Seeing the Forest… from the trees

Here is an interesting article on Standing firm in the face of doctrinal questions.

I have been a fan (and a friend) of Lionel’ posts for a while, here is an interesting series he is beginning on ‘the community gospel’.

Otherwise,  on a personal note posts have been sparse as I have been on Holidays in Canberra and also catching up in Sydney for a week. In the next few weeks I am moving house so I am not sure how much I will be able to do.

Brett

I don’t particularly agree with some of the things done by the Episcopal Church in North America, and I am no great fan Brian McLaren, but here is something worth pondering. Here is Brian McLaren’s sermon at the recent Episcopal convention, what is worth considering is how he is using the both current problems and issues to point the convention to the Bible and Jesus Christ and in that to call them to evangelise.

If you consider both the audience and the heart of his message it is a great example of contextualisation. He is really cutting through (or ignoring) alot of the issues and showing a way forward.

A short drive from me is a church that advertises itself with the slogan ‘Church has changed!’ I find this worrying, partly because I think that it targets disgruntled Christians more than anyone else, it seems to communicate ‘this church is better than yours.’ It may be aiming at those leaving churches rather than looking to present the good news of Jesus to all the people they are in touch with.

Christianity Today has posted this interesting article; The great Evangelical Anxiety’ by Mark Galli. The issue I think behind this is how Christians are to live in western society which is becoming more and more pluralist. Do we seek to be more contextually relevant or do we seek to find the next spiritual program that will improve things? While neither of things things may be necessarily wrong they do seem to miss the core of the issue. It is easy to forget that the heart of the Christian message is not exercises, methods or programs but the good news of Jesus.

While Mark Galli may not give many answers, or even practical solutions he does point to the need to remember that the heart of the Christian message is nothing more than the amazing news of what Jesus has done.

It is always interesting to see how far people will go to make God contextually appropriate. Here we have a feminist Jesus. I don’t think I need to comment any further. Mary Kassian does well enough. Check it out:

Re-imaging God in the Shack 

Many take the incarnation as the paradigm for mission, it seems to me that this is taking things too far and it creates a number of problems. The incarnation is an example for us but can only be applied to us by analogy. The problem with an analogy is that people can use the term to refer to a whole range of different things, particularly with something as huge as the incarnation. ‘Incarnational’ can have significantly different meanings for different people.

Chris Green’s article in The Word became flesh: Evangelicals and the Incarnation comes out strongly against the incarnation’s use as a paradigm for mission, and he does have some good reasons; (This is my summary)

• We are not the same as Jesus. We are sinful, don’t come from heaven, did not create the world. We will not die so others sins can be forgiven. We are not God’s prophet par excellence, the great High priest or the Kings of Kings.
• The incarnation of Jesus does not finish, Jesus is still incarnate, but as the incarnate King. You do get the feeling at times that some people are saying we are left to carry on Jesus incarnation. Jesus did not pass this on. We are sent like he was (Jn20:21) but we may only see our sending as being like his (i.e. analogous).
• Theology acts like a web, if you emphasise one aspect too heavily others will suffer. By focusing too heavily on the incarnation we run the risk of diminishing the death and resurrection. Hence we can speak less about the ongoing work of Christ, less of his payment for our sin and more of his identification with us. We ought to reflect the New Testament emphasis on both these things.
• Some say a message must be ‘embodied’ to be meaningful. But this does not make sense as God spoke before Jesus and does. This to me sounds more like postmodern communication theory where words only have subjective content. (1)

But what we can say about the incarnation is that it is used as an example of what our attitude should be (Phil 2), not pursuing power and influence but humbly giving ourselves.

1 Cor 9:19-23 shows Paul’s example of giving up your privilege and position to reach others. What seems to be evident is that this means that we will be the uncomfortable ones. We ought to be the ones who step out of our comfort zones and engage with the people around us.

John 17:18 & 20:21 Shows us that as the Father sent Jesus to be obedient to his will, so we are to go into the world as people obedient to the Father.

Although the incarnation is clearly on view in these texts, there is not explicit link from the incarnation to the believer. Rather we see small instances of similarity. Whilst many are encouraging incarnational mission as the way forward for the church I believe that we ought to be cautious here.

The New Testament does not use incarnational mission as the paradigm for mission. While much of the actual practice of incarnational mission is good, if we say that it is the paradigm all must conform to we will be limiting our options for mission. Worse still, we may also succumb to some of the weaknesses listed above and hence hinder people from hearing the gospel clearly.

