Thus the clear, bright line that Missionals seek to draw cannot be drawn with such clarity. God is a sending God. God is also an attracting God. He sends forth his Spirit and attracts the elect not only to himself, but also to his people. He may draw them to his people before he draws them to himself.

Anthony Bradley has voiced some criticisms of the whole “Missional” movement within the Reformed community in recent days, and I find that I agree with him in a lot of it in terms of the specific problems he points out, though I suspect we’d part company on the prescriptions recommended to remedy the situation.

For those of you who aren’t fluent in evangelical hipsterism, “missional” refers to a series of strategies which supposedly grow out of a fundamental reorientation of the understanding of the purpose of the church. Missionals notice that God is a sending God, who sent Christ into the world, and that His fundamental orientation is one of seeking out and bringing gracious blessings and benefits to the world. The conclusion they reach from this insight is that the people of God are supposed to go into the world and do something.

Missionals often label the assumptions under which the evangelical church has operated in the past as “Attracationalism.” At the risk of oversimplification, Missionals say to the world, “We’re coming to you.” Attractionals say to the world, “What do we need to do to make you come to us?” The problem with Attractionalism now, according to Missionals, is, of course, the culture. The culture has changed, so the church can’t really attract very well anymore. There is such a disconnect between the culture in the church and the culture in the world that people cannot or will not make that jump. True-believing Missionals will even go so far as to say, “It’s not that the Church has a mission. It’s that the Mission has a church.” You can find a slightly more fulsome presentation of the issues here.

Missionals (or at least Reformed Missionals) also seem to believe in the basic goodness of the institutions and structures of culture. Rather than seeing contemporary culture as a hopeless mess because it is erected on the foundations of a false, radically anti-God philosophy and the doctrines of demons, they see culture as essentially neutral to good. It has just gotten off the rails a bit and needs to be “redeemed.” Part of the mission is to bring “redemption” to the culture by participating in it, doing good things, being a positive influence, and winning a hearing. And so you can participate in redemption via participation in the arts. Or the environmental movement, or the animal rights movement. Or by buying and consuming certain beers.

The charge has been laid that the self-professed Missionals in the Reformed community are actually behaving like Attractionals, and the worst kind of Attractionals. They are charged with primarily attracting those who were already professing Christians and who moved into an urban area denuded of historic Christianity and who needed a church. Thus, rather than going forth with a bold, new way of doing church, it seems that the critics believe that the Neo-Reformed Missionals have simply stumbled upon an underserved market, the urban Christian who desires to meet with God’s people on His day. They have prospered primarily because they have met that need.

Their critics seem to believe that what the Missional Reformed, typified by leaders such as Tim Keller, are calling Missional strategies really just end up with the gentrification of poorer urban neighborhoods. Young hipsters move in to an area which is undesirable to most middle class people. They do so either by necessity, due to the shortage of affordable urban housing, or with the conviction that they are redeeming the city. Before long other young hipsters move in. People marry and begin to have children, and the whole character of the neighborhood changes. Prices increase. Critics of gentrification point out that it doesn’t really solve problems. It simply relocates them. It drives the former poverty-stricken residents away from an area because they simply can’t afford it any longer. They also don’t feel welcome any longer in their own neighborhoods after a certain point in the process.

Some have pointed out that the real issues that are ailing the city, and especially the poor in the city aren’t a lack of art galleries or a dearth of organic food. Rather the problems are things like abortion, affordable housing, the disappearance of marriage and the bearing of children out of wedlock (though sexual promiscuity wasn’t mentioned, I assume this would go hand in glove.) Other problems include the disproportionate number of black or brown children in a very broken foster care system, violence, bad schools, and substance abuse. The really committed Missionals would invest their time and energies into these areas. I think that the critics believe that most white and Asian middle class and upper middle class urban Christians aren’t burning with a passion to pour themselves into the problems of the city. I suspect the critics are correct.

