mission: philosophy

Gospel, Church, Cultures

Following the footsteps of Paul, apostle Lesslie Newbigin in 'The Open Secret' summarizes the Pauline categories of missional thought. He writes, 'I have described the interaction between gospel and culture as a continually developing relationship within a triangular field, of which the three points are the local culture, the ecumenical fellowship representing the witness of Christians from other cultures, and the Scripture as embodying the given revelation, with its center and focus in the person of Jesus Christ.'

The Gospel and Our Culture Network (www.gocn.org) have taken this triangular distinction between the gospel, the church and the culture, as a beginning place for understanding the missiology of the western church. The shift is essential because the western church has in large numbers lost the Pauline mission of the church, that of being a sent people on a gospel mission to the ends of the earth to evangelize the lost and plant churches. Planting churches that are a cultural fit for their time and place is important so that the church and gospel might use all opportunities to reach as many people as possible. In our present day this lack of missional, evangelistic church planting emphasis, combined with an eroding clarity of the gospel and a drift toward cultural syncretism is swiftly becoming the band warming up to play the funeral dirge of both the compromised liberal mainline church and the irrelevant, separated fundamentalist church. This continual cycling between the gospel, culture and church culture must continue unending as the gospel is often distorted both by its engagement with culture, and sometimes even more so after sitting in the church for a season.

 

The Need To Contextualize

Using the Newbigin gauntlet, we see that the Gospel is a-cultural. It does not have a culture of its own but it goes into cultures and there speaks into that particular time, place and tribe. When you see Paul preach to Jewish people, he uses a very different presentation than when he preached to pagans on Mars Hill. To the Jew he quoted from the OT to show that Jesus was the anticipated messiah whom they crucified. He called them to repent and turn to the God of their fathers. To the idolatrous people on Mars Hill in Acts 17, Paul uses their own idols to tell the story of Christ. He quotes Cretan poets and understands the culture that he is in. Using the idol to the Unknown God, Paul tells them who that God is. The one true God who came in Christ, in whom we live, move and have our being. Then he tells them to repent and turn to God through Christ. Paul is contextualizing the Gospel to a time and place. The Gospel writers did the same thing as you can see in the following chart.

With this understanding of Gospel and culture, we then see how the church must be a missional expression into the culture, time and place in which we live.