David Bosch & Churches of Christ #4: Contextualization
Here's a summary of what David Bosch wrote about the 4th component of a Western missiology:
4. Contextualization. We know that the gospel must be contextually relevant in the 3rd world. But contextualization for the Western world? Aren't most Western societies already based on Christian principles? Bosch states (and I agree) that too many people "still believe that the gospel has already been indigenized and contextualized in the West." Yet the West has mostly turned its back on the way of Jesus. Was Christianity never deeply embedded into our culture? Or did the gospel contextualize so much that it lost its distinctive character? Bosch doesn't know what Western contextualization will look like, and no one else honestly seems to know yet either. But we need to begin to re-contextualize in earnest.
When I left graduate school for the European mission field in 1994, I was prepared to contextualize not only my message but also my view of church. In other words, I was open to the possibility that the church in Prague might look substantially different from Churches of Christ in the U.S. I had my own biases and was not nearly as flexible as I might be today, but I nevertheless assumed that we would need to contextualize both message and church.
The idealism of my hopes crashed on the rocky shores of disagreements among my co-workers. Some suspected, perhaps rightly, that I had my own agenda as to church structures. Some co-workers seemed to exhibit plenty of their own bias, however. Their actions seemed to suggest that church structures need not change from culture to culture. They were willing to permit only a surface repackaging of parts of the "gospel message" -- nothing more substantial was permissible. I quickly learned that competing visions of church within a mission team create gridlock and paralysis.
The same problems plague our North American context. Some segments of the North American church are unwilling to contextualize ecclesiological (church) forms. They believe that their current forms of "doing church" need not change to reach the world. Instead, they suggest that evangelism is only a matter of a personal relationship with God. They are unwilling to admit that church structures can be out of touch with cultural realities.
This hard-line position leads to incompatibility with those who are willing to reexamine the dispositions, commitments and behaviors of faith communities. I am personally grateful to be a faith community that is willing to have these conversations instead of ending up in a church that would have been unwilling to even entertain the possibility of ecclesiological reform.
But even in an open-minded church, we experience a disconnect between what we do as a church and how the world thinks and acts. How can we possibly connect to a world suspicious of church if our forms and practices reinforce their stereotypes? Early Christians broke through these barriers in radical ways. Yes, they still held true to their basic beliefs.
How might we contextualize our faith for our contemporary world? What are the major needs of our world that are left unaddressed by church teachings and practices? This is direction that Bosch and many others point us in. The trouble is that we are still searching for the answer to these questions. But we must willingly search in the belief that God will provide.
4. Contextualization. We know that the gospel must be contextually relevant in the 3rd world. But contextualization for the Western world? Aren't most Western societies already based on Christian principles? Bosch states (and I agree) that too many people "still believe that the gospel has already been indigenized and contextualized in the West." Yet the West has mostly turned its back on the way of Jesus. Was Christianity never deeply embedded into our culture? Or did the gospel contextualize so much that it lost its distinctive character? Bosch doesn't know what Western contextualization will look like, and no one else honestly seems to know yet either. But we need to begin to re-contextualize in earnest.
When I left graduate school for the European mission field in 1994, I was prepared to contextualize not only my message but also my view of church. In other words, I was open to the possibility that the church in Prague might look substantially different from Churches of Christ in the U.S. I had my own biases and was not nearly as flexible as I might be today, but I nevertheless assumed that we would need to contextualize both message and church.
The idealism of my hopes crashed on the rocky shores of disagreements among my co-workers. Some suspected, perhaps rightly, that I had my own agenda as to church structures. Some co-workers seemed to exhibit plenty of their own bias, however. Their actions seemed to suggest that church structures need not change from culture to culture. They were willing to permit only a surface repackaging of parts of the "gospel message" -- nothing more substantial was permissible. I quickly learned that competing visions of church within a mission team create gridlock and paralysis.
The same problems plague our North American context. Some segments of the North American church are unwilling to contextualize ecclesiological (church) forms. They believe that their current forms of "doing church" need not change to reach the world. Instead, they suggest that evangelism is only a matter of a personal relationship with God. They are unwilling to admit that church structures can be out of touch with cultural realities.
This hard-line position leads to incompatibility with those who are willing to reexamine the dispositions, commitments and behaviors of faith communities. I am personally grateful to be a faith community that is willing to have these conversations instead of ending up in a church that would have been unwilling to even entertain the possibility of ecclesiological reform.
But even in an open-minded church, we experience a disconnect between what we do as a church and how the world thinks and acts. How can we possibly connect to a world suspicious of church if our forms and practices reinforce their stereotypes? Early Christians broke through these barriers in radical ways. Yes, they still held true to their basic beliefs.
How might we contextualize our faith for our contemporary world? What are the major needs of our world that are left unaddressed by church teachings and practices? This is direction that Bosch and many others point us in. The trouble is that we are still searching for the answer to these questions. But we must willingly search in the belief that God will provide.
Comments