I note in passing that nobody seems to be very interested in talking about the destructiveness of homosexuality, because to do so in “the city” might mean that a large group of gay rights activists shows up and at your church one Sunday for some kind of a demonstration. It might also make your efforts to participate in “the arts” much more difficult.

I wonder if a re-articulation of historic Reformed principles might shed some light on this squabble.

First of all, we take it for granted that God is a “missional God.” He sent Christ into the world, unbidden by us. Luke 19:10 tells us that the Lord Jesus came to “seek and save the lost.” Strictly speaking, God is the only one who does any seeking. This is where the whole Seeker Sensitive movement made its greatest mistake. Lost men and women do not seek God. They do not want God, or at least not God as he has revealed himself in the scriptures. Men shrink from the light and prefer darkness because their deeds are evil. When lost men and women do seek God it is only because of one of two things. Either they are seeking the benefits of God, but not God himself. If so, once the benefits are either found to be unavailable to them, or else are given in some measure, then they will turn their attention in other directions. After all, no woman continues to stand in the bread line after it has been announced that there is no bread to be had, and no man keeps the packet after he has smoked the cigarettes.

The other reason why lost men and women seek God is because God the Holy Spirit has first sought them out and moved them to do so. In the words of the old hymn:

I sought the Lord, and afterward I knew
he moved my soul to seek him, seeking me;
it was not I that found, O Savior true;
no, I was found of thee.

We believe that this is an infallible, undefeatable process, whose success is assured by the very hand of Almighty God himself. Thus you cannot do anything to induce the former to true saving faith in Christ Jesus, and you cannot ultimately do anything to derail the latter from doing so. The process is not in any way enhanced by any of the activities which are prescribed in our day to enhance it. Indeed, one of the great dangers of some of the prescribed activities is the production of a false assurance of salvation in those who have had no true experience of saving grace. Better a man knows himself to be lost, disinterested in God, and at enmity with God than he be false convert. I suspect that some of the Neo Reformed do not actually, at bottom believe this, for when you observe their actions and ask them to justify some of them, their answers are fundamentally Arminian answers. To be fair to the Neos, many others who identify as Reformed do not seem to believe this either. It must also be noted that the Apostle Paul himself speaks of worship services as places where the unbeliever might turn up. (1 Cor 14:23)

Thus the clear, bright line that Missionals seek to draw cannot be drawn with such clarity. God is a sending God. God is also an attracting God. He sends forth his Spirit and attracts the elect not only to himself, but also to his people. He may draw them to his people before he draws them to himself. The problem of bringing people into the church is not a problem of cultural disconnect. It’s a problem of regeneration. Culture is not ultimately a barrier to the gospel. If you can speak the language with some facility and know enough to navigate through the culture with what are considered to be good manners, then you know enough to bring the gospel. The idea that there are such radical differences between “cultures” in the U.S. (by which is really meant “subcultures”) is surely vastly overplayed. I am not speaking here of first generation immigrants who have a limited facility with English and still basically live like they did in their native land. I am speaking of people born in this country. One does not have become a skater to reach skaters. One does not have to become postmodern to reach postmoderns any more than one has to become a homosexual to reach homosexuals with the gospel.

Secondly, we must begin with God and his glory, not man and his need. God’s purpose in sending Christ is to save a people of his own, to the praise of his own glory. The glory of God is the central purpose of the Missio Dei, and for every other thing that the Triune God does. It’s all about him. It’s not all about us. He created all things for his own glory. He brings the creation to its final, climactic end for his own glory. He saves the elect for his own glory. He damns the lost for his own glory. His ways are not our ways and they are as high as the heavens are above the earth. Any good which is done to man is of secondary and subordinate importance to the glorification of God. He did not send Christ to redeem cultures or institutions in order to do the mass of humanity some good. He sent Christ to redeem elect individuals who will, according to his providences, have their influence on cultures and institutions as they work out their own salvation in fear and trembling. Neither are we sent out to redeem anything. We cannot redeem one single thing, except, by his power, the time we are given. (Eph 5:16) The mission of the church is to gather and perfect the saints. We are sent out to bring Christ and his word to bear on the lives of lost men and women and let God do with it what he will. Those whom he calls we are to bring into the nurture and discipline of the church. As nice as it is to try and preserve what pristine environment is left on the planet, and repair the damage to the rest of it, such activity does not redeem one single thing. Saving the rainforest is not as important as saving unborn babies. Making sure cattle have humane living conditions is a fine goal, but it is not equal in importance to the saving of souls.

