Linguistic or Liturgical Intelligibility?

In his book The Lord’s Service, Jeff Meyers makes a great point about the difference between intelligibility and familiarity, and how that often a lack of the latter is confused with a lack of the former.

Why does this matter?

Well, in discussions about the need for contextualization in worship, the claim is often made that all that’s being argued for is that pastors be intelligible in their presentation of the gospel. "Just speak in a language that people can understand," we often hear. If we reply, "Oh, you mean English and not Farsi?", we begin to see by the answer given that intelligibility involves a lot more than it seems at first glance.

On top of linguistic intelligibility, there also seems to be the need for liturgical intelligibility, which is far more controversial an issue.

But here’s where Meyers’s distinction between intelligibility and familiarity becomes very helpful. If we’re honest we will admit that a visitor at our church, whether a believer or not, will be able to understand lots of practices and concepts with which he still may be unfamiliar. For example, there’s nothing inherent in the practice of kneeling during a confession of sin or raising hands during the singing of the Doxology that is unintelligible to everyday Americans. Assuming a normal level of intelligence, anyone can look at a group of people bowing and asking God for forgiveness and conclude, "Hmm, it seems that these people think they’ve done something wrong, and they want the God whom they think they’ve offended to pardon them." The same goes for the lifting of hands during the Doxology: sure, the words and melody may be new, but the posture and practice themselves are perfectly understandable, albeit unfamiliar.

So the question that arises (but is not "begged") is, Is it legitimate to alter the church’s forms of, or practices in, worship for the sake of those for whom they may seem odd, foreign, or irrelevant?

How to Reach Non-Whites

Michael Horton makes a great point about context-ualization in his recent article "Does Anybody Really know What Time It Is?" He writes:

If we are going to understand our times--and how the gospel addresses us in them--con-textualization itself will have to be "context-ualized." In other words, we have to realize that this concept too belongs a particular pattern of thinking and web of assumptions we have inherited as denizens of a certain time and place.

"The gospel," adds Horton, "has been around a lot longer than has the doctrine of contextualizing."

I can hear the objection as I type: "But doesn't Paul claim to have become 'all things to all men'? Doesn't this prove that contextualizing has been around since the very beginning?" The problem with this line of reasoning is that it assumes, without attempting to prove, that there is a one-to-one correspondence between Paul's "becoming a Gentile" in his own day and a church planter's attempt to pull out all stops to relate to his target audience in our own.

The reason these dots don't connect is simple: The division between Jews and Gentiles was not primarily racial, but theological. In other words, it wasn't merely that Jews hated non-Jews and Paul decided to break those illegitimate barriers down. Rather, the wall of division was erected by God himself under the Mosaic covenant, with a whole bunch of rules and rituals bequeathed from on high to reinforce it. The purpose of this separation was so that God could illustrate what holiness and privilege looked like, and ultimately, to illustrate the weakness and inability of his privileged people to retain their unique, set-apart status.

Turning to today, there simply is no demographic category that even comes close to mirroring Paul's concern in I Corinthians 9. Whether we're talking about race, gender, or socioeconomic status, the fact is that in Christ Jesus there is no longer male or female, Jew or Gentile, bond or free, for we are all one in Christ. To put it simply, the gospel makes these categories irrelevant. The new covenant is catholic in the truest sense of that word, for it opens up God's promises to all tribes, tongues, peoples, and nations.

Furthermore, do we really want to mirror the apostle's supposed demographic sensitivity? What if I taught a seminar at a missions conference titled, "How to Reach Non-Whites"? After all, since Paul lumped all non-Jews into one catch-all category, why can't I do the same? Asian? African? Hispanic? Arab? Oh, I totally understand all those people. They are non-white, after all.

To be honest, if my vast experience at being both an earthling and Adamic cannot qualify me to relate to other Adamic earthlings without also having to learn about monster trucks, fine cigars, or teenage vampires, then I may as well quit now, because I just don't have the time.

.

