It never ceases to amaze me: the never-ending push to contextualize the gospel to another market niche. Now we have:
The “guy-church,” the church for the real men with no flowers or pastel colors and rustic settings.
We’ve already had
“The Harley-church” (motor-cycle church)
“The Great Sex” church.
The Andy Griffith church (I confess this hit every urge in my body).
The “Church for a better you” (no link necessary) for people who view God as their personal therapist.
The “We’ll give you purpose” (no link necessary) church.
There of course are already “Art churches,” drive-in churches, “gay and lesbian churches,”
My bet? We soon will have:
The “green church” a church for eco-sensitive people. This church promises to show you how God can improve your front lawn.
The “people-with pets church.” – a church to help people in their relationships with their household pets, because after all God loves animals too.
“Ferragamo churches” for people who like shoes, really like shoes.
Contextualization extracts the gospel message (like a concept), reduces it to a narrow point of contact and seeks to attract people via this appeal to this contact. Contextualization by its very nature is attractional in the Frost/Hirsch sense. I would suggest then that contextualization makes it almost impossible for the church to be transformational.
Incarnation on the other hand seeks to incarnate the gospel over long periods of time culturally within a context. It enters into a culture as a communal presence whereby it is able to discern its surrounding contact points. It will accept some things in the surrounding culture and bring them into captivity for the gospel. It will flat out reject others. In the process it becomes a display of a redeemed form of that culture.
Contextualization is possible only within a modern milieu: the milieu that stresses the gospel as a translatable trans cultural (as opposed to intra cultural) concept. Contextualization like this makes the church susceptible to the territorialization of the market, where everything becomes splintered into market niches inevitably separating us from one another. The church thereby becomes bi-furcated ever repeating the modern move to identify and separate. We break up and divide: contemporary churches from traditional churches, black churches from white churches, Republican churches from Democrat. Motorcycle culture churches from suburban churches who drive sedans. “Real men” churches from woman churches from sensitive guy churches. The church becomes another form of “identity politics.”
Evangelicals, uncritical of their modernist bias, are addicted to contextualization.
Comments? Questions? Push backs?
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Contextualization appears to focus on what separates us, where incarnation focuses on what brings us together, that we are humans in need of restoration.
Contextualization in a narrow sense is the same as “market-driven” or “niche” marketing. In addition, who defines real men? Is it a vision of God who is reflected in maleness and femaleness? OR is it some “macho”, fundamentalist idea of maleness based upon a “John Wayne” paradigm that floats around much of contemporary Christianity? This is a bigger issue than many people think! Good work David!
Robin
It your thoughts. I believe it has much to do with our starting points. A contextualized church begins with culture and builds a gospel to fit that culture. An incarnational church begins with the Gospel and allows culture to breath in its life giving aromas. The church cannot be a city set apart waiting for people to come take part in their niche, but instead has to go into the culture to announce the Kingdom. This is a messy practice though; it is not for the faint at heart.
What this reveals is that evangelicalism has been joined at the hip with consumerism and market ideologies for a while.
I would argue that you cannot use this unless you want to radically transform it. If you do not want to transform the movement of power and capital, you will become another organization that supports the prevailing market ethos – and that will happen like a frog boiling in water. I suspect that this is what has happened with evangelicalism.
More evidence? Walk into any Christian book store.
This is a great thought. I’m going to read over this again and process it, but I think I get it.
The one pushback that I would potentially make, and again I want to think through it more and it may not even be an issue, would revolve around a ministry like that of Paul – an itinerant evangelist. How does this look in light of Mars Hill?
Len Sweet has been my DMin prof for 2 years and he talked to us about the MRI church: Missional, Relational, and Incarnational. I’ve been thinking through this and have adapted it to a MIROR Church: Missional, Incarnational, Relational, Organic, and Reproducing, and that is an expression of the Trinity.
I think the aspect of Organic and Incarnational are intertwined: Jesus was incarnated in an organic form. The embodiment of God took the form of those he came to, ie he wasn’t a blond, blue-eyed anglo. And to validate your point, Jesus incarnated for 30 years before starting ministry. His short earthly ministry was organic because of his lengthy “incarnating” period.
