More Thoughts Provoked by Hunter

In To Change the World, Hunter caricatures different sections of the Church as falling into three paradigms of cultural engagement: ‘defensive against’, ‘relevance to’, and ‘purity from’. He then describes his preferred model of ‘faithful presence within’.

Mark Driscoll uses rather snappier terminology to describe the same observation:

1. Church as bomb shelter:  Culture is seen as dark and dangerous and something to hide from. This kind of church is not missional.

2. Church as mirror: This kind of church simply reflects the culture. It does not seek to redeem, but rather blesses what God doesn’t.

3. Church as parasite: This kind of church uses and enjoys what the culture provides, while at the same time condemning the culture, and failing to add anything positive to it.

4. City within the City: This is Jesus language. A bible-believing, Jesus-loving, mission-focused, people loving church, who live differently from the culture but not in an adversarial way.

To be honest, I think Driscoll does a better job of summing this up than Hunter, and his application is certainly easier to follow.

My own preferred way of expressing this – and the way we summarize our vision at Gateway – is with three words: Adventure, Purity and Compassion.

1. Adventure: This is basically the great commission – the mission imperative for the church. We are called to be people who act in faith, empowered by the Spirit, to make known to the world the wonders of God’s grace.

2. Purity: The church is to be a community of holiness, not slipping into the standards and practices the world considers as normal, but living in a way that truly honors Jesus and blesses other people.

3. Compassion: The church is to be a community that demonstrates the upside-down economics of the kingdom, in which the first are last the last are first; in which the poor and the weak are served and cherished. This applies first to the household of God itself, as we help one another, but then inevitably must extend to us being a blessing to the wider community.

This Sunday at Gateway it is our annual September rallying cry of Vision Sunday and I will once again be trying to articulate this vision of what it means to be the people of God. I believe it is a vision worth living and dying for!