For two of those pursuits, anyway....

Some Questions Concerning Contextualization

Mike Horton wrote a great piece for Modern Reformation recently critiquing the dogma of contextualization with which I hope to interact in subse-quent posts.

(For those of you unfamiliar with contextualization, it refers to the practice of presenting the message of God’s Word in such a way that it will be intelligible to those who are listening. There’s much more to it, of course. Included is the idea that we need to take demographics into account when preaching so as to understand our audience and meet them where they’re at, as the saying goes.)

To kick things off, I thought I’d ask a couple questions to get the conversation flowing:

Can we not say that the categories that contextualizers consider so important—such as socioeconomics, race, and gender—are the very categories Paul insists are now irrelevant under the New Covenant (Gal. 3:28)?

Is there really a one-to-one correspondence between Paul’s becoming all things to all men on the one hand, and our incarnating the gospel to our hearers on the other? In other words, are Jew/Gentile relations analogous to Black/White ones?

Discuss.

And on the Eighth Day the Market Said, "Let There Be Youth," and There Was Youth. And the Market Saw That It Was Good.

Continuing his diatribe against what he calls “ecclesial apartheid,” Michael Horton sets his sights on the holy grail of evangelical ecclesiology: youth ministry. In the same way that Madison Avenue created the youth demographic in order to sell stuff to them while they’re still naïve enough to believe the things Madison Avenue tell them, so the “catholicity of the market” pursued by many churches seeks to pander to this demographic in order to lure parents to the churches their kids like the best (advertisers refer to this as the “nag factor”).

The same market forces that drive us to disposable identities and perpetual novelty (planned adolescence) are tearing apart the fabric of genuine covenant community.... Generational narcissism has become a publicly accepted form of self-preoccupation since the 1970s, and each generation is profiled in such literature in the most hyperbolic terms. When marketing and sociology developed the demographic known as “youth,” the church created the “youth group.”

Horton then draws attention to the statistic that half of erstwhile churchgoing college freshmen are unchurched by their sophomore year. He argues that, given the perpetuation of “children’s church” and youth services, “instead of regarding them as having abandoned church, we might perhaps wonder if they were ever fully a part of one.”

We have learned to think as never before in terms of the uniqueness of over-stereotyped generations. Where church divisions used to be lamented as differences over doctrine, they are now celebrated as “megachurch” and “emergent,” as if each generation were an ex nihilo creation.

This gives rise to a couple interesting points. First, what is celebrated as “incarnational ministry” seems to be a prime suspect in perpetuating such market-driven catholicity, and second, this type of approach tends to de-emphasize doctrinal differences (cult) and over-emphasize demographic ones (culture). Hence Christian unity focused on a common confession of the gospel is marginalized in favor of a hegemonic uniformity driven by market forces.

We must reject the divide-and-conquer approach of rival catholicities, taking Paul’s question to the Corinthians—“Don’t you have homes to eat and drink in?”—and apply it to the churches of our own day: “Don’t you have your own social networking contexts like work, school, or Facebook to pursue your unique tastes in music, sports, or hobbies?” After all, the in-breaking of the age to come that happens in worship every Lord’s Day relativizes all times and places and jeopardizes our own cherished uniqueness in this passing age.

In a word, the phrase “the church in Corinth” should be read with the accent on the first two words, not just the last two.

Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi

Liturgical scholars often insist that a church's worship is a direct by-product of what they believe about God. If a particular congregation's leadership considers God to be a kind of magic genie whose job is to do our bidding, then their worship will most likely be narcissistic and consumer-driven. And conversely, if a church understands God to be the sovereign King of the universe, then an atmosphere of reverence and awe will prevail.

At least, so the theory goes.

Unfortunately, this is only half the story. As indicated by the historic slogan lex orandi, lex credendi (literally, "The rule of prayer influences the rule of belief"), the relationship between confession and worship, dogma and liturgy, cuts both ways. In other words, it's not simply the case that a church's worship is the result of her beliefs about God, but it is equally true that her beliefs about God are largely shaped by the way she worships.