Thirdly, we reject as a fallacy the idea that the needs of lost men and women have changed radically in the last 30 years and therefore the gospel message must be reinterpreted to “meet their needs” or answer their questions. The main problem they have is not that they are medicating their pain with liquor or drugs, or that they live in a society which is full of racism, or that marriage has fallen into disuse among them. Those are symptoms of the main problem, and you will not be able to do them much real good by treating the symptoms. The attitudes and cravings which underlie the destructive behaviors are still there, and they will reassert themselves soon enough, no matter how much external help you give. The main problem that lost men and women have is not that they are asking good questions and the church is ignoring them. It is that they without hope and without God in the world. It is that they are by nature truth suppressors and objects of wrath. The main need they have is reconciliation with God through the mediation of the Lord Jesus Christ. Nothing has changed since the Fall. Martyn Lloyd Jones said it well in Truth Unchanged, Unchanging:

“Man has not changed at all. All the changes about which men boast so much are external. They are not changes in man himself, but merely in his mode of activity, his environment… Man as man does not change at all. He still remains the same contradictory person he has been ever since the Fall.”

Fourthly, God has ordained the method for converting the lost. We are to go out into the world and simply proclaim the gospel with power. We are to live as those who are transformed by it ourselves. We are to show our hearers their sin and their need of a Savior, and then point them to the Lord Jesus Christ. Many will reject us. Many will mock. People will ignore us because they are not interested in what we have to say. Many will grow angry and denounce us and accuse us of hate speech. We will be hated and reviled. We are not to be discouraged by that fact. We are not in charge of the results. We are in charge of our own behavior, and we are to faithfully obey the mandate give to us. The statistics concerning our obedience are grim, however. More than 90% of those who identify as born again evangelical Christians never verbally present the gospel to an unbeliever.

I suspect that part of what drives Missionals towards so-called “social justice” types of activities is just this dynamic. Nobody really gets angry at the one who opens a soup kitchen or a good school for poor children. Nobody mocks them for community gardening, or for denouncing greed in the aftermath of a credit implosion, or being a rebel-poet-performance-artist. As a matter of fact, the self-righteous theological and cultural liberals applaud such things. “Here at last is a man who is doing something instead of just preaching or retreating into his own private, comfortable bourgeois existence!” they say. Plus you get to have the righteous anger of someone who is “doing something” and can heap guilt on your fellow Christians who “aren’t.” As much work as it is to do these other things, it is far easier than proclaiming the gospel to hostile men and women who do not want to hear what you have to say, and who might hate you if you tried to say it.

Fifthly, we Reformed people believe that there has always been a visible church, and that in the Old Testament that visible church was the Jewish people. Thus when we read the prophetic denunciations of economic sin and their cries for justice and care for the poor, we confess that such things are indeed found in the scriptures and are binding on the Christian today. But we also confess that the primary concern was between members of the visible church, or the aliens and strangers sojourning within the visible church for a period of time. The Jews were commanded to care for the poor Jews. They were not commanded to go and find the poor Philistine or Amorite to take care of. Those foreigners which were the objects of care, like Ruth or the Shunammite woman cared for by Elisha, were God fearers. Even the Lord Jesus initially refused to heal the daughter of a Canaanite woman until she showed herself to be a woman of true faith. (Matt 15:22-28) The diaconate was founded to solve a problem within the church. The Greek speaking Christian widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food, in favor of the Aramaic speaking Christian widows. There is no evidence that the church was feeding any widows other than professing Christian ones. When there was a famine in Jerusalem, Paul collected an offering from the gentile churches to relieve the wants of the Church in Jerusalem, not for all of the inhabitants of Jerusalem. While we do find a general mandate to love our neighbor as ourselves, we do not find a general mandate for much of what goes today under the label “social justice ministry” and we certainly do not believe that such activities somehow enhance the effectiveness of the gospel message.

