I mentioned newfrontiers up-coming Everything conference a few posts ago. They’ve now added some interesting articles to the conference website. Also, some great images in the gallery. Looking forward to this…

With this in mind, I was interested to read this post by Richard Mouw. After reporting on the vitality of Christian colleges in the US, he ends with the following comments:

What I do worry about in all of this is whether the evangelical churches are prepared to receive and nurture the students graduating from these colleges and universities. On many of these campuses, Lilly-funded programs on the importance of seeing one’s daily work as “vocation” have inspired students to see so-called “secular” occupations as Kingdom service. They are looking for the kind of preaching and sacramental life, as well as continuing education, to which they have become accustomed on their undergraduate campuses. If the evangelical churches fail to meet their expectations, they will go elsewhere. It will not likely be in the direction of liberal Protestantism—more likely they will move toward Anglicanism, Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Or maybe they will contribute to new forms of evangelical church life.

This brings up wider issues: Only a small proportion have even this sort of grounding. How do we serve those who do not so that they enter working life with some sense of “daily work as vocation”? And, equally important, how do we continue this by supporting and educating as part of church life?

What is contextualization?
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I propose the following definition: Contextualization is not ‘giving people what they want’ but rather it is giving God’s answers (which they may not want!) to questions they are asking and in forms that they can comprehend. “Contextualization” ‘incarnates’ the Christian faith in a particular culture.

(Taken from this talk & pdf; HT: reformissionary)

Keller makes the interesting addition that not only does the gospel answer a culture’s particular questions, but it also presents particular challenges to each culture.

    True relevance depends on changing the questions we answer,
    rather than changing the answers we already have.

It seems that there is an endless debate in the church over whether being relevant is a really bad thing or a absolutely vital thing. I want to suggest that we can attempt relevance in many ways and the consequences depend on the route. Look for relevance by changing the answers and you risk losing what you have without actually addressing the needs of those around. But do the hard work of listening to new questions and broadening the answers to meet the new needs and you will find new depth as well as serving the culture.

We are not devoted to the preservation of a single culture, but to incarnation and transformation within every culture. So we need one another to help determine the “important” and “unimportant” features of any given culture.

This will be an inherently multicultural exercise, because sorting out the important from the unimportant cannot happen in isolation or from a distance. … Only together can we discern the deeper significance of any given cultural practice, its redemptive possibilities, and its tempting distortions of the life that really is life.

– Andy Crouch

(from The Importance of Knowing What’s Unimportant)

Why do we attempt to interpret culture? Not just for some intellectual rush. We interpret to understand the questions & the plot tensions. And we aim to understand these so that we can serve better, so that we can bring renewal where it is needed. So, that we come with answers to the questions that are being asked, not the questions we think should be asked.

So, where to start? How about Bediako and the talk The Emergence of World Christianity and the Remaking of Theology (pdf, mp3). There are many interesting things in this lecture, but I was particularly interested the idea that theological development takes place, primarily at cultural crossings, when Christianity hits a new culture:

There is, then, a symbiotic relationship between mission as “cultural crossing” and theology as the process whereby the faith appropriated is lived, embodied and communicated. In as much as the several historical shifts of the heartlands of the Christian faith, as noted earlier, have been cultural crossings, they are privileged moments for understanding the meanings inherent in the faith, that is, for the development of theology.

And why is this? Because in the interaction with new cultures, new questions and concerns come to light. And so, the church finds it has to develop theology applicable to these new areas.

But isn’t this the way the early church did theology? They don’t seem to sit down, figure things out and then find how they apply. They experience new things, were forced into new areas and quickly had to catch up theologically. (Of course, the new theology then had new applications — see Paul’s letters where theology feeds ethics. In a similar way to scientific knowledge, experience produced theory produces new application.)

I think this links nicely with Curtis Chang’s ideas in Engaging Unbelief. If you remember (and if you don’t, why haven’t you read it yet?), Chang suggests that Augustine and Aquinas took an apologetic approach that listened carefully to the stories of those around, found what the key tensions were and showed how Jesus provided the answer. It doesn’t take much of a leap to think that what they were doing was more than apologetics — it fed into theology. Certainly, that is the way their writings were used subsequently.

And this finally brings us to the Campolo quote: If we are not careful, we fail to hear the questions of our culture, the tensions in the stories of those around. We are so socialised to limit our questions to the ones our theology has already answered that we forget that others may have different concerns. And, consequently, there are “areas of life where Western theology has no answers because it has no questions”. Bediako uses this quote in the contrast between the West and non-western cultures, but I think it is equally true from different constituents of one culture.

Somehow, we need to learn to listen to the questions of our culture and of the new cultures we meet. Only then can we be servants and agents for cultural renewal (as Tim Keller phrases it).

…our changed Christian world presents opportunities and challenges for Christian theology that are not generally available in the Western context, for the task of Christian articulation has now been taken “into areas of life where Western theology has no answers because it has no questions“. This is another way of saying that since the significant cultural crossings of the Christian gospel are taking place in the churches of the South, it is to these theatres of Christian interaction that we must turn for the reorientation that is needed for embracing the task of theology afresh in our time.

Sigmund Freud once commented that the Church socializes its youth to ask only those questions he Church is able to answer. Any questions it cannot adequately handle are made to seem ridiculous. By the time the children come of age, the Church seems to have the answer to all the important questions of life, because the Church has taught them which questions to ask and which questions should not be asked.
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[This] helps us to understand why people who are in the Church think it has all the answers to all the questions and problems that are important, while those outside the Church fell that it has nothing to say about the things that are really important.
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According to [Paul] Tillich, the place of the Church is not to raise questions, but to attempt to provide answers. the Church should step aside and let the people of the world raise questoins. The Church should be a listening body — sensitive to the deepest concerns of the world’s peoples, intently interested in their problems, struggling to provide solutions to their most troublesome inquiruesm, and endevoring always to serve as their servant. It’s all too easy for the people of the Church to say, “We’ve got all the answers,” without having first inquired as to what the questions might be.

Stanley Hauerwas argues that “the most important social task of Christians is to be nothing less than a community capable of forming people with virtues sufficient to witness to God’s truth in the world” In other words, the church’s primary task is not to tell the world how to run itself, nor to prescribe particular policies or strategies, but to be a community capable of developing people of virtue and goodness, who are more likely to make good, considerate, wise choices, than bad, harmful or selfish ones.

…

Holy Trinity Brompton, my church in London has what in my experience are rather unusual regular prayer meetings. The unique thing is that the solicitors, the teachers and the healthcare workers do not gather to pray for the work of the church, but the church meets to pray for the work of the solicitors, the teachers and the healthcare workers. Here the church … simply meets to encourage them, pray for them that they may have the perspective of the kingdom of God on their work, to pray for wisdom, courage and grace in the work they are called to… It is a vision of a church trying to be what Hauerwas suggests – a church seeking not to prescribe policy, but to form them in practical Christ-like goodness and wisdom, so that they become the bedrock of a functioning society, and trustworthy signposts to the Kingdom of God.