Chapter 7 THE INEVITABILITY OF CONTEXTUALIZING

Redeemer City to City is an agency that promotes church planting and gospel movements in the great city centers of the world.¹ As part of our global ministry, we have had opportunities to talk with Chinese house church leaders. God is blessing the church in China with extraordinary growth. However, when Chinese churches and ministers who had experienced God’s blessing in their rural ministries entered the mushrooming cities of China and tried to minister and communicate the gospel in the same ways that had been blessed in the countryside, they saw less fruitfulness.

Over a decade ago, several Dutch denominations approached us. While they were thriving outside of urban areas, they had not been able to start new, vital churches in Amsterdam in years — and most of the existing ones had died out. These leaders knew the gospel; they had financial resources; they had the desire for Christian mission. But they couldn’t get anything off the ground in the biggest city of their country.2

In both cases, ministry that was thriving in the heartland of the country was unable to make much of a dent in the city. It would have been easy to say, “The people of the city are too spiritually proud and hardened.” But the church leaders we met chose to respond humbly and took responsibility for the problem. They concluded that the gospel ministry that had fit nonurban areas well would need to be adapted to the culture of urban life. And they were right. This necessary adaptation to the culture is an example of what we call “contextualization.”3

SOUND CONTEXTUALIZATION

Contextualization is not-as is often argued -“giving people what they want to hear.”4 Rather, it is giving people the Bible’s answers, which they may not at all want to hear, to questions about life that people in their particular time and place are asking, in language and forms they can comprehend, and through appeals and arguments with force they can feel, even if they reject them.

Sound contextualization means translating and adapting the communication and ministry of the gospel to a particular culture without compromising the essence and particulars of the gospel itself. The great missionary task is to express the gospel message to a new culture in a way that avoids making the message unnecessarily alien to that culture, yet without removing or obscuring the scandal and offense of biblical truth. A contextualized gospel is marked by clarity and attractiveness, and yet it still challenges sinners’ self-sufficiency and calls them to repentance. It adapts and connects to the culture, yet at the same time challenges and confronts it. If we fail to adapt to the culture or if we fail to challenge the culture - if we under- or overcontextualize - our ministry will be unfruitful because we have failed to contextualize well.

Perhaps the easiest way to quickly grasp the concept is to think about a common phenomenon. Have you ever sat through a sermon that was biblically sound and doctrinally accurate - yet so boring that it made you want to cry? What made it tedious? Sometimes it’s the mechanics (e.g., a monotone delivery), but more often a boring sermon is doctrinally accurate but utterly irrelevant. The listener says to himself or herself, “You’ve shown me something that may be true, but in any case I don’t care. I don’t see how it would actually change how I think, feel, and act.” A boring sermon is boring because it fails to bring the truth into the listeners’ daily life and world. It does not connect biblical truth to the hopes, narratives, fears, and errors of people in that particular time and place. It does not help the listener to even want Christianity to be true. In other words, the sermon fails at contextualizing the biblical truth for the hearers.

When we contextualize faithfully and skillfully, we show people how the baseline “cultural narratives” of their society and the hopes of their hearts can only find resolution and fulfillment in Jesus. What do I mean by this? Some cultures are pragmatic and prod their members to acquire possessions and power. Some are individualistic and urge their members to seek personal freedom above all. Others are “honor and shame” cultures, with emphasis on respect, reputation, duty, and bringing honor to your family. Some cultures are discursive and put the highest value on art, philosophy, and learning.5 These are called “cultural narratives” because they are stories that a people tell about themselves to make sense out of their shared existence. But whatever these personal and cultural narratives may be, sound contextualization shows people how the plotlines of the stories of their lives can only find a happy ending in Christ.6

So contextualization has to do with culture, but what exactly is culture? Effective contextualization addresses culture in the broadest sense of the word, along the maximum surface area. Culture is popularly conceived narrowly-as language, music and art, food and folk customs-but properly understood, it touches every aspect of how we live in the world. Culture takes the raw materials of nature and creates an environment. When we take the raw material of the earth to build a building or use sounds and rhythms to compose a song or fashion our personal experiences into a story, we are creating an environment we call a culture. We do all this, however, with a goal: to bring the natural order into the service of particular “commanding truths,” core beliefs, and assumptions about reality and the world we live in.

