When Faith is Rewilded
Missional-Incarnational exploration with Rowland Smith
Jesus Did Not Float Above the World
At the heart of Christian faith is not systems and strategies, but a person. Jesus came in the flesh. We just celebrated it.
Jesus entered a time period and a place, learning the rhythms, stories, songs, festivals, language, and culture of those people. He walked its roads and threw parties with people…at least he showed up to them, but I bet he helped plan a few. He noticed people others overlooked.
The incarnation was not efficient. But it’s the way Jesus modeled for us.
Jesus was sent by the Father on mission, but His sending did not pull Him out of human life, it pushed Him deeply into it. This is what it means to say that Jesus was both missional and incarnational. Mission describes why He came. Incarnation describes how He came.
And the Gospels writings would indicate that form of being sent was not merely what Jesus did. It was who He was.
Mission was not an assignment He occasionally took up. It was the natural outflow of His union with the Father.
“As the Father Has Sent Me…”
When Jesus turns to His disciples and says, “As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you,” He is inviting them into the same way of being.
This is where the word impulse matters. An impulse is not forced or manufactured. If it’s an impulse, it arises from within us naturally.
The Mission Incarnational Impulse is the conviction that followers of Jesus are not primarily people who support God’s mission, but people who have been shaped by it. Sentness is not something we turn on and off, it becomes “just the way we are.”
Rewilding Faith Without Rejecting the Church
In our conversation with Rowland Smith, he used the language of rewilding
To rewild something is about restoring an environment where life can flourish as it was designed to. Rewilding assumes there is something good and living already present, but constrained.
We have not lost our love for Jesus, but over time, faith can become domesticated, contained within predictable spaces, familiar rhythms, and narrowly defined roles.
Rewilding is about expanding the imagination of what life with God can look like and remembering that the Kingdom of God cannot be confined.
When faith is rewilded, disciples begin to see their neighborhoods as holy ground. We see our workplaces the same way.