I’ve been making some good headway on my paper over the weekend. It feels good… like I am actually going to get it done.

The section I am working on right now deals with contextualization. There have been some very good things I have been reading about it. One of which I even got off one of the links I have on the sidebar - Jonathan Dodson - the Church Planting Novice, wrote something interesting that spurred me to think.

Some have actually said that contextualization of the Gospel is a bad thing.    It’s funny that anyone could say that because the lack of contextualization is exactly the reason why churches are declining so badly in North America and Europe.   For perhaps hundreds of years, we have assumed that church culture was the Gospel and attempted to export it, calling it “church growth”.   It has ceased to work, as people have less and less connection with their roots and history, they simply don’t care.   I read one dissertation on the weekend looking at attempts of Southern Baptists to plant churches in the Pacific Northwest, and lack of contextualization was written all over it - they admitted that the only success they had was amongst those who were already a part of “Southern Baptist” culture but moved there.

For a long time it seems new church planting groups had been talking about stripping “the Gospel” down to its essentials - of removing all culture from it, so that culture no longer got in the way. Now, however, thinking has come to the point where it seems like most have given up on stripping the culture from the Gospel, and now are focused on placing the Gospel in the culture they are trying to reach. It’s a messy business, and no mistake, but yet there are still naysayers who think this “contextualization” is a bad idea.

What really struck home with me about what Jonathan wrote, was his comments about Jesus and the Bible.  Jesus himself is God - entering into our context. Then there is the Bible.  It never occurred to me before, but it is so self-evident - contextualization was always God’s plan from the beginning!  He took men who lived in their cultures, spoke languages and used idioms particular to their culture, to communicate His plan and his works and reveal himself to us all.

The Bible is in context.  Perhaps the reason God did this was because not only would it force us, the readers, to sort through and deal with the difference between culture and the Gospel (decode), but in learning to do that, we then gain the tools to place the Gospel into another culture correctly so that the people we teach read and understand how it applies to their context (encode).

In that light, I read with interest and appreciation the efforts of George Halitzka’s effort to contextualize the coming of Christ by imagining it occurring to a Jewish couple in America in the 80’s (through the prism of Joseph’s death-bed conversations, while Jesus is 15.).  Read both parts - they are fascinating, emotional reading.

And before some of you get all feisty, I know we don’t know when Joseph died, and I know that some of the analogies aren’t perfect, and I know Mary wasn’t as opposed in the Bible as Mary in the story is… look past it and enjoy the fresh insight it offers, and how much more real it feels.  I’m not saying it replaces Scripture, but it gives you a new view on what may be a story you’ve maybe let get too familiar unappreciated.

Oh Lord, sustain my children’s hunger for your Word.  Don’t let my own laziness or selfishness keep them from it.  I am so proud each and every night they beg me to read them a story from the Bible.  How easily that feeling is overwhelmed by the urgent, or by fatigue, or by petty distractions.  Thank you for each of their souls, and use them for great things, Lord.

Amen.

I finally began to work on the articles I had collected for my big paper, and this quote stuck out at me as important.

Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.  For the sleeping God may wake someday and  take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.

It is attributed to Annie Dillard, but not referenced.  The imagery is a trifle overwrought, but after thinking about it, I think I agree.  We don’t respect the Bible nearly enough.  We say it is the Word of God so casually and blithely that we don’t even think about what that really means.

After reading this, I got to thinking, if and when we really do plant a church, I think my first sermon will be on the Bible - what it is and how it came to us, and what that means to have such a treasure collecting dust on the mantlepiece, or tossed into some forgotten box from the time we moved out of our parents’ house and into our own place.