My recent call to be incarnational

 As I have wrestled over the last three years with various missional concepts, I feel God calling me back into the marketplace to work and live incarnationally as a business worker or owner but to still work as a pastor.  I feel the best way for me, as a pastor to be missional is to be incarnational. That is the word must become flesh and blood in the marketplace (a new term for taking the gospel into work place).  Stetzer in his excellent comprehensive work on church planting, Planting Missional Churches, opens up chapter thirteen (Missional/Incarnational Churches) by stating that church planters who are letting the incarnation of Christ drive the mission in their community and beyond are purposefully becoming business owners or work part-time or full-time in the market place. 

In my own experience in Colorado Springs, I have found that I don’t gain as much respect when people ask about my line of work and I respond that I work as a pastor or church planter (as we enter the post-Christian era in America, these days of deep respect given to the pastor vocation are quickly coming to an end), but when I do reply that I am interested in starting a business but I also work as a pastor, I gain instant respect and people want to hear what I have to say.

During his talk in one of the main sessions of the 2011 Exponential conference Michael Frost reminded the church planters in attendance that we cannot be Missional without becoming incarnational.  John 1:14 states that “the Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood” (The Message).  Missional is Christ’s command for us to “go” while incarnational is to “become and move into”.  Probably the greatest incarnational statement in the scriptures is found in Matthew 1:23, “God with us”.  God didn’t ask us to come up to heaven; instead He came down to us and lived among us (John 6:38 “For I have come down from heaven”).   The Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 9:19-23 also reminds us of the importance of an incarnational way of life in reaching people when he stated:

  

“^19-23Even though I am free of the demands and expectations of everyone, I have voluntarily become a servant to any and all in order to reach a wide range of people: religious, nonreligious, meticulous moralists, loose-living immoralists, the defeated, the demoralized—whoever. I didn't take on their way of life. I kept my bearings in Christ—but I entered their world and tried to experience things from their point of view. I've become just about every sort of servant there is in my attempts to lead those I meet into a God-saved life. I did all this because of the Message. I didn't just want to talk about it; I wanted to be in on it!”  (The Message)

Michael Frost describes Missional as the marriage and Incarnational as the love affair.  It is possible to be married but not to be in love.  I need a love affair.