1 post tagged “incarnation”

"It is important ... to distinguish between centered sets and bounded sets ....  The attractional church is a bounded set.  That is, it is a set of people clearly marked off from those who do not belong to it.  Churches thus mark themselves in a variety of ways.  Having a church membership roll is an obvious one.  This mechanism determines who's in and who's out.  The missional-incarnational church, though, is a centered set.  This means that rather than drawing a border to determine who belongs and who doesn't, a centered set is defined by its core values, and people are not seen as in or out, but as closer or further away from the center.  In that sense, everyone is in and no one is out.  Though some people are close to the center and others far from it, everyone is potentially part of the community in its broadest sense.

"A useful illustration is to think of the difference between wells and fences.  In some farming communities, the farmer might build fences around their properties to keep their livestock in and the livestock of neighboring farms out.  This is a bounded set.  But in rural communities where farms or ranches cover an enormous geographic area, fencing the property is out of the question.  In our home of Australia, ranches (called stations) are so vast that fences are superfluous.  Under these conditions a farmer has to sink a bore and create a well, a precious water supply in the Outback.  It is assumed that livestock, though they will stray, will never roam too far from the well, lest they die.  This is a centered set.  As long as there is a supply of clean water, the livestock will remain close by.

"Churches that see themselves as a centered set recognize that the gospel is so precious, so refreshing that, like a well in the Australian Outback, lovers of Christ will not stray too far from it.  It is then a truly Christ-centered model.  Rather than seeing people as Christian or non-Christian, as in or out, we would see people by their degree of distance from the center, Christ.  In this way, the missional-incarnational church sees people as Christian and not-yet-Christian.  It acknowledges the contribution of all people."
-Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch in "The Shaping of Things to Come"