In the Coracle

Church DNA Flaws

October 11, 2004 // Tags: Emerging Church, Mt. Si Vineyard

Via Jordon Cooper, who found it from Jonny Baker, who found Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost’s article on the Christendom-era church’s 3 major flaws:

The Christendom-era church has these three flaws in its DNA; it is attractional, dualistic and hierarchical.

By attractional, I mean the church plants itself within a particular neighbourhood and expects that people will come to it to meet God and find fellowship with others. There’s nothing unbiblical about being attractive to unbelievers. There was certainly an element to which the early church was attractive to the wider community (Acts 2:47), though there is much more evidence that the church was reviled and avoided in its early days. Nonetheless, when I say it is a flaw for the church to be attractional, I’m referring more to the stance the church is taking in its community. By anticipating that if we get our internal features right, people will flock to our services, the church betrays its belief in attractionalism. It’s the “If you build it, they will come” mentality. How much of the traditional church’s energy goes into adjusting their programs and their public meetings to cater to an unseen constituency. The emerging missional church recognizes is compelled to move out from itself into its community as salt and light.

When I have consulted with churches that recognize the need to embrace a missionary stance in their communities, I’m amazed at the number of times, when asked to discuss specific ways they can recalibrate themselves to become missional churches, they begin talking about how to change their Sunday service. It betrays their fundamental allegiance to being attractional. The tailoring of worship services is a lot further down the priority list for missional church leaders. The Come-To-Us stance taken by the attractional church is unbiblical. It’s not found in the Gospels or the epistles. Jesus, Paul, the disciples, the early church leaders had a Go-To-Them mentality.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how we as a church should (and/or should not) make ourselves visible in the community. This looks to be a very helpful article on taht vein.

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Introduction

Welcome! I'm Pat, and I'll be your host here. Please comment on what you see here. I am a lay missionary to North Bend on the east side of Seattle, a husband, dad to 2 kids, a software test architect for DeepRockDrive, a web software company that does live, interactive concerts streamed over the Internet. I'm also a failed and (quite possibly future) church planter and a Doctor of Ministry student with Bakke Graduate University, and usually on this blog we discuss Christian spirituality (especially of the Celtic, post-Evangelical, post-Charismatic and neo-monastic flavors), photography, motorcycles, and other oddball things.

About the Coracle

The ancient Celts traveled in coracles - handmade, wooden framed and hide-covered boats, to journey where the trinitarian God led them. Though the transportation was simple, the journey was profound. This image is an illustration of the way I experience God's guidance - an invitation to travel with him on his paths, not mine; at his pace, not mine.