When we see the Apostolic pattern laid out for us in Acts and 1 Corinthians, we find all of these principles made plain. The Apostle Paul enters Corinth, which was a rich city, and a notoriously wicked city. High on the hill overlooking the town would have been the Acrocorinth. Upon the Acrocorinth were two temples. One was dedicated to Aphrodite. This temple housed 1,000 sacred prostitutes who would descend each night upon the city to ply their trade. Also set upon the Acrocorinth was the temple of Apollo which was a center of homosexual lust and activity, especially directed towards young boys. No doubt there was much drunkenness and many social pathologies. Many young people were abandoned. Many received substandard educations. Many dwelt on the streets and lived lives of begging, prostitution, and thievery. They were victims and victimizers. Slavery was a fact of life in Corinth as it was everywhere else in the ancient world. Abortion was widely practiced in then, as was infanticide. There was certainly poverty, violence, and racism. Corinth was a place given to greed, lust, and the pursuit of pleasure. False religions were ubiquitous and demonic oppression and possession were not uncommon. The Greeks who lived there were quite interested in wisdom and debate and philosophy and the arts. The Jews were interested in miraculous signs. Corinth was considered to be a moral sewer, even by the standards of the ancient pagans. “The City” in Paul’s day was little different than “The City” in our day.

Into this moral sewer strides a Jewish rabbi who had come to Christ a number of years before. He does not attempt to redeem the culture. He does not organize schools or shelters or soup kitchens. He does not seem to be concerned about the injustices that are present in the city. He does not see the polyglot of cultures in Corinth to be some sort of hindrance to the proclamation of the gospel. He is, however, “Missional.” He determines in his heart that he is not going to give the people what they are interested in. Instead he is only going to give them what they are not interested in: Jesus Christ and Him crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles.

He goes to the synagogue and begins to preach about the Lord Jesus. Some believe and are saved, both Jews and Gentiles. When the leadership finally has enough and opposed him and blasphemed, he shook out his garments against them and said, “Your blood be on your own heads. I am clean. From now on I will only go to the Gentiles.” (Acts 18:7) So he moves right next door to a house owned by a convert. The Lord tells him to not be afraid, for he has “many people in this city.” (Acts 18:10) There he continues, simply teaching the word of God for a year and a half, establishing a true, if troubled, church.

There is absolutely no way that this strategy should have succeeded from a human perspective. It should have been a colossal failure. But it did not fail. Why? Because of the plan, purpose, and power of God. Because Paul did what Christ commanded. Because Word and Spirit came together in the lives of God’s elect and brought men and women to saving faith in Christ Jesus.

It is our conviction that such methods are not only for apostles in the first century. They are for you and I today. The human condition has not changed. God has not changed. The gospel has not changed. Word and sacrament and preaching and prayer are powerful for gathering and perfecting the saints. We believe that if we use these methods, God will bless us when, where, and how he sees fit. To use these methods, and only these methods requires a kind of leap in the dark. They aren’t sound from a marketing or a human potential perspective. They don’t make sense. They seem doomed to fail. We are not bothered by this. We know we must lose our lives in order to find them.

If we do not use these methodologies, and employ other methodologies instead, we will certainly generate a lot of activity. We may build some impressive institutions. However, I do not believe we will accomplish much of lasting value.

Brian Carpenter is a Teaching Elder (Minister) in the Presbyterian Church in America. He has been serving as the pastor of Foothills Community Church in Sturgis, South Dakota (population 5,981) since 2004. When one leaves the city limits, the demographic of the rest of the county is officially categorized ‘Frontier’. (Ask Brian how the church found him! [email protected] )