“EMBODYING OUR FAITH”
(Part 3)

I closed my last blog post with Tim’s provocative challenge to “Sunday churchgoers: "we must begin to approach our culture (meaning the people around us) more like missionaries in our post-Christian world."


I’ll bet this aroused some deep feelings and reactions in some of you! Feelings of fear, doubt, question (“whatever does this mean?!”), rejection, irrelevance (“doesn’t apply to us in Hilmar...”), maybe even complete incomprehension. But Tim is helpful. He goes on to describe what this means and how it can be implemented today, through 1. contextualization and by getting a truer understanding of what it means to 2. make disciples.

CONTEXTUALIZATION: “The dynamic process whereby the constant message of the gospel interacts with specific, relative human situations.” (Michael Frost; Alan Hirsch)

•The gospel is always presented in a particular packaging. There is no such thing as a pure gospel if by that is meant something which is not embodied in a culture. Every interpretation of the gospel is embodied in some cultural form. It is important that we make this distinction between content and container.

•Contextualization follows the pattern of the incarnation and the model set by the New Testament Church. In Christ, God performs an unrepeatable feat of contextualization in taking on human form. For Jesus, becoming human also meant taking on the particular cultural garb of his environment. He came not as a generic human being but as a Jewish male, wearing Jewish clothes, speaking Aramaic, and living by the cultural values of first-century Israel. In the book of Acts, we see both the struggles and joys that the earliest churches experienced as the gospel spread...to Jerusalem and Judea (same culture), Samaria (different culture), and to the ends of the earth (very different cultures). The New Testament records the growing pains the Church experienced as it faithfully brought the gospel to these differing settings.

•Example of PAUL IN ATHENS - his response is a great model of contextualization:


a. Finding common ground: Paul finds areas of agreement between his faith in Jesus and the religious beliefs of those he seeks to evangelize. As we engage our unbelieving friends in dialogue, elements of their belief systems and world views will be true. In a postmodern world, there is no shortage of common ground. (Example: spiritual disciplines - Tim shared with a young woman that he regularly practiced meditation, and she was shocked. Her impression of Christianity was that it was only about holding certain beliefs and not about the actual practice of spirituality.)

b. Looking for God at work: Paul recognizes God’s fingerprints in Athenian culture. Long before a gospel witness ever arrives, God is at work in the lives of those who will come to faith. Much of our task as evangelists is to help our unbelieving friends identify the work that God is already doing in their lives. (Example: redemptive analogies - In local customs and traditions, folk stories and legends, linguistic elements, and even in the prophecies of local shamans, foreshadowings of the gospel spring to life when it is presented - Messiah figure “Bali raja,” coconut communion, and baptism in the Ganges River as background for the Truthseekers Christian movement in India).

c. Arguing to the Scriptures: Paul relates the truths of the gospel to sources the Athenians are already familiar with. The gospel story becomes the larger story as it subsumes and explains the rival story (of the Athenians). The rival world view ends up being explained with the biblical world view. (Paul) attempts to introduce the truth of Scripture to his hearers in a way that they will accept. Rather than arguing from the Scriptures (as he does with the Jews), he takes a roundabout journey through Greek philosophy and argues to the Scriptures. This is critical to the way we approach missions in our cultural setting as well. In bringing the gospel to a postmodern world, we are encountering people who are increasingly unfamiliar with the biblical story and who do not recognize the Bible as an authoritative source. (Example: appeal to the culture’s own poets, philosophers, make an ally of pop culture, and argue to the Scriptures rather than from them.)