Missionary G. Linwood Barney speaks of culture as resembling an onion. The inmost core is a worldview - a set of normative beliefs about the world, cosmology, and human nature. Growing immediately out of that layer is a set of values - what is considered good, true, and beautiful. The third layer is a set of human institutions that carry on jurisprudence, education, family life, and governance on the basis of the values and worldview. Finally comes the most observable part of culture-human customs and behavior, material products, the built environment, and so on. Some have rightly criticized this model - of an onion or a ladder - as not sufficient to show how much all these “layers” interact with and shape one another. For example, institutions can produce something new like the United States interstate highway system, which created “car culture” behavior, which has in turn undermined older forms of communities and therefore many institutions. So the interactions are neither linear nor one-way.

But the main point here is that contextualizing the gospel in a culture must account for all these aspects. It does not mean merely changing someone’s behavior, but someone’s worldview. It does not mean adapting superficially-for example, in music and clothing. Culture affects every part of human life. It determines how decisions are made, how emotions are expressed, what is considered private and public, how the individual relates to the group, how social power is used, and how relationships, particularly between genders, generations, classes, and races, are conducted. Our culture gives distinct understandings of time, conflict resolution, problem solving, and even the way in which we reason. All these factors must be addressed when we seek to do gospel ministry. David Wells writes, “Contextualization is not merely a practical application of biblical doctrine but a translation of that doctrine into a conceptuality that meshes with the reality of the social structures and patterns of life dominant in our contemporary life.”2

Skill in contextualization is one of the keys to effective ministry today. In particular, churches in urban and cultural centers must be exceptionally sensitive to issues of contextualization, because it is largely there that a society’s culture is being forged and is taking new directions. It is also a place where multiple human cultures live together in uneasy tension, so cultural compounds are more complex and blended there.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE TERM

The term contextualization may have first been used in 1972 by Shoki Coe, a Taiwanese-born man who was one of the key figures in the formation of the World Council of Churches.10 Coe questioned the adequacy of the older “indigenous church movement” model identified with Henry Venn and Rufus Anderson. Venn and Anderson directed Western missionaries to plant churches in new cultures that were “self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating.” Older missionaries had planted churches in foreign cultures and maintained control of them indefinitely, using native Christians only in assisting roles. They also explicitly directed national Christians to adopt Western ways wholesale. The indigenous church movement, however, called missionaries to see themselves as temporary workers whose job was to do initial evangelism and then, as quickly as possible, to turn the churches over to indigenous, national leadership so the Christian churches could worship and minister in native languages, music, and culture.

This was a good and important step forward in our understanding of how Christian mission is conducted. But Coe, who served as principal of Tainan Theological College, argued that something more than just empowering national leaders was needed. He observed that the missionaries still gave national leaders forms of church ministry — ways of expressing and formulating the gospel and structuring churches — that were unalterably Western. National Christians were not being encouraged to think creatively about how to communicate the gospel message to their own culture.

The Theological Education Fund of the World Council of Churches was the first agency to use this new term and pursue it within its mission. The earliest work under this name, however, caused grave concerns. Following the existential theological thinking of Rudolf Bultmann, who was still highly influential in the 1970s, and Ernst Käsemann, theologians connected to the WCC insisted that the New Testament was itself largely adapted to a Hellenistic worldview that did not have abiding validity. Therefore, it was argued, Christians were free to determine in whatever way that fit their particular culture the “inner thrust of Christian [biblical] revelation” and discard or adapt the rest.12

This approach to contextualization assumes that both the text (Bible) and context (culture) are relative and equally authoritative. Through a dialectical process in which the two are brought into relationship to one another, we search for the particular form of Christian truth (with a small t) that fits a culture for the time being. Virtually any part of the Christian faith, then — the deity of Christ, the triunity of God, the gracious basis of the gospel — can be jettisoned or filled with radically new content, depending on the particular cultural setting. In the name of contextualizing to its culture, a church has the potential to make radical changes to historic Christian doctrine.