History bears this out. Well before the church's Christology assumed its mature, Chalcedonian definition believers were already worshiping a God who subsisted in three divine Persons. Both Augustine and Prosper of Auquitatine appealed to the church's practice of infant baptism in order to refute the Pelagian heresy that children are born without original sin. They were saying, in effect, "If infants are innocent, then why have we been baptizing them all this time?" In Prosper's own words: "Legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi" ("Let the law of prayer establish the law of belief").

If it is true that worship shapes belief as significantly as belief shapes worship, then the ramifications are pretty serious for those churches—whether evangelical or Reformed—that insist on making style a leading factor in how they conduct divine worship. Whether their aim is to woo the unchurched or demonstrate their "relevance" to those coveted artsy-fartsy soul-patched bohemians, the ever-present danger is that Jesus will be transformed from Deus homo into some guyliner-wearing dude in an indy band hoping to land a record deal.

Luther was right, the church will sing its way into idolatry long before its dogmaticians join the party.

The Incarnation: A Good Start?

The third of Niebuhr's five options for determining the relationship of Christ to culture is "Christ Above Culture," and is, according to him, the majority position in the history of the church.

This view, Niebuhr argues, insists that:

"... Christ and the world cannot be simply opposed to each other. Neither can the 'world' as culture simply be regarded as the realm of godlessness; since it is at least founded on the 'world' as nature, and cannot exist save as it is upheld by the Creator and Governor of nature.... We cannot say, 'Either Christ or culture,' because we are dealing with God in both cases. We must not say, 'Both Christ and culture,' in full awareness of the dual nature of our law, our end, our situation."

Advocates of this "synthesist" position include Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria and, most importantly, Thomas Aquinas who, according to Niebuhr, managed to combine without confusing "philosophy and theology, state and church, civic and Christian virtues, natural and divine laws, Christ and culture."

"Thomas's synthesis was not only an intellectual achievement but the philosophical and theological representation of a social unification of Christ and culture."

On of the greatest problems wth this approach, argues D.A. Carson, is that it ignores just how culturally conditioned such syntheses really are. Just like the Jesus of Harnack and Herrmann looked suspiciously like a nineteenth-century German liberal, so the Jesus of the contemporary advocates of "Christ Over Culture" looks, well, just like us.

I find it curious that in the thinking of many, the incarnation of the Son of God is considered to be a mere first step towards Christ incarnating himself to become "the express image" of whoever our target audience happens to be. Perhaps the Market's obsession with demographics has subtly taught us that incidentals such as income and race are so profound that the Son's merely becoming Man was not enough to convince us of God's earnest desire to be relevant.

But take the next step and make Jesus "my homeboy" and I'll buy the T-shirt.

Abstinence, Indulgence, and Speaking the Lizingua Francizzle

Well, I'm a bit bored with Sam Harris, and if the dearth of interaction is any indication, so are you. Ever the one to chameleonically adapt to the whims of the people, I'll take an open-ended haitus from dissecting Letter to a Christian Nation and turn our attention to something that our Friday Features have got me thinking about.

Let's talk about the Christian and pop culture.

There are a few schools of thought with respect to this issue. There are those who see no middle ground between abstinence and abuse. For these folks, any indulgence in secular culture, be it film, television, or music, is threatening and potentially harmful to one's spiritual life. Curiously, this rarely applies to non-Christian books (provided they're old) or sports. But I digress....

Others embrace the whole pop culture thing, often under the guise of what they call "incarnationalism" or "contextualization." By this they mean that since Jesus embodied the gospel in a form that his people could relate to and understand (i.e., that of a Jewish man), we must follow his lead and seek to speak to our culture in its own lingua franca and with its own adopted forms. As long as they're white.

Still others either refrain from pop culture for non-spiritual reasons such as taste, time, or lack of interest, or engage in it for equally non-spiritual reasons such as, well, liking it.

