Coming to Terms with “Contextualization” Part 1-Formative History and Shift to “Cultural Engagement”

In my recent post on Finding a Culture’s Quest/ion and Shaping Their Transformative Trajectory (2004), Emily asked, “Is this your way of talking about the contextualization of the gospel without employing words that have become like profanity to some people? Or do you see the two as different (contextualization and questions for the trajectory)?”

I could give the short answer and just list the terms I now use and maybe give brief descriptions or definitions. However, for some unknown reason, I feel like I should try to show the overall process I use, and give some of the influences that started and shifted the way I view contextualization. (If you’re a just-the-facts kind of person, feel free to jump right down to the post with the process description. For some, though, the story makes it more meaningful.) (And in fact, if you’re not interested in the context of my view on contextualization, that strikes me as ironic! Maybe that’s a reason behind giving the narrative: I meant to give a meta-context on my understanding of contextualization, as I have been studying this term and its applications and implications for 30 years now. But you’re a free agent; do as you choose.)

Forging a View on Contextualization

I realize there is a growing body of literature in print and on blogs about cultural engagement (my overall term now for what I used to call contextualization). I know this indirectly rather than from doing a lot of reading lately about the subject (I share reasons for lack of reading later). I know some of those considered The Big Names, either contemporary or classic theoreticians, theologians, and/or practitioners. Most of them I haven’t read because I’ve been called to create something from scratch based on my own experiences and wrestling to interpret them.

Maybe the approaches by The Big Names seem perfectly adequate. But here’s the thing, at least in my opinion: We need multiple perspectives on cultural engagement, developed within each generation, by men and women with varying backgrounds and formative experiences, and with varying Kingdom experiences that spark their writings. I think this is especially important as we undergo significant shifts in global culture, in which some paradigms and cultures go into ascendancy, and others fall into decline. Another irony: Don’t concepts of contextualization need continual updating? No one perspective is the be-all, end-all, over-all.

Meanwhile, there are very specific reasons why those-most-quoted on subjects related to “contextualization” developed the views they did. At least half the picture comes from personal background, and oftentimes, it seems the other half comes more from their observations of failures (their own and those of others) rather than successes. (That may be an inaccurate conclusion, and if you disagree, I really would like to hear your thinking on why.) For instance, I understand that Lesslie Newbigin wrote much of his work based on seeing the decline of the church in his homeland after spending decades in missionary work in India. Roland Allen developed his critiques of the “missions compound culture” based on watching what happened to Chinese nationals who isolated from their peers when they became Christians and became part of the mission outpost. And I … well, you’ll see shortly …

So, here are three parts that forged my overall view on cultural engagement:

1. Background from formative years.
2. Academic and theological pursuits.
3. Practitioner projects – successes, mediocrities, and failures.

1. Background from My Formative Years

There are four high-impact aspects in my formative years (through high school) that tie in with my passion for cultural engagement: pioneering, ecology, multiculturalism, and people of peace.

I grew up knowing I was a third-generation descendant of pioneers on both sides of my family. My early years were spent in Montana, when it still had a very strong flavor of the Old West. People were there because they were risk-takers, movers and shakers, wanting something beyond the usual and willing to go for it. I have come to realize that, at best, rugged individualism gets you to stand outside the norm and take risks, but it only leads you to somewhere new. What keeps you going once you get there is community. Pioneers needed others who had calm when they had storms, could cook a meal when they had to split logs, could watch the children when they needed to sleep from exhaustion. Without the help of neighbors, people simply don’t make it in a frontier setting. And so, the whole environment in which I was raised was infused with the paradoxical dynamic tensions of individual/communal to keep life sustainable.

And speaking on a different kind of environment, we lived in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Less than a mile from home, I could roam within multiple eco-systems – woods, river, pond, prairie – and the “eco-tones” (overlap zones) in between. “Wired” by my learning styles to be highly observant about concrete details, I also spent a huge amount of time thinking about nature and seasons and cycles that were all around me. I participated in an ecology internship program at age 16, and won an environmental essay contest at age 17. This strongly contributes to my understanding of balance, what it takes for survival and vitality, and what can cause toxicity and death for organic systems.

