Incarnational Ministry and the Unique, Incarnate Christ

The term "incarnational ministry," like "missional" or "Emergent Church," is used in a wide variety of ways. Sometimes "incarnational ministry" means ministry that crosses cultural barriers to be an embodied presence to people in need. At other times, it's used to talk about culturally relevant analogies for the gospel. In still other contexts, "incarnational ministry" has become shorthand for affirming that intellectual assent to faith is not enough-faith needs to become embodied and "incarnate" in acts of love and service, as in the earthly ministry of Jesus. It is understandable if you find these different uses of the phrase puzzling. For in its common evangelical usage, "incarnational ministry" often has surprisingly little to do with the unique Incarnation of the Word made flesh in Jesus Christ. For instance, surely Muslim, Jewish and other religious practitioners would affirm that faith should be made manifest in concrete, physical acts of love and service. But these persons would not affirm the Incarnation of the eternal Word made flesh in Jesus Christ.

This leads us to a question underlying the coupling of the term "incarnational" with "ministry." What is the relationship between the one Incarnation, and the activity and ministry of the church? Should our ministries be guided by analogies between the Incarnation and our own Christian lives?

As Timothy Cowin-one missional blogger-suggests, the Incarnation is important for ministry because it teaches that "Jesus came to physically be with us" to show the Father's love to tax collectors and sinners, seeking not to retreat from culture but to "penetrate" it. The Incarnation applies to us because "the missional church sees its mission as the same as the Lord's." Stated differently, for Cowin, the Incarnation is about engaging in a set of inclusive and loving activities (like in the ministry of Jesus), since the mission of Jesus Christ is the same as our own.

Although Cowin makes some legitimate points about the church's calling to be in but not of the world, approaches like this one risk missing a profound truth of the gospel that the Incarnation is utterly unique. Whereas it may sound empowering for us to have the "same" mission as Jesus in the Incarnation, there is a subtle but profound danger in this incarnational analogy. It is God alone who saves, and God alone saves through the Word that takes on flesh in Jesus Christ. The Incarnation is not a pattern of activities that we copy. The Incarnation is unique-it is not simply a truth that Jesus lived a self-sacrificial life, but that the eternal Word became incarnate in this man Jesus who lived such a life. The Incarnation is a reality without which the ministry of Jesus, his death, and his resurrection would have no significance for our salvation. As such, the Incarnation is a central, constitutive truth of the gospel.

Yet, there is something right about those who seek to recover the doctrine of the Incarnation and its implications for our lives and ministries; there is something right about the sense that we should not enter into ministry in a prideful way that looks down upon others rather than serves others; there is something right about the calling to cross-cultural barriers for the sake of the gospel. In order to explore this further, I will examine how the incarnational analogy has functioned in evangelical missiological circles. After this analysis, I will point to one area in which I think analogies can be made from the Incarnation that do not compromise its uniqueness or centrality; finally, the article ends by drawing upon the wisdom of the Heidelberg Catechism in articulating the ways in which we participate in Christ and his mission, and the ways in which our mission remains distinct from that of Jesus Christ himself.

A common example of the use of "incarnational ministry" in missiological circles comes from a widely used textbook, Ministering Cross-Culturally: An Incarnational Model for Personal Relationships, by Sherwood Lingenfelter and Marvin Mayers.

In Ministering Cross-Culturally, Lingenfelter argues that the Incarnation has profound consequences for cross-cultural ministry. Jesus came into the world as a "learner," needing to learn about Jewish language and culture. Like a careful anthropologist, he studied the culture of his people for thirty years before he began his ministry. Key to the rationale for this position is the Christ-hymn in Philippians 2. In Lingenfelter's rendering, although Jesus Christ was "in very nature God," he identified with humanity and human culture, taking "the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness" (Phil. 2:6-7). In fact, Jesus not only completely identified with humanity but with Jewish culture in particular. Thus, Lingenfelter sees the Incarnation as the model for incarnational ministry, for Jesus was "a 200 percent person": "he was 100 percent God and 100 percent Jew."

Lingenfelter goes on to make a direct analogy with our own ministry: we should seek to become 150 percent persons, becoming less like persons of our own culture and more like persons of the culture to whom we seek to minister (thus 75 percent of each culture).

Lingenfelter has legitimate and pressing missiological concerns that underlie his use of the incarnational analogy. He has seen the tendency of Western missionaries to retreat to their safe missionary compounds, rather than approaching the receiving culture with humility and respect. He has seen how this action-of distance, rather than humble engagement-distorts the message that Christian missionaries try to communicate. Thus, the Incarnation seems like an attractive analogy to inspire missionaries to acquire a posture of learning and cultural engagement.

While I share Lingenfelter's practical missiological concerns, I think that his close analogy between the Incarnation and cross-cultural ministry is not the best way to address these concerns. It depends upon a questionable interpretation of Philippians 2 and a reduction of Christology to a problem of math. (How exactly is a "200 percent person" one person rather than "two sons," as the ancient heresy of Nestorianism claims?) But for our present purposes, I will focus upon two observations.

