Curious Christian

I have been wading through various articles on incarnational mission over the last few weeks. In "Exhibition Evangelism & the Local Church", my friend and collegue Philip Johnson explained it this way:

Incarnational mission is grounded in the very notion of God becoming incarnate in Jesus. Jesus commissioned his disciples saying, ‘As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you’ (John 20:21). Just as God became flesh – incarnated as a human and taught within a particular culture – so too we must incarnate the gospel by living and sharing inside other cultures. An incarnational approach does two main things. First, the message of the gospel is translated into words and symbols that the receptor culture will best understand. Second, the messengers of the gospel join that culture and live out the Christian faith in that context. One of the best illustrations of this is Paul’s ministry in Athens as he shared about the ‘unknown god’ (Acts 17:16-34).

What I like about this brief introduction is that, not only are linguistic incarnation and lifestyle incarnation both identified as aspects of incarnational mission, but that symbolic incarnation is identified as well. In fact, in so far as our words and actions are all signs and symbols of a sort, I would go so far as to say that symbolic incarnation is the broadest dimension of all.