Multiculturalism is a strong aspect in my background. I had no way to interpret at the time how valuable and unusual it was to have such deep exposure to diversity! Montana local history involved learning about Native American tribes, a subject I continued to enjoy for many years. As a lover of books, one of my favorite sets was the Grolier Society’s series on “Lands and People,” and I spent countless hours reading it. Many family and friends were immigrants from Europe and the Middle East. My interest in other cultures continued when our family moved from that rural town of 1,500 to semi-urban Washington state, and I entered a racially diverse and racially tense high school of 1,500. After overcoming culture shock, I found my footing and enjoyed the diversity. I joined the Indian Club, and had school friends from Japanese-, African-, and Mexican-American backgrounds. Border-crossing friendships have always been a part of my life ever since.

Also, my parents and several close relatives were what the Gospels call “people of peace.” They simply took people at face value, welcomed everyone, and treated all the same. For instance, an uncle and aunt sponsored a German man who had been a Prisoner of War in the US, to relocate here after the war. During World War II, my mother’s family had close friends who were Japanese American, and I grew up seeing pictures of these friends in our family’s photo album. In the mid-1960s, my parents opened their small rental house next to ours to an Anglo-South-Asian couple and their children – not the norm, even in Montana, where we lived until I was a freshman in high school. But what an incredible legacy! I am just beginning to probe how deeply these osmosis experiences of showing respect and guarding the dignity of all have influenced the course of my journey in Christ.

2. Academic and Theological Pursuits on Culture and Context

Perhaps an overview of my theoretical and theological background may help to get a sense of my work in my primary studies of culture (i.e., original research work) and secondary studies (reading the works of others).

Since the mid-1970s, I have engaged in studies of linguistic theories as applied to cross-cultural communications. In more technical terms, I focused on rhetorical analysis (the “logic” patterns by which phrases and sentences are glued together into discourses) and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and others related to how language shapes perception.

From the late 1970s to early 2000s, I read a lot of books and critiques on missiological theory, mission-shaped contextualization, and church growth. Some of the earliest books I absorbed were:

Contextualization: A Theology of Gospel and Culture by Bruce J. Nicholls (1979 edition; rereleased with same title in 2003 by a different publisher). I still recall the essence of some back cover copy. It described how one African tribe that wanted to share the gospel contextually with a different tribe would have to analyze at least four cultures: how their own tribe’s culture differed from the other tribe’s culture, how their tribal culture had been affected by the colonial culture syncretized by European missionaries, and how the culture of biblical times had to be interpreted in order to exegete the principles that could/should be applied to Christians in either tribe. I was fascinated with the complexity of it all – a mega-puzzle to solve! But then, that sort of makes sense, given that in second grade, when asked what we wanted to be when we grew up, I said “an archaeologist studying Greek, Roman, and Egyptian cultures.”

Then there was An Introduction to the Science of Missions by J. H. Bavinck (1964 edition; rereleased in 1992). And books by Roland Allen – published far earlier, but I got into them in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Plus I read a lot of Francis Schaeffer, H.R. Rookmaaker, and others related to the L’Abri movement – more in the vein of practical apologetics for connecting with people based on their worldview and culture.

Gradually, my studies started narrowing down. Off and on during 1982-1988, I researched the dynamics of parallel cultures in the then Soviet Union and Eastern European Bloc, and how the persecution of Christians led to the underground church there. I’ve been conducting my own primary studies into the intersection of culture and ministry since the early 1990s. It began with identity-oriented subcultures, and moved toward church planting strategy. I’ve been writing intensively on related subjects since about 1995.

3. Practitioner Projects – Successes, Mediocrities, Failures

I have at one time or another since the mid-1970s served in almost every imaginable ministry and program a local church could offer, and in traditional to contemporary to seeker to home fellowship to “shadow team,” and neo-monastic/residential community models of church.

From the early 1990s, I also started on a path toward deeper involvement in experiencing different kinds of church situations, strategies, and structures. It started out with participating in a 1994 study group on local cultures and the larger shift toward something that had no real name yet, but now we would call it postmodernity and alternative spirituality. Then I got more directly involved in church planting and pioneering other kinds of new-edge ministries.