First, Lingenfelter's portrait of the Incarnation tends to conflate the unique Incarnation with our own process of learning about another culture. The deity of the Son is seen as a "culture" and the taking on of humanity as a second "culture" taken on in the Incarnation. Thus, Jesus, as the pioneer of our faith, shows us how to take on a second culture as well. But here is the problem: the divine nature is not a "culture," and we cannot (and should not) see ourselves as analogous to the pre-incarnate Word that then takes on humanity. The deity of the Word won't fit into the box of "culture" because God is not a creature-and culture is a characteristic of creaturely existence. Instead, God is the transcendent and mysterious creator of the universe. The truth of the Incarnation is that in the eternal Word, this same transcendent God takes on the flesh of human beings for the sake of our salvation.

Second, this doctrinal conflation can lead to a significant problem in practice: it can conflate the mission of Jesus with our own mission. While Lingenfelter certainly would not want to be promoting a messiah-complex among missionaries, the close analogy between the incarnational as a culture-crossing action and our own culture-crossing action makes this a constant issue. I recall times in which missionaries schooled in incarnational ministry told me they were "cheating" from the model if they gave something away to persons in need, or if they presented any ideas that were not already inherent in the culture of reception. Behind this sense of "cheating" is the assumption in that our identification with the culture is enough-that is our mission. Yet, while I agree that missionaries should seek to identify with the receiving culture, our identification with that culture is not inherently redemptive. We should identify with the culture so that our lives offer an intelligible witness to the one Redeemer of peoples from all cultures, Jesus Christ. It is not enough to bear witness to Jesus as the model for crossing cultures. Jesus is much more than a model.

Instead, in our teaching about the Incarnation, we must be crystal clear about the fact that this is a unique event. Jesus Christ is central to the gospel because the Incarnation is not something that happens in various forms to various persons. Jesus Christ is the one and only incarnate Word. There is redemptive power in the Incarnation; apart from the Incarnation, Christ's obedient life, death, resurrection, and ascension would be of no use to us. Because of the Incarnation, we know that it is none other than GOD who has sought us out and cleansed us from our sins. "In Christ" we know and have fellowship with God. If God and humanity were not united in Jesus Christ, then being "in Christ" would not be a locus of our communion with God.

Indeed, if we are to make analogies between the Incarnation and our own lives, it should point us to the reality that Jesus Christ is not a "200 percent person"-in which deity and humanity are framed competitively, two persons smashed into one. Instead, the Incarnation shows us how God's action in our life does not mean the evacuation of human agency, but the empowerment of it. Augustine points this out in his debate with Pelagius about grace. Augustine writes, "This birth [of Christ], which joined the human to God and the flesh to the Word in unity of one person, was undeniably gratuitous; Good works followed; they did not earn this birth." In other words, just as the divine Word takes on flesh in the Incarnation-before the flesh could merit anything on its own-so also God's work in our lives is received as an unmerited gift, with good works following.

Christians often struggle with spiritual pride-we find it difficult to take a compliment in a way that does not give ourselves "spiritual bonus points" for our own faithful acts. We know we should give credit to God-but really, I was the one who performed that act of service and love, right? Ultimately, a competitive, non-incarnational view of divine and human work underlies this ambivalence. In the Incarnation we see that true God and true humanity are brought together in one person, Jesus Christ. When we perform an act of love and service, we can give the Spirit the credit while still recognizing that this act is our own in a secondary sense. Why? Because as we become more like Christ by the Spirit, we are not becoming "less human" by becoming more like God. Our true humanity is being restored as the Spirit unites us to God in Christ.

The Unique Incarnation and the Work of the Church

If it is misleading to see the Incarnation as an example of culture-crossing or to conflate Christ's mission and our own, what can we say positively about the ways in which our lives and ministries participate in the incarnate Christ and his mission? The Holy Spirit has united believers to the living Christ; thus it is important to think about the positive ways in which we participate in Christ. I think that the Heidelberg Catechism (HC) is very instructive on this point. Rather than taking the Incarnation as the point of departure for how we participate in Christ, it speaks in terms of the three offices of Christ:

Question 31. Why is he called "Christ," meaning anointed?



Answer. Because he has been ordained by God the Father and has been anointed with the Holy Spirit to be our chief prophet and teacher who perfectly reveals to us the secret counsel and will of God for our redemption; our only high priest who has redeemed us by the one sacrifice of his body, and who continually pleads our cause with the Father; and our eternal king who governs us by his Word and Spirit, and who guards us and keeps us in the redemption he has won for us.



Question 32. But why are you called a Christian?



Answer. Because by faith I am a member of Christ and so I share in his anointing. I am anointed to confess his name, to present myself to him as a living sacrifice of thanks, to strive with a good conscience against sin and the devil in this life, and afterward to reign with Christ over all creation for all eternity.