The irony is deep. The original call for contextualization intended to allow national churches to do theological reflection without having extrabiblical, Western thought forms imposed on them. However, much of what the ecumenical WCC Theological Education Fund propagated was nonetheless deeply shaped by Western thinking. Contextualization based on the idea of a nonauthoritative Bible stems from the views of modern Western theologians who themselves accepted the European Enlightenment’s skepticism about the miraculous and supernatural. The result as that, yet again, the Christian faith was overadapted to culture. This time it was not the older, more conservative Western culture of nineteenth-century missionaries, but the liberal culture of twentieth-century Western academia.

THE DANGER OF CONTEXTUALIZING

Because of this history, the word contextualization makes many people in conservative theological circles nervous, as indeed it should. As Craig Blomberg points out in an essay on contextualization, “Many who have embraced universalism began life as evangelicals… In the Spanish-speaking world, the same is true of many liberation theologians.”14 In all these cases, the values of a culture were given preference over the authority of Scripture.

IS CULTURE NEUTRAL?
The view of culture as something neutral can’t really account for the power of culture. James Hunter writes, “The problem with this perspective… is that it assumes a… self, one free and Independent from culture, unencumbered by moral commitments defined by virtue of one’s membership in the community. But culture is much more pervasive, powerful, and compelling than is allowed for in the liberal understanding of the self.”13

Although the word contextualization was not around at the time, this was the same issue J. Gresham Machen faced in the Presbyterian Church in the early twentieth century. In his book Christianity and Liberalism, Machen states that liberal Christianity was trying to solve a problem:
What is the relation between Christianity and modern culture; may Christianity be maintained in a scientific age?
It is this problem which modern liberalism attempts to solve. Admitting that scientific objections may arise against the particularities of the Christian religion — against the Christian doctrines of the person of Christ, and of redemption through His death and resurrection - the liberal theologian seeks to rescue certain of the general principles of religion, of which these particularities are thought to be mere temporary symbols, and these general principles he regards as constituting “the essence of Christianity.”

As a matter of fact… what the liberal theologian has retained after abandoning to the enemy one Christian doctrine after another is not Christianity at all, but a religion which is so entirely different from Christianity as to belong in a distinct category.15_

Machen, speaking from the early twentieth century, declared that his culture had become “naturalistic” - it had completely rejected any account of supernatural intervention by God. Everything, in this view, must have a natural, scientific explanation. The problem with the liberal Christianity of Machen’s day is that it granted this cultural belief, even though it clearly contradicted Scripture. Liberal Christianity adapted to the culture when it should have been confronting it. 16 In order (they thought) to make Christianity palatable to modern people, liberal Christian leaders redefined all doctrine in naturalistic terms. The reformulated version of Christianity looked (and still looks) like this:

Machen goes on to argue forcefully and persuasively that the effort to reconcile Christianity to a naturalistic philosophy results not in an adapted version of biblical faith but an entirely new religion, one that directly contradicts classic Christianity at nearly every important point. Perhaps the most telling and devastating example is given in Machen’s chapter titled “Salvation.” There he points out that if Jesus’ atonement is now just an example of how to live, and if being a Christian is not to be born again but to live like Jesus, we have replaced the Christian gospel of salvation by grace with a religion of salvation by good works. “Such teaching is just a sublimated form of legalism,” he concludes.17

The call to contextualize the gospel has been - and still often is - used as a cover for religious syncretism. This means not adapting the gospel to a particular culture, but rather surrendering the gospel entirely and morphing Christianity into a different religion by overadapting it to an alien worldview. But how do we judge when we have moved from legitimate contextualization into fatal syncretism? In a helpful essay, Natee Tanchanpongs states that evangelicals usually try to defend contextualization by arguing that it is simply adapting the less essential parts of Christianity and that syncretism occurs when “the critical and basic elements” of the gospel are lost.18 In this view, contextualization involves keeping the essentials while flexing on the nonessentials.