All these and a lifetime of other church experiences, provided important (and often fascinating!) learning opportunities, but many would likely be graded as mediocre successes or even failures. This journey has included:

• Three church splits – all of them quite nasty, and in each case where additional clusters of people left over time. One of them also involved a complete takeover (you know, confiscate everyone’s keys, change the locks that night, put chains across the parking lot so no undesirables could use it).
• A dozen times when the extreme measure of church discipline were applied – only twice done according to the process of Matthew 18.
• Outright failures or sloooooow deaths of a few plants, ministries, and non-profit agencies I helped start.
• Woundings to self, and to friends whom I enthusiastically encouraged to participate – a reality I get especially angered by.
• Multiple times challenging toxic leaders on their attitudes, communications (or lack thereof), and behaviors, usually to no avail. (Hopefully you don’t think I actually like doing that. If you’ve read my series on recovery from spiritual abuse, you’ll know that I do so because I made a commitment not to protect leaders who clearly misuse their position/authority to abuse others spiritually.)
• A church plant with the potential to become intercultural, but instead various cultural subgroups left in a particular order over paradigm/cultural conflict with the founding pastor, until basically all who remained were culturally like him.
• A pioneering ministry, a “postmodern” church-within-a-church, and a church in transition where traditional-paradigm leaders stepped in to assert or reassert “ownership,” and their control ultimately kept it conventional and/or killed it entirely.
• A premature church plant merged with a church long since in decline, and instead of fusing a vibrant new life together, it created a 200% mortality rate and left the merger fighting for survival.
• Several years of involvement with “spiritual mapping” and “strategic prayer” initiatives, with a gradual realization that much of it was looking more like a syncretized ”Christian animism” that not. This got me using the term critical contextualization, since it was becoming clear that contextualization was inadequate and often led to compromise of biblical principles.
• Three intriguing experiences in residential community, two of them lasting nearly a year.
• Participation in half a dozen virtual networks for support, peer mentorship, and social enterprises with occasional IRL [In Real Life] interactions, but mostly URL connections via blogs, email, project management sites, etc.

Given such a history, it should be no surprise that my ministry has formed into one of discernment, advocacy, and offering a cautionary voice. I have observed, participated with, and contributed to enough folly to give help and hope to others so that they do not do likewise. I don’t want to see the Holy Spirit quenched any more, because of bad leadership from myself or others, even if we are sincere. I don’t want others to feel quenched, because of bad practices in church planting and transition, even if it comes from sincere people. So, I offer a lot in the way of deconstruction.

But my history also is one of pursuing an insider’s understanding of organizational development, processes, and procedures through a wide range of personal work, ministry experiences, and processing life with friends who have similar interests. These lessons have given hope for offering reconstruction ways to build or rebuild our strategies and systems. Again, providential circumstances provided an astounding on-the-job training in systems:

• Working in or for nearly every division of a seminary over a 12-year period, and regularly having to analyze structural systems and processes, whether it was an assigned task or just to make it into a livable work situation for myself and sustainable to hand off to the next person in that position. I produced or edited so many procedures, forms, databases, and manuals there that it’s probable every member of the administration, faculty, and staff still uses something I produced, every single day.
• Journeying with church planting strategist friends and turnaround-church leaders through their learning curves. Editing their writings on anything from the shift from marketing models to multiplicational organic models, to the roles of women in radical church-turnaround ministry, to translating the gospel into terms that people from alternative spiritualities and religions can comprehend.
• Serving on three church planter candidate interview teams, analyzing the communication skills of 30 others, and thinking through how to adjust the Ridley system for holistic-paradigm candidates, to help them find their best opportunities for a truly successful plant.
• Spending the last 16 months on website, marketing, and training materials related to a comprehensive, integrated system of tools for mobilizing ministry volunteers. Basically, I supersaturated my brain with details of ministry systems; what makes for unhealthy, reductionistic, and toxic; and how to get them healthy, holistic, and sustainable.

Also, I didn’t realize until recently, when I recompiled my resume, that about half of the ministry pioneering ventures and church plants, plus dissertations I edited, related to specific racial or ethnic cultures, or to multicultural enterprises. Most of the rest dealt with issues of generational dynamics. Again, these themes lead quite providentially into continued explorations of cultural engagement.

Moving from Contextualization to Cultural Engagement

So, through the process of watching this experiences and especially the difficulties, I started seeing that we needed more levels of sophistication in our concepts of contextualization. In thinking back, most of the “negative” ministry situations had leaders and/or teams who talked the term, but it wasn’t applied in any way that makes sense.

And honestly, I can’t say the blame all goes back to them. How many people do you know who got a seminary master’s degree of any kind – including one in intercultural studies or missions – who got any kind of substantive training on how to observe, analyze, and interpret cultures? Or how to assess the cultures you are being called to work in, and how to strategize realistic and biblically sound approaches to cultural engagement instead of isolate or capitulate? Or how to catalyze a social transformation movement without getting totally sucked in by the culture and thus become irrelevant? (And actually, the same set of questions applies to trainings on emerging-missional-apostolic-organic-whatever church as well.)

