I've been engaged in an email conversation with Gavin Knight and Mike Brantley regarding Conventional (Attractional) vs. Missional (Incarnational) church styles. Mike posted our dialog on his blog. It's long and I would not expect anyone to read it all but it all started from a post that the Tall Skinny Kiwi posted on his blog titled Missional Church: Where is the Fruit? The debate is about measuring success and how do you do it? Conversions? Attendance? Offering? When you link back in this discussion through a few blogs it seems to be that Missional-Incarnational churches are being criticized because they do not have the number of conversions needed to justify themselves as a legitimate ministry.
One might dismiss this notion and say, "who cares?" But, I think this is an important discussion as we are clearly shifting into post-Christian culture in the West, and the reality is that more and more of our emerging post-modern generations are not going to church. They simply do not see church (let alone the Christian church) as a viable means to encountering God. So what do we do? Do we have to "change" the way we do church? Do we just have to get better at what we are doing and work harder? Or do we need to re-examine the way we define success?
Here is a related article by Andrew Hamilton: Incarnational vs. Attractional that I think is well written.
From my experience being in both the market place and in the professional church setting, I have seen some alarming parallels of our cultures economic structure and the Christian church (I am using this term as a whole and in no way represents all Christian churches). As we have observed the Wal-Mart, Costco, Sams-Club, Home Depot, Best Buy, Dicks Sporting Goods and Lowe's (just to name a few) of our culture spread to every market in our economic landscape you can see a subtle yet direct influence these companies have had on consumers mentality. These companies have set out to bring convenience to the consumer's buying habits, shape their expectations about service, price, product choice, and geographical location (there are 6 Home Depot's in 3 miles of my house). They do this all to gain market share, customer loyalty and economic growth.
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