Contextualization Toolkit – Part 1

We Christians are most often comfortable with methodological approaches that break down to a right way and a wrong way. But many aspects of the mission God has given us are at once more complex and more subtle than this, and don’t lend themselves to a simple right/wrong approach. So it is with the matter of contextualization. I’ve read a number of papers on the topic of contextualization that critique certain worship styles or traditions using a lot of generalities, both from writers who want to hold to biblical faithfulness and who want to seek relevance. These sorts of critiques are generally unhelpful.

Rather than plunging into a methodological essay consisting of a list that’s long on style but short on substance, what I’d like to do over a couple of posts is to help build something like a contextualization toolkit.

The problem with toolkits is we often aren’t aware of the tools we have available to us or how to use them, even though they’re right in front of us. Ever had a Swiss Army Knife? Not the little one with one or two blades, the kind that comes on a keychain. I’m talking the massive one that has 47 different blades to use. How often did you use some of those tools? Maybe all you ever used was the large cutting blade for whittling and cleaning fish, the small cutting blade for cleaning fingernails and such, and perhaps the corkscrew (this last will probably worry some of my Baptist friends). Don’t have a Swiss Army Knife? Okay, another analogy. You’re reading this on a computer. Do you know how to do a mail merge in your Word Processor? Can you program spreadsheet macros? The tools are there, whether you use software from the He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named up in Redmond or free software like Open Office. Or if you blog, do you know how to include inline CSS to format your posts, even on the free templates by WordPress? If you can, great. I only know how to do a few HTML tags. I’m aware of the other tools, but don’t have the skill to use them yet.

The point is, we have many tools right in front of us we are unaware of or, if we know they exist, we don’t know how to use them. But even before we get to the matter of using tools, we need some terminology in order to be able to approach the subject. Before we engage culture, let’s get some ideas about what culture is and is not on the table.

• Culture doesn’t have any existence in the abstract – it’s always expressed in and through people. If we’re going to engage culture we have to move from the abstract and the general to the concrete and the specific.
• How is culture instantiated then? I’m going to say culture is a set of questions and the assumptions that govern the way someone answers them. These questions tend to break down to three areas or, to use terms of one of my professors, John Frame, perspectives. Frame suggests a triad of perspectives will describe the sorts of questions and assumptions we are dealing with here:
  • Normative: questions of what ought to be, what is right, what is wrong, who’s in charge and why? (“Ought” questions)
  • Situational: questions of what the world is like, what is the context or environment. (“Is” questions)
  • Existential: questions regarding ourselves our experience. (“Me” questions.)

With me so far? Each of these perspectives relates to the others, and each affects the others and is affected by them. Before I go further, Drew Goodmanson of Kaleo San Diego has provided a great deal of fruitful discussion of perspectival approaches to ministry at his blog, Goodmanson dot com.
Now let’s begin to see how these perspectives affect the concrete, specific instantiation of culture. As we said earlier, every culture will pose some basic questions and some assumptions that help to provide answers to those questions. Here’s a quick list of some of those basic questions that are practically universal to all cultures and subcultures:

• Who am I? (What does it mean to be human? This starts with the existential or self perspective, but the answers are obviously going to relate to the other perspectives.)
• Why am I here? What is the purpose of human existence? (This question starts off existential, but quickly gets to both the situational and normative perspectives).
• Why are things in such a mess? What should be done to make things better? What can I do? (Includes issues relating to all three perspectives)

People whose assumptions and answers more or less line up so that they adopt a similar way of dealing with the world and move in the same directions comprise a subculture or people group. Every subculture contains some assumptions that become idols and bring about resistance to the gospel. Every subculture is also a recipient of common grace and has some assumptions or aspects that will resonate with or even illustrate the good news of Jesus. Christians too often are anti-culture, dismissing an entire subculture as being utterly opposed to everything that is biblical. This is a serious mistake that ends up making barriers, sometimes out of the very cultural elements God would use to communicate the gospel to that culture or subculture in a meaningful way.

Note also that every culture or subculture will have some questions they consider important that may not even occur to outsiders. For instance, Harvey Conn of Westminster Seminary wrote about his experiences as a missionary in South Korea that the people there embraced the Westminster Confession, but there was very little in the Confession that dealt with issues of how current generations should deal with grandparents and ancestors. Elizabeth Elliot, who served among the Waodani (Auca) tribe in Ecuador had to get used to the fact that the tribe members did not perceive themselves as individuals in the way we do in the modern West; they saw themselves as part of the tribal community. This raised questions that were alien to Elizabeth Elliot’s consciousness, but were vital in the context where she served.

With these basic ideas in place regarding the nature of culture, the first thing we need to do before we even start to examine the surrounding culture is to acknowledge the facts of our own cultural assumptions. The questions we ask and to which our cultural assumptions and traditions provide answers are part of our cultural context. It is a mistake to simply assume that our way of doing Christianity is the right way. The way we live, and the way we express Christianity is alsready deeply adapted to our own culture and its assumptions, some of which are unbiblical.

I’ve stated it before on this blog, but it bears repeating: There is no such thing as biblical Christianity. Christianity is always adapted to a cultural context and expressed in and through the culture of the people embracing it, and before we can begin to approach and engage another culture we need to take the time to engage in the exercise of examining our own culture using the same principles and tools of cultural analysis we intend to use on the culture or cultural subsets to which God has sent us as missionaries and proclaimers of the Gospel. It is my hope that we will always do this with humility and grace, because if we approach the Mission of God full of religious and sectarian pride, if we don’t examine our own cultural questions and assumptions, we risk becoming an affront to the cause of the Gospel and impugning the reputation of Jesus who called us, and we ought never to want to allow that to happen.

In my next post I’ll continue to look at this Contextualization toolkit, but here’s a preview:

Basic Ideas on Contextualization

Contextualization is about a relationship and a dynamic that has three dimensions or components: adapt, change and and challenge.

Adopt those things that resonate with the gospel. Because of God’s common grace, every culture has some.

Adapt those parts of culture that may acknowledge a biblical question but which provide an unbiblical answer or which have some resonance with biblical answers but require modification to reflect Christ.

Challenge those things that are absolutely at odds with the gospel and can’t be reconciled with it.

With this post I’ve tried to set down the terms and tools we need to be able to discuss the issue of contextualization, but that has taken so much space we haven’t gotten down to the practical matter of how to actually begin using the tools. In my next post we’ll look at these three steps in detail and look at how we can use these as well as our perspectival approach as tools in our Contextualization Toolkit.