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.

Your friendly neighborhood anthropologist

The new term started at Rockbridge Seminary last Tuesday, and yours truly went out on a limb by selecting "Understanding Other Cultures". My thoughts were that maybe it would give me a new set of "eyes" to see the community here with. Here's the course description.

Course Description
Develop skill sets to interpret a different cultural context and to create strategies that build bridges to that community. Emphasis will be given to building understanding and discernment for persons of different cultural, social, and religious backgrounds.

The course is taught during an eight-week term that includes a course introduction week, six Learning Units, and a learning evaluation week. All units are designed to help the learner fulfill the learning objectives of the course. Learning units may include lecture and research materials, outside reading, learning community discussion, and church-based assignments. The professor serves as a ministry learning mentor, providing almost daily interaction and facilitation among the learners.

Course Competency
This course will help you develop the following ministry competency:

Respects persons of different cultural, social and religious backgrounds. (#34 on Rockbridge Seminary’s list of 35 Ministry Competencies)

Course Goal and Indictors
As a result of completing this course, you will gain skill sets to help you understand persons of different cultural, social, and religious backgrounds. To demonstrate learning, you will:

1. Use six proven anthropological tools to understand another person or group of persons
2. Apply the use of these anthropological tools to a cross-cultural evangelism context
3. Identify a cross-cultural people group that God is calling you to understand
4. Develop approaches for effective intercultural communication
5. Identify challenges related to cross-cultural communication and hermeneutics
6. Analyze your verbal communication style and how it can influence cross-cultural communication
7. Participate in an online learning community of fellow students that discusses cross-cultural ministry
8. Probing the wisdom and experience of a mentor related to understanding other cultures
9. Assess at the conclusion of this course your continued learning needs related to understanding other cultures

I'm really not sure if it is going to be immediately applicable, but I definitely felt that this was the course I should take. I was bummed to find out that anthropologists don't get to dress like Indiana Jones.

Has anyone approached their community in this way? I know Rick Warren went door to door as he developed "Saddleback Sam" - the profile for who they targeted. Anyone else?

Contextualization

Valparaiso is a military town. Today I watched an airshow over my office. Tomorrow I'll probably do it again. With two fighter wings based here, a test wing, and Duke field nearby, we get to see almost every airplane in the inventory, and every now and then some from foreign nations.

It's not unusual on Wednesday night to have someone show up in their BDU's (soon to be ACU's). Lots of retired military lost of contractors. Okaloosa County is politically the most conservative county in the nation.

I've been rereading Ed Stetzer's work "Breaking the Missional Code". I've also been reading Redeemer Presbyterians' Church Planting Manual. My hope in doing that was to gather some insight into the best way to connect with the unchurched here. Sunday night the theme in worship was "Sent To Serve" and I tried to make the point that Jesus was seen with the worst kinds of people. We on the other hand are concerned with getting people like us.

One of the things we did as we transitioned was to relax the dress code here. It started the week after VBS when I kept wearing my khakis and Hawaiian shirts. That was 4 years ago. I'm wondering though if we didn't go just a little bit too far. If we had shirts with logos on them then possibly we could project a more "disciplined" image in a culture that might put that on their list of unspoken values.

Then too, we might need to project that as a "first impression". Giving greeters either vests or shirts might help as well.

The military influence is very strong. Maybe we've missed a chance to sync up and be more effective in drawing them in and keeping them.

Ideas?