Tanchanpongs argues, however, that it is wrong to look at Scripture and imagine that some core, essential teachings are more important than other, more tangential ones. In fact, Harvie Conn argued that syncretism is most likely to occur when (in the name of culture) we forbid the whole of Scripture to speak. Every culture will find some parts of Scripture more attractive and other parts more offensive. It will be natural, then, for those in that culture to consider the inoffensive parts more “important” and “essential” than the offensive parts. This is exactly what the liberal Christianity of Machen’s day did in rejecting the “offensive” supernatural elements of the Bible. Syncretism is, in fact, a rejection of the full authority of the Bible, a picking and choosing among its various teachings to create a Christianity that does not confront or offend.19 Faithful contextualization, then, should adapt the communication and practice of all scriptural teaching to a culture (see below on the dangers of having a “canon within a canon” when contextualizing).

THE INEVITABILITY OF CONTEXTUALIZATION

Here is a beautiful paradox that is easy to miss: the fact that we must express universal truth in a particular cultural context does not mean that the truth itself is somehow lost or less universal. D. A. Carson writes, “[While] no truth which human beings may articulate can ever be articulated in a culture-transcending way… that does not mean that the truth thus articulated does not transcend culture.”20

It is important to seek to maintain the balance of this careful and important statement. First, this means there is no one, single way to express the Christian faith that is universal for everyone in all cultures. As soon as you express the gospel, you are unavoidably doing it in a way that is more understandable and accessible for people in some cultures and less so for others. On the other hand, while there is no culture-transcending way to express the truths of the gospel, there is nonetheless only one true gospel. The truths of the gospel are not the products of any culture, and they stand in judgment over all human cultures. If you forget the first truth-that there is no culture-less presentation of the gospel - you will think there is only one true way to communicate it, and you are on your way to a rigid, culturally bound conservatism. If you forget the second truth-that there is only one true gospel-you may fall into relativism, which will lead to a rudderless liberalism. Either way, you will be less faithful and less fruitful in ministry.

LIBERALISM AND NATURALISM
When liberal Christianity adopted naturalism, it assumed this was a permanent change in human thinking that had to be accepted. Those who clung to supernatural Christianity were, it was said, “on the wrong side of history.” But this was a category mistake. Early modernity was both naturalistic (“everything must have a natural, scientific explanation”) and individualistic (“there can be no higher authority than the reasoning, choosing self”). Late modernity or postmodernity, however, while maintaining belief in the autonomous self, has rejected naturalism’s confidence that science can eventually answer all-important questions and that technology can solve all significant problems. Liberal Christianity wedded itself to what is now seen as a fading, obsolete cultural view. Pentecostalism (the most supernaturalistic form of the faith) and other forms of orthodox Christianity have grown exponentially in the past hundred years, leaving liberal Christianity far behind.

What should we conclude from this? If there is no single, context-free way to express the gospel, then contextualization is inevitable. As soon as you choose a language to speak in and particular words to use within that language, the culture-laden nature of words comes into play. We often think that translating words from one language to another is simple - it’s just a matter of locating the synonym in the other language. But there are few true synonyms. The word God is translated into German as Gott- simple enough. But the cultural history of German speakers is such that the word Gott strikes German ears differently than the English word God strikes the ears of English speakers. It means something different to them. You may need to do more explanation if you are to give German speakers the same biblical concept of God that the word conveys to English speakers. Or maybe a different word will have to be used to have the same effect. As soon as you choose words, you are contextualizing, and you become more accessible to some people and less so to others. There is no universal presentation of the gospel for all people.21

However, even within the field of one language, numerous other factors unavoidably involve us in the work of contextualization. Let’s think back for a moment to the boring sermon. Sometimes the sermon we hear is boring because it went on for too long (or it was not long enough) to engage the listeners. One of the most culturally sensitive areas of human life is this area of time. What various people and cultures consider “late” and “too long” varies widely. In the United States, African-American and Hispanic Christians have services in which singing, prayer, and preaching go on at least 50 percent longer than the attention spans and comfort zones of most Anglo people. Anyone who leads worship services will, then, unavoidably be contextualizing toward some people and away from others.

