Part I: Incanational Christianity
I want to start this series of post off with a question. Have we complicated the mission of the church so much that many times what we are doing no longer resembles the intent of the original mission? Steve Job’s is quoted as saying, ”That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
I am going to do a series of post helping us to return to the simplicity of living our lives out of an understanding of the incarnation. I don’t suppose to have all the answers to solve the churches mounting irrelevance in a growing post Christian America. I do know from my own spiritual walk that when things get complicated I have to remove the clutter, reduce the distractions and clear my thinking so that I can see fresh again.
Simplicity is learning to live from our DNA so that the systems we build, which are needed to accomplish the mission is actually supporting the original intent of the mission. For us to return to original intent, we many times have to remove layers of preconceived ideas that have complicated or diluted our vision.
In losing weight what you many times have to do is shock the system, to restart it, so that you can get out of a plateau or rut and actually lose weight. One way to shock your system is to detox your body thereby removing the toxins so that you can actually change from the inside out. We many times want change that is easy, but for any of us that have changed we know that behavior does not change easily. It takes breaking through the complexity of ingrained patterns by keeping singly focused on the course you want to take.
One of the great foundational truths of the church is from I Timothy 3:6 bound up in the simple statement ‘God manifested in the flesh’. It is from this scripture that we derive the doctrine of the incarnation therefore since it is bound up in the very DNA of what constitutes the church, it is important to focus upon this simple yet profound truth. If we get it wrong at the level of DNA then all that follows will be altered from the original design. We are called to be a people of mission and that mission is to be lived out in the context of an incarnational people. The mission of the apostolic church is not just leading people to Christ, but actually Christ being formed in people. It is two fold based on both evangelism and discipleship wrapped in the DNA of the ‘great commission’. We have been commissioned to be a people who demonstrate incarnational living and I hope to help us come to better understand what that means in this next series of post.
One of the things I have been called to do as a ministry is help the church to return to her original foundations. It is by returning to our foundations that we will find our greatest impact and truly establish the church no matter the context she finds herself in. Our foundations are tied to our ability to communicate accurately and live out the love of the gospel, which we have been called to not only preach, but to practically flesh out in a world that has left any stability of sanity. I hope that you enjoy this series and we will learn together how the fundamental truth of the incarnation is to be brought into all parts of our life and the structures that we create are to fulfill the mission we have been called to finish.
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