The Challenge of Gospel Contextualization
Missionary to India Lesslie Newbigin stated that contextualization has been discussed among those involved in foreign missions for years as a necessary means to proclaiming the Gospel into the language and culture in a way to “make sense” to those whom the Gospel is being addressed. Newbigin’s point is that we now face the same challenge of contextualization in our post-Christian Western world—our neighbors, friends, co-workers, and even family. The irony is that our older churches that applauded the non-compromised contextualization of the Gospel by the foreign missionaries that they sent with prayers and money are the same churches that now struggle with that missionary approach in our Western culture with peoples from diverse ethnicities, languages, religions, socio-economic backgrounds, and ages.
We redemptively engage peoples and cultures by sharing, showing, and embodying Christ in our context. This includes evangelism, cultural engagement, counseling, empathy, and celebration. It’s bringing the renewing power of the whole Gospel into the whole city through the whole church. It is not realigning our Bible to the culture, but by God’s grace, realigning the culture to the Bible.
Mission is a characteristic of God.
Mission is a characteristic of God. He’s a sending God. He sends His Son and sends His Spirit to renew the world. The Son sends His believers by the authority of God as He was sent. So mission doesn’t start and end with us. It starts and ends with God.
“I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth.” (John 17:14-19)
5. Boldly and intentionally promotes the Gospel through making disciples and church planting globally through collaborative expressions of mercy and generosity.
A missional church is not simply focused on the growth of neither the single local church nor its continued physical presence in the community. Its goal is to make disciples of all nations (Matt. 28:18-20). When a church focuses on its own promotion, it has a tendency to use disciples to build a church, resulting in resentment. Conversely, a church that focuses on making disciples will use the corporate church to promote the Gospel to as many people as possible—both local and global, or what Dr. Bob Roberts refers to as glocal transformation. A missional church sees church planting as the outworking of mission in a community. Its mission work is the establishing of churches glocally. When our mission mindset is to promote the building of churches in multiple contexts, we are more prone to collaborative work with other churches and with a heart of generosity for the advancement of the Gospel in all nations.
6. A missional church is dependent upon the Holy Spirit to empower and lead believers as agents for evangelizing and making disciples. (Acts 1:8; Luke 4:1, 14, 18)
The life of Jesus was empowered, led, and directed by the Holy Spirit. To be dependant upon the Holy Spirit means to live like Jesus as opposed to some strange mystical experience. Jesus gave the Great Commission, as we commonly know it, and He included the prerequisite of Spirit-empowerment to accomplish it. In Luke’s Gospel, for example, Jesus explains the Gospel to His disciples and tells them that as witnesses of His resurrection, they are to proclaim it to others. But He told them to stay in the city until they were clothed with power from on high (Luke 24:49). Jesus promised that He would empower the church through His Holy Spirit as they make disciples (cf. Acts 1:8). “The promise of God’s presence often accompanied His call to service in the Old Testament (e.g. Ex. 3:12; Josh. 1:5); it is not so much a cozy reassurance as a necessary equipment for mission.”