A sermon can also lose listeners because of the types of metaphors and illustrations that are chosen. When Jesus tells those who preach the gospel to hostile people to avoid throwing pearls to pigs (Matt 7:6), he is uniting two fields of discourse. He is connecting preaching the gospel to the concrete world of raising pigs. By doing so, he is conveying meaning in a far more riveting and illuminating way than if he had simply said, “Don’t preach the gospel indefinitely to people who are hostile to it.” Jesus used an illustration, but every illustration by definition must use some concrete life experience. And so, as soon as we choose an illustration, we move toward some people (who share those life experiences) and become more remote and less accessible to others (who do not).

I once spoke to a mature British Christian believer from a working-class background. For a time, he attended a solidly evangelical church, but all the leaders and ministers were from the upper classes and the elite schools. The preaching referred to life situations and concepts that the speakers knew, which meant frequent illustrations drawn from the sports of cricket and rugby. This man shared, “People in my world know very little of these sports, and the constant references to them reminded me that I did not go to their schools or have their privileges. That was distracting, but not insurmountable, because we are all one in Christ now. But I realized that I could not bring to that church the working-class folks to whom I was ministering. The continual reminders that the leaders were from the upper crust would make it very hard for my friends to listen to the Word. You might say to them, ‘Why so touchy?’- but you can’t expect people to be sanctified before they are justified. You can’t expect people who are not yet believers to shed all their cultural sensitivities.” Eventually he went to another church.

Does this example mean that the church in this situation failed in some way? It is possible that the church could have consulted with this man and others to discuss ways that it could have been less culturally strange and remote to working-class people. But there is always a limit to this flexibility. The preachers must choose some particular illustrations and concepts that will inevitably be more meaningful to some cultural groups than others. We need to stretch as much as we can to be as inclusive as possible. But we must also be aware of our limits. We should not live in the illusion that we can share the gospel so as to make it all things to all people at once.

Another reason a sermon can be accurate but still have little impact is that the level of emotional expressiveness is not calibrated to the culture of the person listening. I once had a Hispanic member of my church tell me, a bit sheepishly, that when he brought other Hispanic people to hear me preach at Redeemer, he had to tell them, “He really does believe what he is saying with all his heart, in spite of what it looks like.” He had to do that because so many people from his culture felt that my level of emotional expression signaled indifference to my subject matter. “In our culture, if you really believe something and are committed to it, you express more feeling.” I was struck by the fact that if I adapted to a certain type of culture and expressed my emotions more fervently, it would look to people from another culture like a rant and be completely unpersuasive to them. There is no universal presentation. We cannot avoid contextualization.

We have talked about the manner and mode of preaching, but contextualization also has much to do with the content. A sermon could be unengaging to a person because, though expressing accurate biblical truth, it does not connect biblical teaching to the main objections and questions people in that culture have about faith. A few years ago, I participated in a consultation on evangelism for several churches in London. One of the dilemmas we discussed was the two very different groups of non-Christians in a particular area of the city. On one side were millions of Hindus and Muslims who believed that Christianity was not moralistic enough; on the other side were secular British people who thought that Christianity was far too rigidly moralistic. Of course, the gospel is neither legalism nor antinomianism, and so it is possible to preach a single sermon on the gospel that engages listeners from both groups, but if we are ministering in a neighborhood or area dominated by one of these groups, we must preach each passage with the particular objections of that people group firmly in mind. No one single gospel presentation will be equally engaging and compelling to both sides.

