Deep Incarnation

Living, Working, and Worshipping among the poorest in our world

Marginal places are hard which is why most (not all) church planting these days is done via cloning. As a “successful” church, you find an area of similar demographics and repeat the process. Sadly these means that most church planting is done from middle-class areas to similar middle-class areas. Some church plants are not church plants at all, but church re-plants, cuckoo plants. Often the areas of focus for both clone planting and cuckoo church are big student areas of student cities. Huge amounts of financial and human church resources is being ploughed into reaching these areas, as they have high student and graduate densities. Jesus said he came to be “good news to the poor” (Luke 4), and yet the good news of Jesus is no longer available to the poor.

So what do we need to do? Sadly there is no shortcut, but we need a new move of the Spirit where people’s hearts are broken for the poor. Rather than just seeing this as a need to give more money, they need to give a more precious gift – our lives.

We need, what we are calling, deep incarnation, we need Christians to live, work and worship among the poorest or in the Margins; not just for a few years but potentially decades.

Living

Living in Solidarity with the people everyone else forgets. Making friends with them and in the process learning from them and realising our own spiritual deficiencies. We come not as experts to solve, but as learners to listen! Walking the same streets, taking the same buses, buying from the same shops, experiencing the same anti-social behaviour. This is what Jesus meant by telling us we must humble ourselves.

Working

We have become so accustomed to our achievement/aspiration culture that we don’t even know how much it dominates our lives. We are told we need that dream home or job or partner or family. In Marginlised cultures aspirations are reduced, many see just getting through the day without seeing a bailiff as a triumph!

We tend to take that attitude into our work lives, but those aspiration and achievements are in the grand scheme of thing, fairly irrelevant! The question Jesus will ask us is not did we get that promotion but did we help the person nobody else helped. We need to take jobs that offer us no real personal benefit but offer others benefit. A teacher who takes a job in a failing school, a lawyer who is available for pro bono cases, an architect who designs affordable and beautiful houses, a GP who opens a practice in an area of low life expectancy, a church leader who serves in a small local church, rather than going to the big city center church. Even if we cannot live in the margins, we can find ways to work for the benefit of those that do.

Worshipping

The saddest thing we hear is when people list what they are looking for in a church. This might be great children’s or youth work, lively contemporary worship or a beautiful organ filled cathedral, it might be a great, Bible based teacher or lots of people that look like us (or look like how we aspire to look like). We chose church like we buy online, find the best product, best price, read the reviews and then commit, if we don’t like it we send it back, if we really don’t like we leave a terrible review!

But we have got the order the wrong way around, we don’t approach it in prayer! We don’t start by asking – “where am I most needed?”, “where could my skills be of most use?”. If you are potential preacher, why go to a church where you might preach once every six months, when you could go to church where you preach every month? If you are potential worship leader why go to a church where you may play only when there are five Sundays in a month, when you could be playing every other week? These are just two poor examples!

God cares where we live, work and worship, and he wants to use us, but often we look around the church, frustrated that we are not living the New life that we were promised, but unwilling to make the changes that God is urging us to make!

For more information on what Deep Incarnation looks like – there are a series of very short videos available here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0aExibXFqN-TM9B9OY-96g/videos

Learning

The biggest mistake we make when we move into these areas though, is that we go in as experts to help, solve or save. The first thing we do is to listen, when we listen we discover how little we know. If we go as experts we will fail, but if we go as students, then God can use us in amazing ways!