d. Starting the story farther back: When sharing Jesus with Jews or God-fearers, Paul was able to appeal to their shared history and Scriptures to persuade the that Jesus was the promised Messiah. In Athens, no such common ground exists. Paul’s hearers subscribe to a different view of the universe and worship different gods. Consequently, Paul cannot meaningfully proclaim the Messiah has come without first introducing the Athenians to the God of Israel (Acts 17:24-31). For most of our country’s history, a basic understanding of the Christian God could be assumed, Bible stories and scriptural references were common enough...that biblical allusions would be recognized in the public square, and most people had some basic understanding of who Jesus was. In our shifting culture, we can no longer assume (this). In a post-Christian context, we should assume people know nothing about the Bible and the Good News until we have evidence to the contrary. (Example: Evangelism (in the past few centuries) consisted of calling people to commit to something they most likely already believed on some level. Evangelistic tools like the altar call, mass evangelistic rallies, and tract evangelism were developed. The revival model lent itself to a sort of sales approach, complete with an emphasis on “closing the deal.” Immediate decisions were called for and became the norm. Evangelism as a decision-oriented event becomes far less effective in the absence of a Christian world view.)

e. Preaching without compromise: Paul does not water down the message of Christ. This is the classic task of the cross-cultural missionary: to engage culture without compromising the gospel.” (Frost/Hirsch) We misunderstand contextualization if we see it as an attempt to make the gospel more palatable. Nor should people misunderstand contextualization as a way of better marketing the Church.

•Either accommodation to or isolation from the culture means God’s mission goes unfulfilled. Every missionary path has to find the way between these two dangers: irrelevance and syncretism.

•We have to remember that even if we do not change our approach for the receiving culture, we are not necessarily presenting a “purer” gospel or a gospel that is culture free. Rather it is quite possible that in not changing we are insisting that a person conform to cultural wrappings originally suited for another time and place (presumably our own preferred time and place). Many of our faith expressions are out of touch, not because they’re ancient but because they’re antiquated. Relevance is not about conformity; it is about clarity and connectedness.

MAKE DISCIPLES: “(The Great Commission) to make disciples has been understood in different ways. Many understand it as evangelism - converting people to saving faith in Jesus.


Many others see mere evangelism as a shallow reading of the text and emphasize that these converts need to be discipled, which means attention must be given to the spiritual formation of believers. I think we would benefit from revisioning (evangelism or spiritual formation) in a more holistic way. Discipleship IS the Christian life. And the goal of the Christian life is to become like Jesus.” At the heart of Christian mission is the ministry of disciplemaking.

•Two models of disciplemaking:
MODEL 1 - Evangelism was...everything that happens to lead a person toward Christ until that person becomes a Christian. Discipleship was...everything that happens to help a person grow in their faith after the person becomes a Christian. The two were totally separate. I became disillusioned (with this model) over time. Why was it that new believers were so prone to fall away if follow up was not immediate? Was conversion to Christ that fragile a thing? Why were new believers so resistant to follow-up? (And) when had I ever challenged someone to count the cost of being Jesus’ disciple? The answer was never. I was selling people a ticket to heaven, not a life of becoming like Jesus. The model I was using was making it more difficult for people to live as actual disciples of Jesus.
--Conversion is treated more as an event and less as a process.
--Rarely are potential disciples truly challenged to consider what it will cost them to follow Jesus (and) may actually serve to inoculate people against the gospel by offering them an inadequate experience of Jesus.
--Issues of trust and assimilation into the church family: new believers frequently feel as though they have been sold one thing, only to discover that they have bought another (unappealing requirements i.e. attending a church, prayer, reading the Bible, witnessing to others, giving, etc.)
--The gospel presented to and accepted by them is essentially self-centered, and becoming other-centered seems an intrusion rather than a normal part of Christian living. Their faith is seen as a personal matter. An overemphasis on personal decision can lead to a personal, and ultimately private, version of Christianity.
--(When) evangelism and discipleship are treated as completely separate entities, it feeds a pick-and-choose mentality among believers. Discipleship becomes the primary activity for believers. Evangelism is seen as optional; it rarely happens in the lives of most believers. In fact, one of the greatest barriers to evangelism is the sheer volume of activity we ask our congregants to participate in.

