). It is literally a Jesus as God movement. “At its very heart, Christianity is therefore a messianic movement, one that seeks to consistently embody the life, spirituality, and mission of its Founder” (94). A properly-oriented catechumenate will position the encounter with Jesus at the center of its formation.

               How does the catechumenate reflect this epicenter? One of the ways that Hirsch advocates for determining whether the encounter with Jesus as Lord is central to the community’s life is to ask, “Is the real Jesus really Lord in my community?” (99). Is the risen Lord really the congregation’s touchstone and defining center? If this consciousness is central to the congregation’s adult faith formation, then hopefully it will be reflected in the totality of the community’s life. A properly-oriented catechumenate will manifest this. As Hirsch says, we need “to recalibrate ourselves and our organizations around the person and work of Jesus the Lord. It will mean taking the Gospels seriously as the primary texts that define us. It will mean acting like Jesus in relation to people outside of the faith” (94). Since the Gospels are central to the formation of the catechumenate and it seeks to give God’s gifts in Jesus and elicit the response that our way of living is a confession of his lordship, the catechumenate is  a way of sitting at the feet of the Lord! He guides and governs all creation toward his fulfillment and is the heart of the church’s mission and life as the Lord.

               The other five mDNA reflect this epicenter. We make disciples because his lordship calls us to do so. We see ourselves as driven by a missional impulse because God’s mission has come in the flesh into the world God created in Jesus. We form a living community because Jesus is living among us. The catechumenate embodies these five characteristics because the catechumenate itself flows from the confession that Jesus is Lord. The catechumenate is itself a form of lived confession that Jesus as Lord is at the heart of it all: of the catechumenate, of congregational life, of the church’s mission.

Palm Sunday 2019 (311)

Apostolic Environment: Missional Leadership through the Catechumenate

, , , ,

The third characteristic of genuinely missional churches, the mDNA that constitute Apostolic Genius according to Alan Hirsch, is Apostolic Environment. In the New Testament age, Hirsch perceives that the leadership of the Apostles constitutes the apostolic environment. This leadership “embodies, symbolizes, and re-presents the apostolic mission to the missional community…a missional church needs missional leadership” (Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways, 152).  

Based on his consideration of the New Testament and missional movements throughout church history, how does Hirsch conceive of missional leadership? He says that the calling of leaders in an apostolic environment is “the extension of Christianity” calling “the church to its essential calling” and guiding “it into its destiny as a missionary people with a transformative message for the world” (152). An apostolic environment is one where leaders lead from the vision and comprehensive scope of the gospel as the mission of the church. For Hirsch, apostolic leadership integrates the outward mission of the church to the world with apostolic doctrine and teaching. They go hand in hand. He says,

At core, the apostolic task is about the expansion of Christianity both physically in the form of pioneering missionary effort and church planting, as well as theologically through integration of apostolic doctrine into the life of the individual Christians and the communities they are a part of. But more than that, as custodian of Apostolic Genius, he or she is the person who provides the personal reference point as well as the spiritual context for the other ministries of God’s people (154).

The leaders in an apostolic environment envision the external mission of the church as the mission of God the Father through His crucified and resurrected Son by the power of the Spirit toward the renewal and restoration of all humanity and the entire cosmos.

From this Hirsch establishes three primary functions of leaders in an apostolic environment:

  1. Embedding mDNA through pioneering new ground for the gospel and the church
  2. Guarding mDNA through the application and integration of apostolic theology
  3. Creating the environment from which other ministries of the church emerge (155-7).

In a local congregation, an apostolic environment of leadership aims to create an atmosphere of expectation and movement (163).