So, here we are, sitting in North America in a post-Christendom setting that is increasingly multicultural demographically and pluralistic spiritually. What are we gonna do with such an amazing opportunity with potential to “disciple the nations” in our own neighborhoods? And, how would we become equipped to do so anyhow?

I stopped reading in about 2001, when I switched to focus on writing up my original research and theorizing about “contextualization.” I’m sure I missed some important things in some books written by others during that time period. However, my calling is to complete this work from my own perspective, not simply composite whatever seems to fit from the variety of perspectives others have. I know my views will show their holes eventually, but I don’t need to be self-critiquing my findings in the process of processing them so they conform to the theories of The Big (or Not So Big) Names. If/when I ever get this material done and published, then perhaps I’ll be led to critique it all by the theories of others. And that will undoubtedly improve and polish it, but I doubt it will utterly demolish it. …

(If details of some of these experiences and studies are of interest, see the Cultural Curriculum Project page. I have more to add in from past activities, and will also bring it up to date when I can.)

Five Main Messages on futuristguy Blog

Meanwhile, one last item of interest before jumping into my actual descriptions and definitions related to the process of cultural engagement: the main messages on this blog. After all, it started out as a blog to report on the Allelon Missional Order summit in October 2007, and keep up with other participants. It quickly became something else … more about the future and paradigm shifts and cultures. Maybe that’s just the way with a lot of providential journeys: It’s easier to steer something that’s already moving than to get it through the inertia barrier and get started. Anyway, here’s what I wrote up as the overriding current messages on my futuristguy blog, as relate to cultural engagement.

1. It’s about paradigms, not methodological models. If all we do is tweak the surface structures, it becomes more about make-up that covers over the flaws than wellness that brings that inner glow to the surface. Those who refuse to change will continue to impose declining paradigm definitions of “success” on new paradigm endeavors, in which case the new will always fall short, and likely will die from control by declining paradigm leaders who expect very specific methods that align with their paradigm.

2. It’s about cultural engagement, and both individual and social transformation in a paradoxical, integrative, holistic paradigm. I believe we could well witness implosions within all North American denominations and movements that refuse to bring into dynamic tension the aspects of our faith and practice that were split in the liberal-fundamental divide of the last two centuries. Neither side is holistic. Each leaves out some major issues of faith and/or practice, and that has implanted its own DNA of destruction.

3. North American churches, denominations, and seminaries have until 2030 at the latest to transition to a holistic paradigm and holistic leaders. This will require some very serious introspection and significant work to fill in our gaps (spiritual osteoporosis), remove our excesses (spiritual bone spurs), and reintegrate our entire paradigm to be consistent. I see this happening in the coming together of representatives from different “post- tribes,” such as pairings among post-Charismatic/Pentecostal with post-Evangelical, post-Liberal with post-Conservative, etc. I’m not sure I see much of it elsewhere yet – despite similar warnings from eminent church consultants like Lyle Schaller over 10 years ago.

4. A litmus test of whether we actually want change, or are just enamored with the idea of change, can be found in our willingness to engage in a 100-year sustainability plan for our neighborhood or organization. Creating and implement such a plan requires a full paradigm shift, not a bunch of new wineskin patches atop old wineskin paradigms. It requires significant investment in preparation by getting current ministry systems and infrastructures in order – or else the plan will actually send the organization and its people into culture shock. So, for instance, it requires demonstrating clear communications, follow through on what is promised, review and revision of goals, and processes for participants to offer constructive criticism. If an organization’s participants cannot get over that threshold level of removing toxicity, how could they ever reach sustainability?

5. We cannot accomplish sustainability alone; we need a collaboration style based in a covenant to work together long term and in compositing our “human resources” for the benefit of the local body. As a newer and holistic paradigm form of collaboration, this has distinctive differences from the traditional paradigm with ecumenical unity around common creeds, or the pragmatic paradigm with functional unity around common projects. It has a bit in common with the City Reach methodological model, but is less about a hierarchy of leaders and more about grassroots connections. I suspect I’ll be writing in depth on this in the near future.

Okay, so this post brought us from the formative themes, through reshaping by a range of studies and experiences, to the current dominant messages. Next post will address the processes and procedures in cultural engagement as I now see them. Back soon …

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