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. 

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