Global Mission

Reflections and Case Studies in Contextualization for the Whole Church

Rose Dowsett, Rose Dowsett

• Editorial: William Carey Library
• Año: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781645080800
• Categoría: Théologie et religion
• Categoría: Ministère chrétien

Global Mission is divided into two sections: the first, Reflections and Foundations, comprises nine essays of a more general nature; the second, Contextualization at Work, contains twenty one essays of a more specific nature, most of them case studies from a particular location and people group. The thirty-three contributors come from five continents, and a host of contexts. Some are veterans, some quite young, but every one of them is passionate about God's mission, and about building bridges for the gospel in a way that is absolutely faithful to Scripture but also sensitive to specific contexts. North and South, East and West, demonstrate precious unity in Christ in our common calling.Contextualization is complex, and none of the authors claim to have got everything right. But their essays are thoughtful, and written out of love for God and love for his world. They tell the stories of trial and error, of struggles and triumphs, as each seeks to present Christ in terms that make sense and can be understood. It is following the process, quite as much as specific conclusions, which make this book valuable and transferable to many other parts of the global church. The essays also give us a peep into many different societies, and the birthing of faith in the grace of the Holy Spirit. Thus we give thanks to God for all that he is wonderfully doing around his world and stimulate our prayers for those who work cross-culturally, especially in pioneer situations.Not all contributors agree on every point, especially when it comes to the difficulties of mission in the Muslim world (and increasingly, amongst Hindus). There has been no attempt to standardize different approaches, letting a robust conversation develop.Each chapter ends with some suggested study questions, useful for personal reflection or group or class discussion. The book is deliberately accessible to lay people, but stimulating to career missionaries and academics.We pray that it may serve the purposes of God, for his glory. This book was published in partnership with the World Evangelical Alliance.

PART ONE

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REFLECTIONS AND FOUNDATIONS

INTRODUCTION

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RAINBOW FAITH

Authentic Discipleship in Global Perspective

Rose Dowsett

In my attic, there is a pigtail: a long black plait of hair, attached to a Chinese skull cap, such as scholars and many others wore in late nineteenth-century China. I do not know the name of the person who wore it, though I do know he was a missionary with the China Inland Mission.

Every now and then I hold the cap and pigtail in my hands and remember my forebears who carried the gospel with such passion (literal suffering as well as commitment) to the interior of a vast, and even then, vastly populated land. And I also remember why that anonymous man chose to wear Chinese dress, despite being despised and taunted for it by most of his own countrymen. He did it to identify with the people he longed to reach with the gospel and to show respect for their culture. I honor him, this man unknown to me, but known to God and a brother in Christ.

As I write, I have beside me a reproduction of an etching—a detailed line drawing from before the days of photography—originally printed in a missionary magazine in the late 1860s. In the picture, the King of Yoruba in Nigeria, surrounded by hundreds of his subjects, welcomes three missionaries recently arrived from Scotland. The foreigners, two men and a woman, are dressed in full Western attire: long frock-coats, trousers and hats for the men, and floor-length heavy dress, shawl, and bonnet for the woman.

It’s hard not to smile; it looks so exasperatingly silly. More seriously, it perhaps suggests a complete lack of adaptation to another culture, with all the likely failure in gospel contextualization that goes with it. And yet, these, too, I honor. They were part of a brave procession of men and women who knew full well as they left their homes that they were not likely to survive more than a year or two at most in “the white man’s graveyard,” yet even so believed the cause of the gospel more urgent and more precious than their own lives.

The history of the church in its mission is full of the good and the bad, the absurd and the tragic, the awful and the inspiring. As fallen human beings our motives are rarely pure and, whoever we are and of whichever generation or culture, our ministry will bear all the ambiguities of our humanity. Even though redeemed, we are still not perfected!

Because it is very fashionable to dismiss much of the modern Protestant mission movement since the early nineteenth century as cultural and/or political imperialism and therefore harmful, we can easily lose sight of God’s amazing grace in choosing to use and work through flawed human beings and all the peculiarities of history. Yes, it is easy to spot many things which should have been done differently. But we need also to honor those who gave themselves in the cause of bringing the gospel to unreached and unevangelized people, often at tremendous cost. We need also to recognize that it is always easier to see the splinter in another’s eye rather than the log in our own, as our Lord so graphically put it. How discerning are we about what we are doing in mission today? Nor is this a Western problem, though it is that. I also observe that many in the exciting, God-birthed new mission movements from Africa, Asia and Latin America, equally do not find it easy to contextualize, but assume that what they have been familiar with is equally transferable to their new setting.