               The catechumenate has the effect of embedding an apostolic environment in a congregation. Since the catechumenate is oriented toward the birthing of new Christians—especially adults but youth and children as well—it embeds the vision that the congregation is constantly in mission to the world. In the congregations we studied, the pastoral and lay leaders of the congregation lead out of the crucible of the catechumenate. Through the catechumenate they embody, symbolize, and re-present the apostolic mission to the missional community (152). By its structure, the catechumenate intertwines apostolic teaching and doctrine and the external mission of the church. For example, Redeemer Lutheran Church in the Bronx constructed its youth confirmation on the model of its adult catechumenate. They have regular catechumenal gatherings on a weeknight for two hours with a meal (often pizza). The youth are encouraged to invite their friends. And they do! Their friends come and fellowship with the youth at Redeemer while hearing and learning the apostolic witness of the gospel. The entire congregation, youth included, live in an apostolic environment. As Hirsch concludes, “Apostolic influence awakens the church to its true calling and identity” (177).

Palm Sunday 2019 (219)

Moving into the Neighborhood: The Missional-Incarnational Impulse

, , , ,

As I indicated last week, Alan Hirsch identifies five characteristics of genuinely missional churches, the mDNA that constitute Apostolic Genius:

  • Disciple-making
  • Missional-incarnational impulse
  • Apostolic environment
  • Organic systems
  • Communitas, not community

My (Kent) intention it to take up each of these in the following weeks and show how the catechumenate embodies these characteristics.  I am going to begin with the Missional-incarnational impulse (simply because we haven’t given attention to it elsewhere). It is important to frame this characteristic as Hirsch does. He contrasts this with the primary impulse toward mission that holds in most first world settings: the evangelistic-attractional impulse. This impulse is missionally-oriented toward attracting people to become part of a church/community/institution in order to grow the church (increase its numbers) and strengthen the life of the institution. Its fundamental impulse is attraction, not sending, as is the case in the missional-incarnational impulse.

So what does it mean to be missional-incarnational as opposed to evangelistic-attractional? As Hirsch says, it is “the practical outworking of the mission of God (the Missio Dei) and of the Incarnation. It is thus rooted in the very way that God has redeemed the world, and in how God revealed himself to us” (128). Being missional, which is a mark of the church, means being incarnational. In other words, God instantiates his mission to renew his creation when his Son becomes incarnate, takes on human flesh, and moves into our human neighborhood (John 1:14; Hirsch, 132). As Hirsch points out, through the incarnation God in his Son identifies with all that it means to be his human creatures and reveals the true human image of God, what it means to be a human creature of God.

This means that the church in its mission must live incarnationally. As Hirsch observes,

“The Incarnation not only qualifies God’s acts in the world, but must also qualify ours. If God’s central way of reaching his world was to incarnate himself in Jesus, then our way of reaching the world should likewise be incarnational. To act incarnationally therefore will mean in part that in our mission to those outside of the faith we will need to exercise a genuine identification and affinity with those we are attempting to reach. At the very least, it will probably mean moving into common geography/space and so set up a real and abiding presence among the group. But the basic motive of incarnational ministry is also revelatory—that they may come to know God through Jesus” (133).

This missional-incarnational impulse was instantiated in the congregations we studied. They were deeply embedded in their contexts and understood their life as a witness to those around them. As Hirsch indicates, the missional-incarnational impulse is a sending impulse (as opposed to attractional). The church as the people of God are sent into the world as seeds of God’s renewing work in Jesus. The catechumenate shaped that self-understanding of being sent in the congregations. The picture at the head of today’s blog makes that apparent. It is Redeemer Lutheran Church in the Bronx processing through their community waving palm branches on Palm Sunday. This ritual act embedded bodily in them this self-understanding of being a people sent into the world immediately around them. They understand themselves as sent as God’s missionaries into the places they live, where they work, where they play, and where they serve. As Hirsch says, “By living incarnationally we not only model the pattern of humanity set up in the Incarnation but also create space for mission to take place in organic ways. In this way mission becomes something that ‘fits’ seamlessly into the ordinary rhythms of life, friendships, and community and is thus thoroughly contextualized” (135). God has moved into the neighborhood to love among his people. The catechumenate creates the opportunity for the church to see itself as a sent people.