Shifty contextualization in Southern Baptist missiology

Ed Stetzer's LifeWay Research Blog, (Mar7,2k11) presents a contribution from Dr David Sills affirmative yet critical of certain trends called loosely MissionSHIFT,  after the book and a conference of that name held July 12-15 at Ridgecrest Conference Center in North Carolina.

We can learn from Sills, too, but all in all he is just too biblistic for me.  He actually says below that "The Bible is the supracultural, concrete absolute, revealed will of God for the faith and practice of Christ's church in all times all over the world."  Sills believes the Bible is "supracultural" (an echo of "supernatural"; a doctrine that is itself not Biblical --altho I'm sure Sills can drum up some verses to further his hoary bad ideas).  He isn't honouring the hermeneutical principle of interpreting between two horizons, thus denying the Bible's own historicity, I woud say.  To diminish the Bible's historicity is to de-Incarnation-ize the character of its revelatory power, then and now.  A further consequence in this sillsian shift in how the Christian witness is contextualized (contextualization shift, mission shift, echoes of Thomas Kuhn's 'paradigm shift' in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962).


Editor : David Hesselgrave and Ed Stetzer 

Veteran missionary David Hesselgrave and rising missional expert Ed Stetzer edit this engaging set of conversational essays addressing global mission issues in the third millennium. Key contributors are Charles E. Van Engen (“Mission Described and Defined”), the late Paul Hiebert (“The Gospel in Human Contexts: Changing Perspectives on Contextualization”), and the late Ralph Winter (“The Future of Evangelicals in Mission”). Those offering written responses to these essays include: (Van Engen) Keith Eitel, Enoch Wan, Darrell Guder, Andreas J. Köstenberger; (Hiebert) Michael Pocock, Darrell Whiteman, Norman L. Geisler, Avery Willis; (Winter) Scott Moreau, Christopher Little, Michael Barnett, and Mark Terry. 

Biblicism. Moralism. Legalism.  These are the three scourges that bedevil Christian faith and our fawlty Bible reading.  Sillsian biblicistic missiology is not the worst thing in missiology, and we can take pointers from him in avoiding the worst.  But it is not the best either.  Then there's what I take as code for a moralistic and legalistic stance -- "sinful practices that are clearly forbidden by God's Word." Since I don't believe in absolutizing any commands in the Bible,  except the Great Two-fold Love Command of Deuteronomy and Jesus in the Gospels,  I  am distrustful of what Sills may mean on this.  From what I hear on all sides from neanderthal Evangelicals, the one clear command in the Bible is to hate homos like myself (a Reformed VanTilian, Greg Bahnsen, tawt that homos shoud all be put to death and, it seems to me, the Southern Baptists are mostly of the same ilk).  

My own missiological tradition extends from J. H. Bavinck (1885-1964) in his Introduction to the Science of Missions, and Hendrick Kremer (1888-1965) in his book The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World (1938), to Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1999) in his Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture, and David Bosch (1929-1992) in his Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (1991).  Ah! with that last title we trace the meme of paradigm shift that travels from Kuhn into the scientific missiology of Bosch and then is reduced to operationalism by the Southern Baptists.



Stetzer and Sills are both part of the Southern Baptist missions braintrust.  Here's Dr Sills' still-valuable text from Stetzer's blog:


I greatly appreciated the section on contextualization in MissionShift, both for the article from Paul Hiebert as well as the responses to it. Dr. Hiebert has long been a hero of mine and I believe his work on contextualization to be among the most significant missiological contributions of our time.
In MissionShift, Dr. Hiebert traces the historical development of contextualization from none at all during the colonial period, to too much during the over-correction of uncritical contextualization, to the struggle for the healthy balance of critical contextualization. I would suggest that his insightful assessment is correct, but not yet complete (as in unfinished, not inadequate). Just as Hiebert's critical realism stresses that we may have true knowledge, but our knowledge is partial, Heibert's historical sweep of the development of contextualization only explains a part of the reality. Contextualization is a multilevel maze, filled with trap doors; getting it right is messy and requires constant vigilance.

We must recognize that the historical stages of contextualization did not die off when the next phases developed. They are all alive and well in various mission field contexts around the world. Additionally, new evolving forms of contextualization are taking tangential directions that continue the historical development. While critical contextualization is essential for avoiding syncretism and preserving sound doctrine in healthy churches, we must assure we are critically contextualizing the Gospel and the church, not aberrant views of them. Getting the process right with the wrong content is not a step forward.