In other words, contextualization is a challenge to us all.

AS OLD AS THE HUMAN RACE

Although the word “contextualization” is modern, the practice is as old as the human race.

In the Old Testament, over the centuries, God’s people had to work out what authentic discipleship looked like in pilgrimage or settledness, in servitude or freedom, in exile or in homeland. In the midst of many contexts and cultures, what did faith and obedience consist in? How could they display the distinctiveness of their calling and of their message, and the uniqueness of the God whose they were? Of course, over and over again they failed or wrongly slipped into cultural legalisms. But on the other hand, over and over again they were renewed through the grace of God and, as Hebrews 11 celebrates, there are many shining examples of men and women of faith.

Although the word “contextualization” is modern, the practice is as old as the human race.

The New Testament illustrates the same journey of faith, though now wonderfully in the transforming light of the life, death and resurrection, and ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ. Repeatedly, the challenge is the same as it always was: how to live in faith, obedience, and authentic discipleship in whichever setting the sovereign Lord has given us. Character, word and deed—personally and in community—must all bear witness to the one and only living God so that the community of believers becomes a visual aid and shining beacon of light, communicating God’s truth to the world and living a life of worship to God himself. You could be Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, young or old, live in Jerusalem or Corinth or anywhere else, but you would have a visible, audible DNA in common, alongside all the enriching, complementary particularities.

It was the particularities that were to cause so much trouble down through the centuries. We all have an inbuilt tendency to reject or be suspicious of those who are different from ourselves. Difference can be unsettling and threatening. It challenges our security in our own identity. And, since Genesis 3, the consequence of fallenness is the constant pattern of the more powerful imposing their will upon the weaker. At the same time we are not very skilled at being able to critique our own cultures, and it’s easy to have blind spots about values, beliefs, and behaviors with which we are familiar and comfortable, but which in some way or another are not compatible with biblical norms.

Painfully, as we study church and mission history, we see repeatedly the distortion that comes when the gospel is compromised by being linked to political, economic, military, or cultural power. Sadly, the same is true of ecclesiastical power, especially where that power is bound up with all the others. Further, conquering powers rarely show respect for, or real understanding of, the cultures to which they come. Even within the church, from early centuries, bitter splits occurred between those streams of the Christian community whose expression and understanding of their faith differed largely because of different cultures: hence, for example, the violent rupture between the Greek and Latin parts of the church, which was quite as much to do with culture and struggling for power as it was to do with theology.

At the same time, church and mission history is also mercifully lit up with examples of fine pioneers and groups who contextualized their precious message with sensitivity and creativity. The Nestorians and later the Jesuits in China; the Celtic missions in northwestern Europe; the Moravians; William Carey and his friends in Bengal: these and many more exemplify great respect for the cultures to which they came, a desire to share the gospel in terms that made sense to their particular audience, a willingness to learn the language and live long term alongside and among the people they wished to reach, and flexibility in thinking what the church might need to look like in this particular setting. This is all the more remarkable in that these people would rarely if ever have encountered people much different from themselves before setting out on their missionary journeys.

By the time we come to the past two centuries, alongside so much that was flawed, we also find ample evidence of careful study of particular cultures and much thoughtfulness about appropriate contextualization to meet the challenge of an alien religion, different thought forms, different customs and values and social organization. Yes, there are plenty of infuriating examples of totally inappropriate Western church buildings replicated in some tropical setting, or of pipe organs exported to Africa, or of hymns extolling the beauties of the snow in a place where the temperature rarely drops below 90 degrees Fahrenheit. But equally there are plenty of examples of early converts being encouraged to develop their own authentic patterns of worship in their own language and cultural idioms and of being helped to face-up to the particular issues in their context which would be incompatible with following Christ.