MODEL 2 - A more holistic approach allows conversion to take place via a process rather than an event, and encourages potential disciples to see the Christian life up close and to count the cost of becoming a Christ follower. Jesus seemed largely unconcerned who was in and who was out, but simply called all to follow regardless of where they were at in the process, always inviting them to go deeper. Jesus’ approach fostered a process that naturally included both aspects of disciplemaking: evangelism and formation. Such an approach is biblically faithful, brings with it a number of benefits, and is especially suited for ministry in a postmodern context. Three broad shifts: 1. from evangelism as an event to evangelism as a process (postmodern people typically need more time/truth is discerned primarily by experience), 2. from impersonal to personal (most tools utilized in modern evangelism are essentially impersonal: crusade evangelism, between a speaker and a stadium full of people, between a Christian with a tract and a total stranger, etc.), 3. from a rational to an embodied apologetic. Evangelistic methods that are event-oriented, impersonal, and more rational than embodied contribute to the bracketing off of evangelism from the rest of a Christian’s life.

•These approaches should also raise some concern in terms of the authenticity of the resulting conversions. Have those who prayed a “sinner’s prayer” actually come to a saving relationship with Jesus? Is there saving faith behind the the prayer or are they merely mouthing words? It is faith that saves, not the words a person recites. Too often we treat such a prayer as a defining test of salvation, rather than looking at the fruits that come with repentance. Time and the resulting fruit will tell if the conversion is real or not.

Howard Snyder: “Church people think about how to get people into the church; kingdom people think about how to get the church into the world. Church people worry that the world might change the church; kingdom people work to see the church change the world.”


•When the mission degenerates into serving ourselves, we not only fail to live out God’s mission but miss much of the rich formation God would birth in us as a result. More than ministry to those within the church, it is mission to those outside the church that brings the spiritual vitality the church desires.

Disciplemaking: Spiritual Formation As Apprenticeship To Jesus Three elements necessary for lasting spiritual change to occur: 1. vision (salvation not just as forgiveness of sin but as a process of becoming like Jesus; God’s kingdom is available now, and as Christ’s disciples we participate in extending God’s kingdom rule to the ends of the earth; the Church serves as the world’s first taste of the kingdom), 2. intention (we must make a decision to apprentice ourselves to Jesus - too often we present the gospel as a set of truths we must subscribe to, as opposed to a relationship with Jesus, (and people) have no idea that they will be changed by him; in the Church we nurture intent as we present a compelling vision of the discipled life, offer clear means by which people can move into this vision, and urge and model doing and not merely hearing the Word), 3. means (simply trying harder (to be a disciple) will not be enough; training is different than trying; spiritual disciplines make ourselves pliable for God’s work in our lives).

Attitudes And Practices To Cultivate As We Make Disciples Of Postmodern People


1. authenticity (no phoniness, open and honest about our failures and humble in our successes, no sugarcoating, speaking plainly about our beliefs and stance on issues), 2. humility (posture of “fellow traveler,” not of one who has arrived or who has all the answers, remembering that God has already been working in a person’s life before we arrived as a messenger, arguing to our basis of truth rather than from our basis of truth), 3. be a listener (evangelism involves listening as opposed to simply informing them of truth and asking them to believe it; this generation is unsatisfied with being spoon-fed the “right” answers - (need to) process these deep questions), 4. be a storyteller (faith that captures their imagination, share your story, tell God’s story, an approach to spiritual formation that lives in the real-life stories of those around them), 5. make room for mystery and ambiguity (God is bigger than we can fully comprehend, allow our faith to be filled with awe and wonder, choose to live in (rather than alleviate) the tension that comes from the many paradoxes inherent to a faith as rich as ours), 6. make an ally of pop culture (communicate with our culture utilizing media that is familiar to them), 7. embrace the mystical element of faith (experiential faith, experience God, not just acquire fact about Him), 8. avoid a shrunken gospel (present a full picture of the message and avoid any kind of bait-and-switch approach - evangelism does not merely invite people to heaven but to participate in God’s world-changing mission.

Whew! This was a dense blog post, to say the least. But I hope it helps you get a better grip on what it is we are facing as “church people” seeking to live out our calling as Christ’s Church in our “post-Christian” and “postmodern” world today. The issues, dynamics, and challenges that we face are immense, complex, and different from what many of us who are older grew up with.

In my final post, I will offer Tim’s very practical suggestions and practices for how to be a congregation that is “embodying our faith,” based on the real-life practices of Life Covenant.