Dave Kludt is a pastor/equipper at Kairos Hollwood and works for the Fuller Doctor of Ministry program. When not doing one of these two things, he hangs out with his wife in East Hollywood reading books, laughing with friends, biking around the neighborhood, and eating ethnic food. This is Dave’s first contribution to The Burner Blog.
Google “missional vs. attractional” and you’ll find a slew of blog posts, articles, and books referencing the divide between two ways of “how to do church.” Yet, there is a growing awareness that the clear distinction between the labels “attractional” and “missional” may not actually be helpful in discerning the direction of the Western church. Just a few years ago, a discussion in a seminary class saw my classmates and I describing attractional with words like “big,” “mega,” “institutional,” “pews,” and “old” while missional was seen as “new,” “emerging,” “young,” “candles, “hip,” etc. Clearly, there have been caricatures and straw men at work in the development of these labels and perhaps it is time to move on.
It seems odd that there has been such disagreement about whether the church should be attractive to those outside of the church or whether the church should encourage people to go out and live as a contrast community. At least, that’s what Hugh Halter and Matt Smay say in their latest book, AND: The Gathered and Scattered Church (published by Zondervan as part of the Exponential Series focused on the missional, reproducing church). Halter and Smay, who previously co-authored The Tangible Kingdom, help lead the Adullam community in Denver, Colorado and in AND, propose moving the conversation debate between “attractional and missional” to a place where we can affirm and recognize the need both to gather and to be sent together as a community, suggesting that “quite possibly, God may be growing weary of our deconstructive critiques guised in the covering of ‘strategy’” (24). Strong words, for sure, but they convey the authors’ concern to see the church embrace the movement between gathering and scattering.
The book’s title – AND - comes from this recognition that a holistic understanding of the church must take into account the very dichotomies that can cause church splits, generational gaps, and blogger battles: the church is (centralized)(decentralized)… the church needs the (old)(new)… the church should be (fluid)(structured) and more! The authors locate this fluctuating rhythm in the movements of the Scriptures, as the people of God continually find themselves called together only to be scattered only to be brought back home only to be sent out… only to be gathered together again. The question we should be asking, the book suggests, is less about how we do church and more about what the church is.
The proposed answer, geared toward the Western church, lies in confronting the patterns of consumerism prevalent in our culture. Specifically, Halter and Smay point to spiritual formation and discipleship – the kind that pushes people to be like Jesus rather than simply knowing about Jesus (they assume that nonconsumerism is a part of this push). Regarding structures, they argue the church should function with both arms – sending and gathering (following Ralph Winter, they describe these two arms as “sodalic” [sending] and “modalic [gathering]). This is a balance needed not only in theory, but also in leadership, vision, practices, and structures – in all things “church.”
I had a few minor quibbles with the book. After reading and rereading a few larger sections, I am not quite sure how the book as a whole is organized; the chapters work together loosely, but I found that many could function on their own or in a different order. The book focuses on ideas overly familiar to current church/ministry conversation (missional, incarnational, contextual, etc.) and did not always cover new ground. Some of these terms may be reaching their current saturation point and I look forward to fresh concepts taking root in these conversations. Like any book geared toward practicality, there is a limitation on the book’s lasting usefulness. This book works well right now, but may be lost after a few years in the quickly changing currents of church and ministry trends.
That said, as a (bivocational)(small church)(church plant)(urban)(missional) pastor, reading this book was both challenging and encouraging. The authors, as practitioners in the trenches of ministry, “get it.” This is a credit to the publisher as well as the authors. The simplicity of the message is compelling; for example, they define the church simply (but profoundly) as a group of people on mission together willing to say ‘come, die, and give your life away’ – beautiful! I loved several of the chapters – Chapter 3: Consumerless Church, Chapter 4: Spiritual Formation for Missional Churches, and Chapter 7: To Gather or Not to Gather – and will be encouraging leaders in my community to read and dialogue about them.
While not without its faults, AND: The Gathered and Scattered Church is a thoughtful, balanced, and engaging book that is helpful to those in the throes of ministry struggling to decipher what shape God might be calling our communities to take in order to be faithful to our calling.
The Burner buys books from http://www.fullerseminarybookstore.com and thinks you should, too.