What do you think? Is "this much" too much, or is "too much never enough"? Are certain media acceptable while others out of bounds? How may one's engagement in pop culture, or lack thereof, benefit/harm his spiritual life? Are there discernable and/or distinct trends among evangelicals and the Reformed?

And can we ignore the role our eschatology plays in all this?

Countercultural Contextualization?

The dialogue over the last couple days has been both helpful and lengthy (we've had a combined 350 unique visitors and 750 page views since Tuesday morning, but I suppose that's to be expected when Darryl Hart and Tim Keller are joining the conversation)....

But one area that needs to be clarified, I think, is the nature of counterculturalism.

When a ministry such as Redeemer in New York makes a claim to both counterculturalism and contextualization, I must admit that, initially, I have trouble wrapping my mind around such strange bedfellows (kind of like the first time I saw a photo of Kevin Federline). How can a church both contextualize the gospel to the tastes of its surroundings and claim to subvert them at the same time? And what was Britney thinking when she hooked up with K-Fed anyway?

But I think I'm beginning to understand the Redeemer Model: Christians are to be markedly different when they interact with unbelievers at work, for instance, but then in public worship they are to make every effort not to stumble those same visiting unbelievers unnecessarily. So to use Keller's example from the comments below, a Christian CEO won't seek to maximize profits if workers' rights are violated (counterculturalism), and his church won't use the Trinity Hymnal if the unbelievers' tastes are violated (contextualization).

But this seems to be doing things in precisely the opposite way than the Scriptures tell us to.

It is not in the cultural kingdom that Christians are to be countercultural, but in the cultic kingdom. When we are engaged in common grace, kingdom-of-man activity we are to go about our business quietly, honestly, and with all diligence. We pay our taxes, we respect our fellow man, and we obey the powers that be (I Pet. 2:12-17; Rom. 13:1-7; I Tim. 2:1-2).

But on the contrary, when we are summoned into the heavenly Jerusalem each Lord's Day we give expression to the subversive, otherworldly, and countercultural characteristics that define us as a community (and if you ask me, eating the flesh and drinking the blood of our murdered Leader is a tad more revolutionary than caring about workers' rights... just ask any member of the Green Party).

So contextualization and counterculturalism can coexist. But believers should practice the former in the secular realm and the latter in the sacred....

Trickle-Down Missionomics

Does the emphasis upon (or infatuation with) "the city" that men like Tim Keller display strike any of you as odd? The city, so the argument goes, is the hub of culture, and if the city can be won, the ripple effects will reach the towns and villages.

It reminds me of President Reagan's "trickle-down economics," according to which the opulence of the wealthy will eventually benefit everyone else.

What should we make of this? Is our goal to transform society, and if so, is the city integral to reaching that goal? Why does the Bible use so much agrarian imagery if it's the city that is central to God's redemptive plan?

"We Preach Christ...."

"Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom," Paul wrote in I Corinthians 1:22-23, "but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles."

Was Paul using hyperbole here? Did he really "preach Christ crucified" in every sermon?

For many today, what has become known as "Christ-Centered Preaching" runs the risk of blunting the sharp edges of biblical imperatives (for example, after reading the command that Christians should love God and neighbor, the minister says, "Well since we can't do this, it's a good thing Jesus died for us!"). Further, "redemptive-historical preaching" is often considered tantamount to preaching the same sermon every week with a different text ("In John 11:35 we read, 'Jesus wept.' Now you'll remember that Adam was originally created good....").

What are we to make of Christ-centered preaching? Redemptive-historical preaching? How do these differ from the Puritan method of Doctrine, Reason, Use? What role does "application" play in preaching? And perhaps most importantly, How on earth do we make an ancient text relevant for the (post)modern hearer?

How to be Missional and Countercultural

Well, I've spent (more than) enough time describing what the Church is not to do under the guise of contextualization, but lest I fall prey to Moody's quip ("I like the way I do evangelism more than the way you don't do it") I will do my best to describe what a missional church would look like under a two kingdoms rubric.

