Attractional And Missional Revisited

I’ve just gone back to a book I started a while ago and then
put aside (heavens knows why – some distraction, probably). It’s ‘Bible
And Mission: Christian Witness in a Postmodern World’ by my old research
supervisor, Richard
Bauckham. It is the published version of some lectures he gave about five
years ago. Some of his thinking has important implications for those of us
interested in the whole emerging/missional/Fresh Expressions scene. Here I want
to explore chapter 3 of the book, which is about literal and symbolic
geography.

By way of background, Richard is tackling the problem of
particularity and universality. Christianity makes universal claims, but this
is not popular in a postmodern world that is happier with local, particular
truth. However, he points out that our faith is always one that has made
deliberate moves from the particular to the universal. He cites Abraham, Israel
and of course Jesus as prime biblical examples.

Within chapter 3, he says that geography is both particular
and universal in this sense: he refers to the common labelling of Old Testament
mission being understood in a centripetal manner, and New Testament mission as
centrifugal. That is, in the OT the nations were to be attracted to Israel, and
in the NT, disciples were to go to the nations. He argues that centripetal and
centrifugal mission is present in both OT and NT. The literal geographical ‘centre’
of Jerusalem/Zion/the Temple in the OT becomes a metaphor in the NT for the
church (which is people, not a building) and is also used metaphorically of
himself by Jesus. The centrifugal theme is clear: Jesus is sent, and so is the
Church. But the centripetal motif is present, too. As Israel was a light to the
nations, so Jesus and (in a derivative sense) his church is the light of the
world.

Where does this connect for the emerging church discussion? The
centrifugal nature of mission has been strongly emphasised here: that is what
an incarnational/missional approach to church entails. It has been seen in
contrast to the ‘attractional’ approach that may be summed up with the slogan
from the film ‘Field Of Dreams’: ‘If you build it, they will come.’ Attractional
mission has put great store on buildings, programmes and activities, and has
been practised by traditional churches and mega-churches. It has been heavily
criticised by the emerging/missional crowd (including me).

But Richard’s exposition of centripetal mission needs to be
brought into the discussion. There is a way in which we need to be attractive. Nice
buildings, good programmes and a range of activities do not make us the light
of the world, or a city set on a hill. But other things do. Holiness of life
together is light. Missional Christians may not want to be attractional, but we do need to be attractive. When we live missionally/incarnationally in the world,
there needs to be something attractive about our lifestyles. The attractive and
the missional, the centripetal and centrifugal must be held together. We
missional Christians are good at emphasising the need to be ‘in the world’, but
we need also not to be ‘of the world’, and different in a positive way. Perhaps
for those of us in the Methodist tradition, this means a new place for John
Wesley’s emphasis on social holiness.

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