We asked Andrew to come and lead this session as someone outside of our context to help us begin to understand our context. This might sound like a strange way to do that. What can an outsider bring us that we don’t already know? What Andrew brought along was some broad thinking about the value of contextualisation and some practical stories from his experience of church life.
What is contextualisation?
The question we’re thinking about at the moment is where are we? And that’s a question that is really about contextualisation. What on earth is this and why does it matter? Andrew shared this definition contextualisation from Tim Keller:
giving people the Bible’s answers, which they may not all want to hear, to questions about life that people in their particular time and place are asking, in language and forms they can comprehend, and through appeals and arguments with force they can feel, even if they reject them.
Tim Keller, Center Church.
In short, contextualisation is about helping people understand the message of the bible. To genuinely do that it requires us knowing people and understanding them so that we know how to communicate the message of the bible in a way that they will understand.
This is important because the God of the bible longs to be known by all people and repeatedly in the bible we see him making himself known in ways people can comprehend. There’s a whole series of blog posts of material on this point alone…
Reflections on Thursday night
Like Andrew himself said, he was pointy on Thursday night. I think it’s worth flagging that and then checking yourself and whatever assumptions you might have about this topic.
For example, perhaps you were taken by what Andrew shared about their experience of church in Ashfield and excited to replicate it. Be careful of assuming that what worked in Ashfield will work in Canterbury and Hurlstone Park. Even though we’re only a little way down the road our areas are quite different. On the flip side, be careful of assuming that because their context is different from ours there’s nothing we can learn from them.
One of the highlights for me on Thursday night was the reminder that every Christian is a missionary. Every single one of us. We are all commissioned by Jesus to bear witness to him. Whatever shape that takes for you you will need to wrestle with contextualising the gospel to the people you work with, or the friends you run with, or the family you pray for.
For me, one of the other highlights was looking through the scriptures and seeing how the gospel is communicated in different ways to different people. We looked at how Paul himself spoke of being ‘all things to all people’ (1 Corinthians 9). We looked at the way his speeches changed depending on his cultural context (e.g. his speech in Acts 13 before the synagogue in Antioch is very different from his speech in Acts 17 and the very non-Jewish context of Athens). And we looked at the stunning way the apostle John picked up a greek philosophical concept of the logos (or the word/message) and communicated the gospel through that lens (see John 1.1-14).
For me, I was encouraged to hold tightly to the broad principals of contextualisation (learning about where God has placed us and earnestly trying to understand the people in our area), and hold loosely to the practical expressions of how that played out in Ashfield.
Going forward
Thursday night was really just the beginning of a conversation about where are we? In term 3 we will run a follow up workshop that will be just us. And it will be just us coming up with ideas about how we should behave in light of where we are.
Between now and then I would encourage you to keep up the conversation. Talk with each other about your own reflections about the workshop, talk with each other about how to better understand our context, and talk with people you work with, live next door to or see at school drop offs. Who are they?
Two ideas…
On Thursday night I mentioned two ideas that I think will help us keep up this conversation. Prayer walks and focus groups.
Prayer walks. These are pretty simple. As the name suggests you walk and you pray. You will soon receive an invitation to a congregational prayer walk. The idea is that we walk throughout our parish and pray as we walk. I’m not sure if you’ve done that kind of thing before, it can be a little daunting. But I would encourage you to give it a go. I have found these help me to see where I am in a new light. It teaches me to look at where I live like a missionary. You may even like to organise smaller scale prayer walks with your small group, or with some friends from church.
Focus groups. Focus groups are one off meetings with local people who don’t consider themselves to be Christian to understand more about the people who live in our area. Focus groups ideally are made up of people with something in common (e.g. a group of Nepalese locals, or parents from the school, or friends from a sporting club). The idea is to invite them to a one off meeting to help you understand your local area and who lives there.
I plan on hosting at least one of these. If you would like to host one send me an email and I can give you an info sheet on how to run one.
This is just the beginning of the conversation. What reflections did you have on Thursday night? What ideas do you have about how we can understand our context?