Biblical mission means having compassion for the lost, seeking to meet them where they are at and introduce them to Jesus. This sort of mission is always contextual as it seeks to meet people where they are at and display both the message of the gospel and obedience to God in loving others. In our thinking about mission ought not diminish the need for all our life and speech to point to the identity we now have in Christ and invite others to join us in it.

Notes (with some big words for those who like them):

1. Here there is a great similarity to some theological issues we may take with Karl Barth. Graham Stanton(2) notes ‘The mistake of neo-orthodox theologians was to build an ontological union with Christ based on the incarnation rather than an emphasis on spiritual union with Christ through faith worked by the Spirit.’ The result of this is as we speak on incarnational mission sometimes we focus on the Christian’s role in the encounter rather than Christ’s involvement as a real person. Jesus ends up with a non-speaking role in our evangelism. A more biblical emphasis will see us emphasising the command to love, and that ought to drive us in relational mission.
2. Graham stanton and others have some excellent papers on Incarnational mission, relating to youth ministry in particular. They are part of the Youthworks Theology of Youth Ministry Conference 2008. You can pick them up at: http://www.youthworks.net/college-ministry-training-sydney.php?c=473&w=7000&r=Y

This post was added to a conversation going on at PTC. These terms have been thrown around a bit since the visit of Mark Driscoll a few weeks ago. I hope this is a helpful introduction.

It may be helpful to look at the history and uses of these terms. Missional & contexualisation are both tricky terms as they are driven by the presuppositions of those using them. These terms have been picked up and used extensively through the ‘Emerging church’ and beyond. There is a significant degree of variety out there. If you want to see some of this have a look at the missional syncroblog (http://blindbeggar.org/?p=609), the conclusion here seems to be that ‘missional’ must be more than the adjectival form of mission but must include incarnational mission. Much of the academic material on contextualisation presupposes that the incarnation is the model which we must follow. While this does capture significant parts of the Biblical teaching (Jn1, 20:21, Phil 2 etc.) At present I have some reservations about this which I will get around to posting at some point soon on my blog.

As for Contextualisation, Hesselgrave & Rommen’s book ‘Contextualisation’ shows the spectrum of use of this term. I think that contextualisation is a good thing but needs to be founded on the Biblical calls to share in God’s mission, love our neighbour and have compassion for the lost. Tradition in this sense can guide and guard us from the novelty of our age and actually help us to have some depth and authenticity.

In the emerging church conversation there are different approaches to Tradition. Dan Kimball will encourage us to use ancient forms as a way of incorporating depth. Alan Hirsch comments that the church has been in Christendom mode (300-2000AD) and needs to get back to the Missional mode of the NT church. In this sense he goes too far in almost dismissing the majority of church history and movements. Essentially there are diverse approaches to Tradition.

Mark Driscoll is at the conservative end of this conversation (if he is in it at all anymore). He was encouraging us to engage with our context. While we may need to work on the way we do church continually, more important than that is working on engaging and connecting with the people around us. That is part of the mission that God has given us.

I take it that good contextualisation will offend people, but for the right reasons. (see Whiteman, D.L., Contextualization: The Theory, the Gap, the Challenge. International Bulletin of Missiological Research. Jan 1997 ) The message of Jesus is offensive, and if we are speaking in ways the people around us can understand we will offend people. In this sense an appreciation of tradition will help us to critique the present and to have more of a ‘prophetic’ voice to our culture. I am convinced that deep down our society’s problems are spiritual ones and if we can both help people to see their problems and point them to real hope and life in Jesus.

When we think of contextualisation we so quickly move to thinking about our church meetings and particularly preaching. Much of what is in our traditional forms is very good and certainly not worth throwing out, yet if we sit in our buildings arguing about how to shape our meetings we have missed the main point here. In reality the majority of mission and contextualisation will come from the things we do outside our meetings. It will come from the way we engage with unchurched people around us. If we then let that begin to have some impact on what we do it can be helpful. Personally I think that much of our conservatism has held us away from the errors we see in much of the American church, yet it also means that many Christians are isolated from the communities they live amongst.

A helpful concept to think through in regard to Church meetings is the idea of novelty. Our culture loves novelty, used well you can capture much attention by doing novel things. But if everything you do is novel, you run the danger of losing both depth and any sense of authenticity. We can use novelty but we ought never to put it in the driver’s seat. Contextualisation is always a fine line between syncretism and irrelevance, but it is one way of speaking of the task of taking the gospel of Jesus to the world.