I think the other thing this does is change how we view the need for the professional pastor, particularly in a planting environment. The length of time it takes to get a self-supporting, incarnational/organic church goes beyond what most are willing commit to time-wise. This necessitates a greater emphasis on spiritual formation so that indigenous, volunteer-led ministry can occur.
have you read Bevans book on contextualisation – offers 5 models, and notes that the evangelical translatability (and the one you use to define contextualisation) is only one among others?
that book helped me realise that my beef with contextualisation was simply due to my limited evangelical lens and that there are lots richer contextual seas to dip into,
steve taylor
http://www.emergentkiwi.org.nz
The “green church” a church for eco-sensitive people. This church promises to show you how God can improve your front lawn.
Actually, my “green church” would advise you to replace your lawn with a wildflower meadow.
But everything else you right rings true to me.
I presume that you are working out of a very specific definition of contextualization here. When you cite the examples you do (which make uncritical contextualization the primary or exclusive focus) I am in full agreement with you.
However, with Incarnation, I suspect that there are aspects of contextualization still at work, no? After all, the work of translation of Scripture is, on some level, contextualizing. What I hear you criticizing is closer to syncretism, but perhaps not.
I look forward to hear your response. Thanks David. Great post, as always!
Peace,
Jamie
A very thought-provoking article from where I stand. I personally had to wrestle with what I “heard” and what you were actually saying.
So in conclusion, when we as the church use contextualization as our goal or stopping point we got it all bass-ackwards. I confess I value a place that “strikes a chord” with some group of people, but it’s too easy to get hung up on it–and worry about what works and what doesnt.
So… Ra! Ra! good post, and it made me think things through a lot.
Now my struggles came from more of semantics. The way you defined contextualization is more of an actual, applied way of what is going on in North America. And in my mind was a more generic, theoretical definition that could be used appropriately anywhere in the world. And when I went to the actual web site of the “guy church” (BTW a search of the site for ‘guy’ came up empty), I actually liked what they were trying to do even though I assumed things were a little more seeker-sensitive/generic than they described. They even had one paragraph where they used words like transform, community, and “His plan”.
So like Bill Hybels, I believe that non-Gospel barriers of religion can be left out of the Gospel, leaving only authentic Gospel barriers. And like D. Fitch I beleive we cant get stuck in niche-market mentality while avoiding difficult change.
Steve … thanks for the tip on Stephen Bevans. I haven’t looked at it in a long while. But he’s got two things going for him as far as I’m concened, he’s a missionary (to Phillipines) and a Catholic, here in Chicago. Nonethless,I suspect him of some Neibuhrianism which I can no longer be comfortable with (after Hauerwas) with at this juncture. You know, can culture be a monolithic category? can theologians do theology contextual -ly as a method. Is incarnational a method or a way of being in the world? For this subject, we need to grab a coffee, I need to learn more from and about Bevans.
Jamie…hope you’re doing well… I think you’re right. My grief is with the evangelical way of talking contextualization very much inhabited by modern habits which always end up giving up the shift. The very last thing we need to do for “real men” is have a church geared towards that proclivity. For we are a community of gifts and full diversity (not just ethnic). It is together we become the people of God in concrete form. This evangelical form of contextualzaition formed by the habit of the Cartesian assumptions ,I find troubling, for it makes being the church impossible.
Thanks to everyone for the comments, they’ve been great, helpful .. as I go of to Azusa this coming week to teach this stuff
Great post David. I remember Richard Beaton in one of my Fuller classes on the exegesis of the gospel of Matthew saying, “the Scriptures are already contextualized.” We have to enter their world to be incarnate it in the 21st century world.
By the way…will you be at Azusa Pacific this week? I am near there and an alum
Howdy from Texas Fitch! To illustrate: I’m in a dry county because of the 10,000+ member Southern Baptist Church that runs town. So, I’ve seen a proliferation of cowboy churches that evangelize at rodeos and have their own roping events. Though they have Christian fellowship and worship, the desire to live the cowboy life comes before the call to live the Christian life. Therefore, the gospel loses its ability to transform men (or their women) at the points where it differs from cowboy culture. And don’t even get me started on that mega-church!
Rev. Nik Gabcik
thanks David. if you want to read more, try Robert Schreiter, New Catholicity. He was into contextualisation in the 70′s and so the New Catholicity is his wrestling with culture in more postmodern times.
Also Kathryn Tanner’s, Theories of Culture I found very helpful in terms of thinking about culture as not monolithic.
I did my PHD (2004) studies on whether an emerging church was a postmodern contextualisation of faith. It was “relevantised” in Out of Bounds Church? (Zondervan 2005), in which I use the image of a DJ on a dance floor, in order to sketch a potentially Incarnational approach to postmodernity: reflecting on sampling (of culture, of church history, of Biblical text), senstivity to the original context around samples, reciprocal relationship with the community.