GARDENS OR FIELDS?
Craig Blomberg points out that in Matthew’s parable of the mustard seed, the sower sows his seed in a “field” (agros, Matt 13:31), while in Luke the sowing is in a “garden” (kepos, Luke 13:19). Jews never grew mustard plants in gardens, but always out on farms, while Greeks in the Mediterranean basin did the opposite. It appears that each gospel writer was changing the word that Jesus used in Mark—the word for “earth” or “ground” (ge, Mark 4:31)—for the sake of his hearers. There is a technical contradiction between the Matthean and Lukan terms, states Blomberg, “but not a material one. Luke changes the wording precisely so that his audience is not distracted from… the lesson by puzzling over an….. improbable practice.” The result is that Luke’s audience “receives his teaching with the same impact as the original audience.”22

Finally, as we will see below, contextualization doesn’t simply include language and vocabulary, emotional expressiveness and illustrations. It goes even deeper. Contextualization affects the way we reason because people in one culture find one way of appealing persuasive, while those of another may not. Some people are more logical; some are more intuitive. When we choose a particular way to persuade and argue, we will unavoidably be adapting more to some kinds of people than to others.

CONTEXTUALIZATION IN LEADERSHIP
I used a boring sermon as my case study for contextualization (or a lack of it), and so all my examples have been about verbal communication of the gospel. But culture has a pervasive impact on every aspect of how a Christian community is ordered - how people relate to each other, how leadership is exercised, how pastoral oversight and instruction is done. For example, some years ago, a Korean member of my staff watched our pastoral staff make a decision. He noticed that I as senior pastor would not betray my view at first but would try to get everyone, even the youngest and newest, to offer their opinion; then I would affirm them and try to incorporate their input into our final decision. He pointed out that in a first-generation Korean church, the senior pastor would give his full view first and then others would comment in order of age and seniority. Junior members of the pastoral staff only spoke after the decision was already a fait accompli. As I listened to him, I realized there was no culture-free way for the pastors of my church to make a decision. We were unavoidably going to be very contextualized to one culture.

As soon as we seek to communicate, we will automatically be making all sorts of cultural moves.

THE DANGER OF NOT CONTEXTUALIZING (OR OF THINKING YOU AREN’T)

All gospel ministry and communication are already heavily adapted to a particular culture. So it is important to do contextualization consciously. If we never deliberately think through ways to rightly contextualize gospel ministry to a new culture, we will unconsciously be deeply contextualized to some other culture. Our gospel ministry will be both overadapted to our own culture and underadapted to new cultures at once, which ultimately leads to a distortion of the Christian message.23

The subject of contextualization is particularly hard to grasp for members of socially dominant groups. Because ethnic minorities must live in two cultures — - the dominant culture and their own subculture they frequently become aware of how deeply culture affects the way we perceive things. In the movie Gran Torino, an older blue-collar American named Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood) lives alongside an Asian family in a deteriorating Detroit neighborhood. He finds it impossible to understand the cultural forms of the Hmongs, just as the elderly Hmongs (who cannot speak English and live completely within their ethnic enclave) find Walt strange and inexplicable. But the teenage Hmong girl, Sue, is bicultural — she lives in both worlds at once. So she understands and appreciates both Walt and her own parents and grandparents. As a result, she is able to communicate persuasively to both about the other. Isn’t this the very thing we are doing whenever we present the truth of the gospel to a culture that has alienated itself from it?

In the United States, Anglo-Americans’ public and private lives are lived in the same culture. As a result, they are often culturally clueless. They relate to their own culture in the same way a fish that, when asked about water, said, “What’s water?” If you have never been out of water, you don’t know you are in it. Anglo Christians sometimes find talk of contextualization troubling. They don’t see any part of how they express or live the gospel to be “Anglo” - it is just the way things are. They feel that any change in how they preach, worship, or minister is somehow a compromise of the gospel. In this they may be doing what Jesus warns against-elevating the “traditions of men” to the same level as biblical truth (Mark 7:8). This happens when one’s cultural approach to time or emotional expressiveness or way to communicate becomes enshrined as the Christian way to act and live. Bruce Nicholls writes the following:
A contemporary example of cultural syncretism is the unconscious identification of biblical Christianity with “the American way of life.” This form of syncretism is often found in both Western and Third World, middle-class, suburban, conservative, evangelical congregations who seem unaware that their lifestyle has more affinity to the consumer principles of capitalistic society than to the realities of the New Testament, and whose enthusiasm for evangelism and overseas missions is used to justify [lives of materialism and complacency].24

