Missional In Seattle

Thanks to Steve at Refor­mis­sion­ary for com­pling links to all the Mark Driscoll and Tim Keller video spots for the Desir­ing God Con­fer­ence. They are well edited and very thought-provoking.

Two videos stood out for me. First, was Mark Driscoll’s spot on encul­tur­at­ing the Gospel in Seattle. This short vign­ette cap­tures, in essence, what my under­stand­ing of min­istry has pretty much always been. I’m not sure the un-encultured sub­urban “sanc­tu­ary” approach to church ever made much sense to me, des­pite all the years I spent in it. Put simply, what Driscoll describes (maybe with a little less techno-awe), is what I hold to and have tried to develop in churches.

How­ever, it was inter­est­ing that when L saw the video, she said “I thought this guy was against attrac­tional.” That got me think­ing; the line between hos­pit­al­ity and attrac­tion is not always a clear one. Some of my friends are very good hosts and to be honest, I find their hos­pit­al­ity attractive.

Maybe the issue is nor­malcy? I thought about every seeker ser­vice I have been involved with and vis­ited and to be honest, none of them were cul­tur­ally normal. They were always odd, always a case of the church “dress­ing up” like the world. What I’ve tried to with the oppor­tun­it­ies I’ve had and what I think Driscoll is talk­ing about is not “dressing-up,” it is just being normal to the culture.

The second video, talks more on facing sin in present­ing the gospel. On one level this video is a good counter to the claim that mis­sional approaches are weak on theo­logy and renun­ci­ation of sin. How­ever, it goes a little further.

Many years back, well before I went to theo­lo­gical col­lege I star­ted to real­ise that con­ven­tional approaches to evan­gel­ism just didn’t seem to work. How­ever, lots of oppor­tun­it­ies arose to talk about faith with the people I “hung out with.” I recall when I left fin­ance to go into min­istry I never had to take the ini­ti­at­ive to explain my decision; people asked, they were curi­ous. The dif­fer­ence in the two situ­ations wasn’t down to theo­lo­gical con­tent, it was down to patience.

Whilst at theo­lo­gical col­lege, I bypassed the mon­astic lunch­time meal to eat in local cafes, res­tur­ants and malls. I firmly believe that min­is­ters should be Fl?¢neurs, observing the every­day inter­ac­tions and move­ments of people — part of the cul­tural land­scape, observing and learning.

The city is like a text­book of life, if we can slow down and take the time to walk through it and read it.

But also, it was encour­aged to see Driscoll talk about doc­trine in prac­tice. Good theo­logy always comes down to being able to address the human con­di­tion in all it’s rich­ness, but also in all its falleness.

Tech­nor­ati Tags: Mis­sional, Mark Driscoll