THE CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGE

Why has contextualization become such a pressing—and contentious—issue at the present time, both in the west/north and in the Global South? The reasons may be different in different places and among different communities, but there seem to be some widespread issues.

…IN THE WEST AND NORTH

In most places in the west/north (though not all) the church is declining and there is a widespread loss of confidence in the gospel and in the uniqueness of Christ in the face of other world religions. Even evangelicals are caught up in this. We have lost our Reformation understanding of truth, and with it the authority of Scripture is undermined. With the collapse of Christendom, not only has the church largely lost its credibility as a voice in public affairs (in Europe especially, now dominated by secularism), but also it faces an internal crisis of how to reach a generation increasingly totally alienated from traditional forms of church life and values. Further, there is an uncomfortable realization that much of our ecclesiology has itself been in cultural captivity to Christendom and Enlightenment structures. Too often it has mirrored rather than challenged the assumption that authority should be expressed through power; too often it has been preoccupied with structures and organizations rather than with the simple, flexible authentic life of the Spirit among God’s people.

At the same time, mass immigration to the west/north means that, on the one hand, we find ourselves living for the first time face to face with people who are Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist and, on the other hand, also with Christians from other parts of the world who live out their Christian faith differently. Many of the latter have far more experience than we do of bearing witness to Christ in the context of another dominant world religion and are not subverted by the long shadows of Christendom in the same way.

All these factors disturb old ways and assumptions, challenge our identity, and raise profound questions (sometimes healthily as well as painfully) about what authentic discipleship, personal and communal, should look like in the twenty-first century. Here is a sobering reminder that the task of contextualization is never completed, never static; it needs to be sensitive and continuous, with ongoing critical reflection on the status quo. Change is hard but essential. But how can we ensure that change is not shaped by an increasingly pagan culture but rather by a faith-full re-reading of and re-living of God’s Word?

To complicate matters, among evangelicals there are at least two polar opposite reactions, with many others uneasily somewhere inbetween. On the one hand, conservatives have often reacted with rigidity, believing their traditional theological formulations, (in some cases) a very literal reading of Scripture, and particular forms of church life and worship are essential for true orthodoxy. Any kind of change or adaptation is perceived as unfaithfulness. They see many fumbling attempts at contextualization driven, they believe, more by sociological analyses than theological ones, and so reject them out of hand. At the far opposite end of the spectrum, perhaps most strongly among those who embrace elements of postmodernism with the greatest enthusiasm, are those who see truth as in some sense evolving, with the Bible as a strong story written for particular contexts, and therefore offering guidelines rather than unchanging absolutes; this means that in a vastly different cultural climate one can be as flexible as one wishes about most things, provided people hear “the story of Jesus.”

Is there a third way between these two extremes? The issue of contextualization is not one only for mission and church in the Majority World. It is of acute importance for the people of God in the north and west as well.

…IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH AND NON-WESTERN CHURCHES

In the Global South and non-Western churches, the issues are usually different, though not all Global South churches are growing vigorously—some of them, too, are declining, especially where they are unable to pass on the baton of faith to an upcoming generation. Also, among Global South churches there is not one uniform attitude to the Bible so that some of the tensions seen among northern churches are reflected in the south, too.

Many (but by no means all!) Global South churches are comparatively young, having come into being sometime during the past two centuries. There are, of course, some ancient churches of various streams in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But Protestantism, and Charismatic and Pentecostal churches, are rarely older than a century. Many trace their roots to Western missionary work. They are no longer, quite rightly, willing to accept without question forms and formulations of Christian faith and behavior handed down to them by foreigners. There are inherent questions especially where evangelization was compromised by travelling alongside imperialism and colonialism; the form of Christian faith may be alien and alienating, impose cultural patterns which are unhelpful, and exclude cultural forms which would be very positive.

If the church was shaped by poorly contextualized missionary activity, there may be too little engagement with real questions in societies which did not have a long Christianized history, there will be specific questions (e.g., relating to pre-Christian ancestors, what can be salvaged from pre-Christian religion, etc.) which are not adequately addressed, and a...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword: Reflections on a New Book on Contextualization
• Preface: The Shaman Meets the Man with the Black Beard
• Part One: Reflections and Foundations
• Part Two: Contextualization at Work
• Part Three: Final Observations
• References
• Index