Note how the HC does two things simultaneously. First, it speaks about a profound union between believers and Jesus Christ-we are not lone-ranger Christians; we are profoundly connected to the living Christ: "I am a member of Christ and so I share in his anointing." Its language is strong and unequivocal on this important connection.

But secondly, note how our "membership" in Christ and "sharing" in his anointing are derivative and subordinate to the living Christ. Christ alone is the "chief prophet and teacher," our "only high priest," and our intercessor to the Father. In our own person, we can do none of these things. The Son is a child of God by nature, but we are children of God by grace. This difference has profound consequences for ministry.

The consequence of this distinction is that we should not seek to simply "copy" Jesus as the "missional blogger" advocated at the beginning, or as some other advocates of incarnational ministry suggest. We belong to Christ-"in body and soul, in life and death," as the first answer to HC states. But we are not Christ. And, in spite of a potentially misleading claim in the "mission statement" of my own denomination (the Reformed Church in America), we should be cautious about seeing ourselves as "the very presence of Jesus Christ in the world." We belong to Christ, but the only Savior is the living Christ himself-the Son by nature, not simply by grace. Our ministries should point to the Head of the body, the One to whom we belong. Paul brings together these teachings of union with Christ and yet pointing to Christ when he writes that God has made known his riches among the Gentiles in the mystery of "Christ in you, the hope of glory." But rather than follow up with this stunning affirmation of union with Christ by focusing upon our own redemptive action, Paul continues: "It is he [Christ] whom we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone in all wisdom, so that we may present everyone mature in Christ" (Col. 1:27-28, NRSV). We are united to Christ in a profound way, yet we do not simply copy the action of the one Redeemer. We bear witness to Christ the Redeemer rather than ourselves; we find our maturity and identity as ones united to Christ but also as "servants" of Jesus Christ (Rom. 1:1), the one Incarnate Word who reconciles us with God.

The answer to HC 32 above is also instructive for thinking through the implications of the three offices of Christ-the difference between Christ as prophet, priest, and king and our own lives that participate in the one prophet, priest, and king. We are "anointed" by the Holy Spirit to bear witness to Christ, to "confess his name." We are not the great prophet and teacher, but we confess the One who is. Secondly, we offer our entire lives as "a living sacrifice of thanks" to "strive" against "sin and the devil." Christ alone offers the perfect atoning sacrifice. Our own sacrifice is one of gratitude and thanksgiving-done with a "good conscience" because of the complete work of Christ our high priest. Finally, we "share" in the kingship of Christ by sharing in his resurrection and exaltation, looking to the day when we will "reign with Christ over all creation for all eternity." Christ is prophet, priest, and king. We are united to this same Christ. But as members of the body serving the one Head, we participate in Christ through acts of professing Christ and his truth, loving God and neighbor in gratitude, and living in hope of our final resurrection, exaltation, and reign with Christ. We do participate in Christ's "mission," in a certain sense. But precisely because Christ is the only mediator between God and humanity-the only perfect prophet, priest, and king-our "mission" is distinct from that of Jesus Christ himself.

In terms of Christian ministry, the result of this approach is one that gives a central place to the church's ministry of Word and sacrament. Negatively, this means we are not sent to go out and "take over the culture," or to seek to be the Savior to those around us. Positively, it means that we point to Christ, the Head, through the word of the gospel held forth in both Word and sacrament. There is no human set of activities-no matter how loving or revolutionary-that can bring redemption. Redemption comes through Jesus Christ alone, made possible by the Spirit's work in uniting us to Jesus Christ.

This approach toward Christian ministry overlaps, on some key points, with some visions of incarnational ministry. As Lingenfelter suggests, we need to seek out relationships with those to whom we minister, displaying our faith in lives of humility and service. We need to approach ministry as learners of the culture and history of those around us. Yet, it is not necessary to draw upon the Incarnation as a model for culture-crossing in order to promote these virtues in Christian ministry. These norms coincide with the humility and gratitude of those who know they belong to Christ but are not Christ themselves: we present our lives as "a living sacrifice of thanks," serving God and loving our neighbor in humility and gratitude. A life of gratitude humbly recognizes that we are not our own, but that we belong to Jesus Christ. Ultimately, the fact that we are "not our own" should call into question our allegiance to national or cultural priorities that fuel our ethnocentric tendencies that compromise our witness to the gospel. As a way of giving thanks to God, we are called to seek out relationships with those in need and move across cultural barriers that threaten to block our grateful witness to Jesus Christ, the One to whom we belong.

Moreover, in contrast to seeing incarnational ministry as the model for culture-crossing, the Heidelberg Catechism's teaching directly counters our own messianic tendencies: we are not the Redeemer-we belong to the Redeemer. We are freed from manipulating those to whom we minister because we do not need a list of spiritual accomplishments to please God; and it is with "a good conscience" that we strive "against sin and the devil." In the unique Incarnation and the once-for-all sacrifice on the cross, we have been cleansed from our sins and filled with the Spirit who brings new life. Precisely because the Incarnation is unique-and we do not need to copy it -we are freed for humble, non-manipulative witness and service for the sake of the gospel.