Lack of cultural awareness leads to distorted Christian living and ministry. Believers who live in individualistic cultures such as the United States are blind to the importance of being in deep community and placing themselves under spiritual accountability and discipline. This is why many church hoppers attend a variety of churches and don’t join or fully enter any of them. American Christians see church membership as optional. They take a nonbiblical feature of American culture and bring it into their Christian life. On the other hand, Christians in more authoritarian and patriarchal cultures often are blind to what the Bible says about freedom of conscience and the grace-related aspects of Christianity. Instead, their leaders stress duty and are heavy-handed rather than eager to follow Jesus’ words that “if anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all” (Mark 9:35).

An inability to see one’s own enculturation has other results. One of the most basic mistakes ministers make is to regurgitate the methods and programs that have personally influenced them. After experiencing the impact of a ministry in one part of the world, they take up the programs and methods of that ministry and reproduce them elsewhere virtually unchanged. If they have been moved by a ministry that has forty-five-minute verse-by-verse expository sermons, a particular kind of singing, or a specific order and length to the services, they reproduce it down to the smallest detail. Without realizing it, they become method driven and program driven rather than theologically driven. They are contextualizing their ministry expression to themselves, not to the people they want to reach.

I have been moved to see how churches and ministries around the world have looked at what we do at Redeemer Presbyterian Church and how they have expressed their appreciation and have sought to learn from this ministry. But I have been disappointed to visit some congregations that have imitated our programs-even our bulletins - and haven’t grasped the underlying theological principles that animate us. In other words, they haven’t done the hard work of contextualization, reflecting on their own cultural situation and perspective to seek to better communicate the gospel to their own context. They have also failed to spend time reflecting on what they see in Redeemer and how we have adapted our ministry to an urban U.S. culture. Everyone contextualizes - but few think much about how they are doing it. We should not only contextualize but also think about how we do it. We must make our contextualization processes visible, and then intentional, to ourselves and to others.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION AND REFLECTION

  1. This chapter defines contextualization as “giving people the Bible’s answers, which they may not at all want to hear, to questions about life that people in their particular time and place are asking, in language and forms they can comprehend, and through appeals and arguments with force they can feel, even if they reject them.” Unpack the four parts of this definition. Which of these elements of contextualization do you tend to do best? Which do you tend to skip or overlook?
  2. Evangelicals often try to defend contextualization by arguing that it is about adapting the less essential parts of Christianity and that syncretism and compromise occur when “the critical and basic elements” of the gospel are lost. In this view, contextualization involves keeping the essentials while flexing on the nonessentials. What is the danger of this approach, according to this chapter?
  3. Keller writes, “There is no universal presentation of the gospel for all people.” What do you think is meant by this statement? Do you agree or disagree?
  4. D. A. Carson is quoted as stating that “no truth which human beings may articulate can ever be articulated in a culture-transcending way.” What distinctive values or biases have you learned through your own cultural formation (family, hometown, nation, race, church, etc.) that affect your communication of truth? Which biblical themes are you most tempted to edit out? How did you become aware of these biases?
  5. Keller writes, “One of the most basic mistakes ministers make is to regurgitate the methods and programs that have personally influenced them. After experiencing the impact of a ministry in one part of the world, they take up the programs and methods of that ministry and reproduce them elsewhere virtually unchanged… They are contextualizing their ministry expression to themselves, not to the people they want to reach.” How have you seen this mistake made in ministry? What do you need to do to begin intentionally contextualizing?