So your post is fascinating. I agree with your critique of evangelical contextualisation, but don’t think it’s fair that you then disparage all of contextualisation, because you are using definitions differently than the wider missiological discipline.
enjoy the class – they are always great places to road test ideas.
steve
http://www.emergentkiwi.org.nz
PS if cultures are not monolithic (as you suggest and I agree), then surely so can authors be
ie there might be gold in Bevans book, but dross in another book. I’ve met him and he’s a wonderfully humanly Christlike man.
I have to say that I am also having problems with your problem with contextualization. As one commenter pointed out, even the translation is contextualized. How your church does communion is contextualized. What time you meet is contextualized. I’m betting the church you attend is not the ideal church that all should be moving towards – it is hopefully what your culture(s) need in your context.
Maybe what we should be talking about are values that can be translated, such as
- faith expressed in love
- mercy
- community
Thanks, David. I couldn’t agree more, especially about the specific example of “real men”. Many, MANY have been tragically hurt by such well-intentioned, but misguided capitulation to consumerism.
Peace,
Jamie
I want to go to the Fruit Loops Church, for people who realy, I mean really, like Fruit Loops. It is sponsored by Kelloggs, so there is no tithing required. I’ve heard that the fruits of the Spirit loop back around from helping others to helping us folks at the Fruit Loops church who helped others in the first place. It sounds to me just like the Acts two church. Full of charity, with no one in need. Oh and lots of colorful personalities, like Peter and Paul.
Hey Dave, just a little push back. I think you’re being too hard on “contextualization” and perhaps defining it too narrowly and specifically. “Contextualization” as I first encountered it in the context of missiology was not at all about niche marketing as you seem to have defined it. Rather it was more similar to your idea of “incarnation”. Also, it was more focused on the question of whether people in Africa, Asia, Latin America, etc. were able and allowed to practice Christianity in a way that made sense within their indigenous culture or whether they had to adopt Western practices and forms of Christianity. In other words, it was more of a post-colonial, anti-imperial idea than a consumeristic, market-driven idea. Quite frankly, what you describe as “contextualization” doesn’t seem at all similar to how I came to understand the word in my missiology classes and my reading of people like Newbign, Bosch, etc.
Shalom,
-Mike
Mike … I think you might be getting at what I said in the earlier comment. There’s a kind of contextualization that is “contextualization gone awry” which undercuts the incarnational process. Thanks for the push back.
DF
I find the “guy church” perplexing, since I’ve spent the majority of my life sitting through millions of sermons filled with “sports analogies” given by male ministers. It’s ironic that most evangelical churches do not permit women to be ordained, and yet the people interviewed in the article feel that churches are too “feminine.” hmmmm.
Am I missing something? Didn’t Paul say he becomes all things to all men so that he may win some?
As a biker in a bikers church, I know that we get folk coming that would not darken the door of any other ‘church’.
However, we are not exclusively for bikers – and I don’t know of any of what you call contextual churches that are exclusive to a certain group.
We started this because of the fact that as bikers we were looked down upon whenever we went to normal (abnormal!) churches. Thus starting a bikers place got the people we were ourselves, bikers, and others have also joined who have nothing to do with biking.
Are you not over analysing things a bit too much, and in the process, missing the wood for the trees?
Pops
pops…
I know … this sounds overdone…and the answer should be simple… but what did Paul mean by his phrase? I think it makes sense for Christians to inhabit and transform cultures ..even motorcycle cultures … the beef here on this post ….is the attempt to niche market the church making church comfortable.. even conform-able to the habits, lifestyle, proclvities of every niche lifestyle encalve. This divides the body … and we lose there wherewithal to be trasnformative in culture. And I consider this no longer incarnational … I consider it synchretistic and dilutive of the gospel.
Hi David
Some frigging big words that I need to go use a dictionary to see what they mean – did you not get the “I am a Biker” bit
Okay, but in order to influence a culture, one must get integrity in that culture to be heard?
My take is that without that integrity/trust, you are getting nowhere.
However, one can not become so like that culture that no one can tell the difference between’you’ and ‘them’.
Also, once in that culture and having an influence, there must be a drive to get them to reach out to other cultures and keep the momentum going and thus utimately, bring all ‘cultures’ together as one.
And here I thnk we have managed to achieve that in that we not only have Bikers coming, but also business owners, ex prostitutes, drunks, druggies, murderers, house wifes etc and they all mix well with each other as they have a common denominator, Jesus. And they are all working together to reach others.
?
Pops