Just when we thought we had it down - down becomes up

Oh the thinks we do think. In the space of one day I have read an article in USA Today praising the "guy church" and now in weighs David Fitch to not only take on that but every other context specific church.

Actually, I think he's right in the long term. But we're so short term minded that the tendency is always to go for what draws a crowd and work back from there.

Read David's article and see if you don't find yourself agreeing too.

Reclaiming the Mission :: The Weblog of David Fitch

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.