MISSION: Its matter of emphasis
 One the big issues around at the moment when it comes to mission in Western Culture is attractional versus incarnational methods of mission. For a seminar I will be doing in the future I have put together some diagrams to try and explain where I am in my thinking on this issue. Again a couple of warnings, all diagrams are by necessity generalizations and tend towards the simplistic. I know for instance there is not simple a clear barrier between the culture of God’s people and the culture of the World, the church by necessity is shaped and influenced by its surrounding culture but the easiest way to help people understand the fundamental issue is to represent it this way. So in my thinking I am bit more nuanced that it may seem in these diagrams. Please feel free to copy and use them, if the can help in anything you are doing, even if only an example of what you disagree with 
CENTRIPETAL MISSION
When missiologists talk about “centripetal� mission they are describing the primary missionary activity of God’s people as one of drawing people from the surrounding culture to enter the culture and community of God’s people. This is very much the vision of the later prophets of the Old Testament. So Micah writes, 
“Many nations will come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths.” The law will go out from Zion, the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.â€? Micah 4:2   The people of God by embodying the ways of the Lord in their community life will convince the surrounding people of the reality of God and the rightness of His ways and draw them to come to Jerusalem to acknowledge their submission to Yahweh. The missional methodology here is attractional.
CENTRIFUGAL MISSION
Centrifugal mission, at least in terms of direction, is the opposite of centripetal mission. Mission takes 
place in this paradigm by God’s people crossing the cultural barrier into the surrounding culture to take the gospel to the people there. This is clearly the vision of Jesus for his church following his resurrection. The Risen Christ, I would argue, moved the missional emphasis for the people of God from attractional to incarnational. He tells his disciples, this New Israel He has called into being, “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Acts 1:8 Rather than the Gentiles coming to Jerusalem here God’s people are sent from Jerusalem to the Gentiles. The disciples are called on to go and enter the culture of those they encounter. This missional methodology is incarnational, it seeks to follow Christ’s example, “as the Father has sent Me, I am sending youâ€? John 20:21
CHRISTENDOM PARADIGM CHURCH
 In Christendom, the religious hegemony created in the West by the privileged position given by the State to the Church for about 15 centuries from Constantine, Christian values, morality and beliefs 
predominated, and at times were enforced. This meant that there was little perceived cultural barrier between church and world. Mission was often regarded as superfluous, except at the edges of the Christendom empires, because church involvement was state mandated. Later when people were free not to attend church the mission that developed was mainly, centripetal, that is attractional in nature. Mission was about getting people into church, that is church buildings to hear the gospel. There were experiments in centrifugal mission, so called “foreign missions� and one the most innovative, the city “missions� of the UK, designed to enter the culture of the working class poor. Nevertheless, I want to argue that the emphasis here is different from the one we find in the NT, it is more akin to the mission of God’s people in the OT.
APOSTOLIC PARADIGM CHURCH
In recent years there has been growing recognition that the cultural barrier between the church and its culture in the West is a reality and in fact a huge barrier. With Postmodernism and other cultural changes the gap between the
culture of the church shaped by Christendom and its surrounding culture has opened up into a chasm. This makes centripetal mission as the main missional methodology less and less effective, as people don’t feel drawn to church services, and in fact it is often so alien to them, it actually repels them. Hence the often quoted “Jesus yes, church no� slogan. This has motivated a fresh determination to make the church in the West better reflect in its culture and time the apostolic era church. The result is that many contemporary missiologists are calling on the church to return to incarnational forms of mission
CENTRIFUGAL + centripetal = APOSTOLIC PARADIGM
I do have slight worries when I read some of the stuff written by some sections of the emerging church, which seems to rule out any form of centripetal mission at all. I just don’t think that is sustainable. On the other hand I think that the market for that form of centripetal mission on steroids, the seeker sensitive church, such as Willow Creek, is living on borrowed time. People are no longer all that attracted to “events� to me the day of “crusade� evangelism is finished. If my experience is anything to go to, contemporary young adults feel about as attracted to church services, in their traditional forms, as they are to a good dose of hemorrhoids.
 My conclusion is that to create a contemporary apostolic paradigm for the church’s mission in the 21st century West, centripetal and centrifugal mission must been seen and practiced  as complementary not seen as mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, I do want to insist that there is an emphasis to be maintained.  We live on this side of Pentecost, in our mission Spirit empowered and directed centrifugal mission must predominate. The problem with the Christendom era church is that it mostly allowed centripetal mission to predominate in its mission. This emphasis caused it to practice a mainly OT model of mission in the NT era. I think this is a charge that can legitimately be leveled at the seeker sensitive movement, ie Saddleback and Willow Creek.
 Although centripetal mission is not the main emphasis in the apostolic paradigm church, I still want to say that centripetal mission has a vital role to play in contemporary mission. Unless our church community is in some sense attractive, unless it does fulfill the vision of the prophets, by embodying the character of God and demonstrating the reality of God then our movement into the cultural around us will be fatally undermined. Unless the church embodies the message we take incarnationally into our culture we have no credibility. The quality of our community should provoke questions in our surrounding culture which we can then seek to answer as we missionally enter that culture. I think this was what Lesslie Newbiggin was talking about when he said that the hermeneutic (way of understanding) the gospel in contemporary culture was a congregation that actually lived it. So the attractional aspect of mission is should not so much be about getting people to events we are running, as to allow them to observe and experience the community we share as God’s people.
y. This monument is to the probably hundreds of protestant and later Presbyterian believers who were executed here. If you think you have had worship wars in your church in the 17th century in Scotland they tried to stamp out Presbyterian worship and if you got caught at a Presbyterian service or had signed a document supporting them called the National Covenant then it is more than likely you would have ended your days at the end of a rope in the Grassmarket.