We still find each of Hiebert's historical stages of contextualization represented on mission fields today. Non-contextualized churches appear to have been picked up with a science fiction transporter beam and placed in another culture context where they do not "fit." In areas where all houses are made of mud walls and thatch roofs, these church building are made of red brick with stained glass, pews inside, an upright piano, and a little sign behind the pulpit that reports how many were in Sunday School and brought their Bible. They sing the same songs in the same order at the same hour of worship as the missionary's home church in the sending country.

Other churches today reflect an uncritical contextualization that allows cultures to find their own expressions and beliefs. I recently preached in a Quichua church that a missionary had planted twenty-five years ago, but who then left them to figure out Christianity on their own. I was not surprised that they had mixed in their traditional witchcraft with the Christian practices they had learned and formed their own brand of syncretized Christian belief and worship.

There are many other churches whose missionary-church-planters were very careful to study the culture to understand the worldview. They learned the reasons behind cultural practices, identifying the barriers to and bridges for communicating the Gospel in culturally appropriate ways. When they encountered sinful practices that are clearly forbidden by God's Word, they addressed them in the hermeneutical community of discipled believers and found functional substitutes that fulfilled the cultural role or need but still honored God and His Word. They sought to be faithful to what God has clearly revealed and also sensitive to the culture.

New trends in contextualization are embracing forms of Christianity that some would argue are not critical but rather a return to uncritical loosing of the biblical reins. Some missionaries view C5 and Insider Movements as a step that allows cultures to decide what Christianity means and looks like in their contexts. In extreme forms, missionaries say that contextualizing their ministries in Muslim contexts allows them to call themselves Muslims (after all, a Muslim is one who submits, and they submit). They refer to God as Allah without any qualification to clarify the Triune God (there is only one true God, right?), and even pray the shahadah "There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is the prophet of Allah" (a prophet is one who speaks for God, they argue, and Mohammed said some nice things about Jesus). Traditional forms of church, worship, teaching, and preaching seem tied to the olden days and are abandoned for these newer forms of missions and church planting. However, we must take care to remain tied to the Scriptures as we critically contextualize all aspects of Christianity. The Bible is the supracultural, concrete absolute, revealed will of God for the faith and practice of Christ's church in all times all over the world.

Some take great pains to critically contextualize their understanding of church, ministry, reaching, preaching, and teaching in other areas. Errors we often see in the wake of their ministries are not necessarily the fault of contextualization, but the content that they seek to contextualize. Churches that have drifted from Evangelical moorings at home will plant that same erroneous understanding in mission contexts. If they have studied and embraced Hiebert's critical contextualization, they may be very careful to avoid non- or uncritical contextualization, and seek to plant churches that reflect their own understanding in a culturally appropriate form. Unfortunately, they would still be wide of the mark because that which they contextualized was aberrant from the start. While we seek to critically contextualize, let us remain tied closely to the Scriptures to ensure that it is the Gospel and the New Testament churches that we contextualize. MissionShift's examination of contextualization is extremely helpful and valuable, as is the full body of Paul Hiebert's work. And while contextualization continues to shift, evolve and develop, we can trust that the Word of God remains forever.


refWrite again:  My own view is that the Church militant has failed in its Christ-given mission over the course of its history, and keeps on failing.  Our mission alienates so many millions, time after time over historical time around the globe.  No wonder some missionaries slide into the compromises that Dr Sills doesn't hesitate to seize upon. Thus, we humans need to be evangelized after our death, when we exist somehow in the Interim State where in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we consider them missiologically before our death, what dreams may come must give us pause.  Hesitate, please, Dr Sills.  Our dreams in the sleep of death must give us pause, before we shuffle off this mortal coil.


We need the visit of the Person who holds each of us together in some dispersed existence of sub-nanoparticles wavicled out forensically as electromagnetic info-pulses into the universe, the Christ who created us and kings all that exists, all existents including us created by Him,  Christ the Creator,  Christ the King, Christ the Saviour.  He is the Great Evangelist, and we need Him personally in our death.  With Shakespeare and George MacDonald, I go for the asleep-in-Christ doctrine that Calvin tawt us.  But with a soteriological near-universalist twist based on His death-time visit to us in the dreams He sends us then, sends to each human, just as He "descended into Hell" (Apostle's Creed) to evangelize there before His resurrection and His securing of ours.


I work the midnite shift.


-- Owlb