contextualization

Missional: Is it a good word?

Nick Bogardus — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 15:21:35 -0700

Reflection & Influence

Christians love catch-phrases and keywords. Making fun of or lamenting "Christianese" or the Christian subculture is a relatively easy and lazy thing to do. The more fruitful approach - the one that would hopefully build up the church rather than armchair quarterback it - is to lovingly critique it.

How we use language is something that really interests me. It's something that's important to see and think about because, while I'm not a linguist, I can see that language carries with it two big factors. First, language is a reflection of what we think, believe, and value. Secondly, language influences what we think, believe, and value.

Blurred Definitions

Which brings me to the word I want to bring up in this blog article: missional. "Being missional" or "to be missional" has been a descriptive or imperative catch phrase for about the last five years, particularly among younger Emerging churches. It's a word that I've always felt a little uncomfortable with because of it's ambiguity (but that's another article).

A recent Q&A video from John Piper helped me see more clearly the restlessness I felt about the word. In this clip he makes a very good distinction between "evangelism" and "missions".

Cause & Effect?

I'm left with a couple questions:

1) Do churches and Christians use the word "missional" because they are afraid of the word "evangelism"?

2) Though it claims to do otherwise, will this North American emphasis on being "missional" negatively effect global missions and the global Church by affirming (instead of challenging) our culture's narcissism and producing culturally insular Christians?

Fiddling While The Culture Is Burning

Nick Bogardus — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 08:06:30 -0800

Many in the new seeker-sensitive experiment in “doing church” have seen only the surface habits of this postmodern world and have not really understood its Eros spirituality. Theirs is an experiment in tactics in which innumerable questions have been asked about the ways the Church can become successful in this culture and they are all prefaced by the word how. How do we get on the wavelength of Generation Xers? How do we do worship so that the transition from home to church, from mall to church, and from unbelief into a context of belief, is seamless and even unnoticed? How do we speak about Christian faith to those who only want techniques for survival in life? How can we be motivational for those who need a lift without burdening them? How can we say what we want to say in church when the audience will give us only a small slice of their attention, especially if we are not amusing? And what is emerging, as the evangelical Church continues to empty itself of theology, is that it now find that it is tapping, wittingly or not, into this broad cultural yearning for spirituality, and capitalizing on that disposition’s inclination not to be religious. Evangelical spirituality without theology, that even sometimes despises theology, parallels almost exactly the broader cultural spirituality that is without religion. Evangelical faith without theology, without the structure and discipline of truth, is not Agape faith but it is much close to Eros spirituality.

This, however, is not understood. Church talks about “reaching” the culture turns, almost inevitably, into a discussion about tactics and methodology, not about worldviews. It is only about tactics and not about strategy. It is about seduction and not about truth, about success and not about confrontation. However, without strategy, the tactics inevitably fail; without truth, all of the arts of seduction which the churches are practicing sooner or later are seen to be the empty charade that they are; and because the emerging worldview is not being engaged, the Church has little it can really say. Indeed, one has to ask how much it actually wants to say. Biblical truth contradicts this cultural spirituality, and that contradiction is hard to bear. Biblical truth displaces it, refuses to allow it its operating assumptions, declares to it its bankruptcy. Here, indeed, is an anti-god, dressed up in the garb of authenticity, but whose world is a world of fiction. Is the evangelical Church faithful enough to explode the worldview of this new spiritual search? Is it brave enough to contradict what has wide cultural approval? The verdict may not finally be in but it seems quite apparent that while the culture is burning, the evangelical Church is fiddling precisely because it has decided it must be so like the culture to be successful.

[David F. Wells, Above all Earthly Powers: Christ in a Postmodern World (Eerdmans, Grand Rapid, MI, USA, 2005), 162-163. Emphases mine.]

Culture & Natures

Nick Bogardus — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 05:44:15 -0800

I was reading the interestingly-titled and well-written "Why Are There Never Enough Parking Spaces at the Prostate Clinic" by Carl Trueman at Reformation 21 and a sentence in his last paragraph had an important conviction/reminder for me as a Christian who somewhat of a cultural commentator.

Trueman says, "Alternatively, I could try to move out of my own little world, start thinking less in cultural and more in biblical terms. I could become less obsessed with particularities and more concerned with universals. I could engage less with the accidents of culture and more with the substance of nature." [emphasis mine]

That is something I wanted to bring up, especially among all of the cultural conversation on this site. We can get so busy scanning our culture like iTunes' "cover view" feature or flippantly analyzing every cultural flash in the pan and completely miss the point as Christians. As Christians our lives are lived in view of eternity, in view of the one and only God who creates and sustains and who has revealed Himself to us in the Bible and continues to do so every day. These facts carry with it some fundamental truths that we, in all of our contextualizing bluster, can skim right over: God has a nature and we have a nature. That is exactly where the greatest Christian missiologist/apologist/evangelist started his Gospel presentation in the last half of the first chapter of Romans.

As we look at our culture, are our spirits provoked (ESV), distressed (NIV), or troubled (HCSB) as Paul's was (Acts 17:16) when we look at the idols that are created, bred, and worshipped all around us? When we offer insights or diagnosis, are they done so through the lens that Paul uses in Acts 17 and Romans 1 where he begins his analysis with a view of who God is and how we've looked to other gods, other saviors? I think that having that Biblical view of the world is our true north and keeps us looking to, thinking in light of, and living faithfully in the eternal framework we believe that we are in. More so, it keeps us directing the gaze of those who hear us upwards and outwards, instead of downwards and within as our Western culture demands.

If we miss that, we're just contributing to the noise. If we miss that, we won't understand our need for Jesus - and therefore others won't either - and our cultural analysis will be a dire misdiagnosis. If we miss that, all of our talk of culture and contextualization is about as consequential as Wayne's World.