I love Alan Hirsch. I love the book The Forgotten Ways. He has immensely impacted my theology of missional and is one of my favorite authors and bloggers. Now if I could just meet him. Maybe I can be at some conference where Bob Roberts and Alan Hirsch and Len Sweet are all gonna be and we can have a big pow-wow. That would be such an wonderful and wild discussion. It would almost be better than my brisket combined with Dreamland Ribs and Milo’s Hamburgers and Publix sweet tea. And a Hardee’s chicken biscuit for breakfast. Boy I miss the food in Alabama.

Anyway, Alan has a great post on incarnational ministry. You need to check this out. I especially love the point about presence. All I can say is….WOW! This rocks.

He says:

The fact that God was in the Nazarene neighborhood for 30 years and no-one noticed should be profoundly disturbing to our normal ways of engaging mission. Not only does it have implication for our affirmation of normal human living, it says something about the timing as well as the relative anoninymity of incarnational ways of engaging in mission. There is a time for ‘in-your-face’ approaches to mission, but there is also a time to simply become part of the very fabric of a community and to engage in the humanity of it all. Furthermore, the idea of presence highlights the role of relationships in mission. If relationship is the key means in the transfer of the Gospel, then it simply means we are going to have to be directly present to the people in our circle. Our very lives are our messages and we cannot take ourselves out of the equation of mission. But one of the profound implications of our presence as representatives of Jesus is that Jesus actually likes to hang out with the people we hang out with. They get the implied message that God actually likes them.