Offending my Paycheck: The Dangers of Incarnation

Of course, there are lots of ways incarnational ministry can go wrong.

One is, as my good friend Marshall Benbow pointed out, we can end up pretending to be something we're not. We then lose the power of holy authenticity in our over-attempts to be relevant. In doing this we give up too much of our own story that God has intersected with his grace. The apostle Paul told his story a lot. Read through his letters, and whether he's writing to Jews or Gentiles or both, he is constantly telling them about who he was before Christ intersected his life and who he is becoming now.

Another danger is that incarnational ministry can easily become faddish. In the rush to be cooler or more relevant or more hip than the church or ministry next door, we grab a hold of whatever methods or means are the newest. Without prayerful consideration in the appropriation of methods, we will foolishly flip-flop from one strategy to the next, tossed about by the waves of trends and fads.

The last danger that's perhaps most important for us to be aware of is that we forget that incarnation is, itself, a means to the larger end of transformation. If we fall in love with our style or methodology and forget that we have larger ends to be aiming for, we lose the whole thing. I'm deeply grateful for author Marva Dawn and her mentor, French Christian philosopher Jacques Ellul, for calling me to be discerning and critical in my thinking about the difference between means and ends. Just because we can do something doesn't mean it's right, good, holy, or appropriate in it's timing.

John and Charles Wesley wrote tons of hymns that the church still sings today. Many of those hymns were written to the tunes of drinking songs. They infused drinking songs with powerful lyrics and they left a mark that was (and continues to be) transformational. They were able to do this because they were both incarnationally rooted in the culture they were serving and because they had perspective on that culture through their study of Scripture and other thinkers who had gone before them. This is critical for people who are thinking about incarnational ministry: we've got to hear the thoughts of the people in the past to really have perspective on what we're doing now. This keeps us from getting overly caught up in the hype and it also gives us more to offer the people we encounter than just more of the same. This is why I've got a link on the site to free Christian Classics on-line. We need to be hearing from these folks, or we lose perspective and begin to think all of Christianity went from Jesus, to Paul, to us.

Author Christian Smith (he wrote "Divided by Faith, for those who are familiar) has recently written a book about a study of 13-18 year olds who are involved in religious activity, most of them evangelicals. He is shocked by their inability to articulate any of the basic tenets of their faith. He calls their faith "moralistic, therapeutic, deism." They don't really know any of the stories or particulars of their faith. Some of this is developmental (how much can any 13-year-old articulate about matters of faith?) but clearly this is a call to think critically about whether or not we're being transformational in our incarnational ministries.