First, I draw a distinction between being missional and being contextual. "Missional" is a mindset that believers should have at all times. The goal of missional churches is to send, not necessarily to attract. "Contextual," on the other hand, seems to describe the tone and ethos of the actual worship service rather than the behavior of the saints Monday through Saturday.

But here's where a two kingdoms paradigm comes into play: During corporate worship on the Lord's day, we are no longer American, Asian, black, white, rich, poor, barbarian, Scythian, bond, or free. In other words, it is our unique folk culture that we are to unabashedly display in public worship, with all its ancient and countercultural glory. Our "context" for worship, therefore, is Mount Zion and the heavenly Jerusalem, and our primary concern is not pleasing the culture, but pleasing Jesus, the Mediator of the new covenant, whose blood speaks better things than that of Abel (Heb. 12:22-24).

So when God, through his minister, calls the saints heavenward to worship, the purpose of the remainder of the gathering is just that: for the saints to worship. But when the service culminates with God, through his minister, commissioning his people to go forth in his Name and with his blessing, these redeemed people, having just experienced the Lord's calling, cleansing, consecration, and communion, are now to go out into all the world and make disciples of all nations.

So our missional calling does not mean that we adapt divine worship to the presuppositions, trends, and tastes of this passing age. What it does mean, however, is that we cease trying to attract people to church with our pandering and programs and start living our most holy faith before the eyes of a watching world.

This is the kind of mission I am excited about, for it is this, and not cultural mimicry, that will compel postmodern cynics to ask us a reason for the hope that lies within us.

Form and Content, Medium and Message

Marshall McLuhan has famously stated that "the medium is the message." This means that it is not only the content of what we say that speaks to people, but the form which our message takes screams every bit as loudly.

As social critic Ken Myers has written, "The assumption that all forms are neutral is not itself a neutral assumption." In other words, the idea that as long as the message of the Bible is preached, it makes little difference what types of media are used to convey that message, is a uniquely post-Enlightenment position with which hardly anyone in the first 1500 years of Church history would have agreed.

I could provide an obvious example involving, say, "Fairest Lord Jesus" sung to the tune of "I Stab People" by the Insane Clown Posse, but for the sake of bringing the point a little closer to home, take the issue of informal dress (of which most informal churches are quick to assure us when we visit their websites). It is undeniable that there is a connection between the anti-authoritarian assumptions of post-sixties Americans and the resistance of many of today's evangelicals to dress as nicely for church as they do for work. In the "wardrobe wars," it seems, God can't hold a candle to Mammon.

A better example could be provided from Paul's argument to the Corinthians that their desire for the Christian message to be presented with such power and eloquence that it would seem impressive in the eyes of men is utterly inconsistent with the nature of that message. If the gospel is all about the weakness and foolishness of the cross, then to present it in glitzy packaging is rather inconsistent. Like trying to hold water in a sieve or communicate the Pythagorean Theorem using smoke signals, the content simply can't be conveyed using that form.

Is it possible that, in our insistence upon the supposed neutrality of the media which carry our message, we have allowed our cultural convictions to shape our conventions, thus rendering our churches expressions of our cultural disorder, rather than remedies for it?

Intelligibility or Familiarity?

A frequent objection from the missional crowd (by the way, who says they get to co-opt that word?) is that Reformed or traditional worship is "unintelligible" to non-believers.

Let's pause here and examine this charge for a moment.

Imagine the following scenario during a worship service: The pastor says something like, "Let us pray together and confess our sins and shortcomings to God," then everyone prays, and then the pastor says, "God is a loving and forigiving God, and if you confessed your sins to him, he forgives you for Jesus' sake."

For the life of me, I can't figure out what is so unintelligible about this! Assuming the non-Christians present actually speak English and have come across the words pray, sin, and God at some point in their lives, then I must conclude that they can at least figure out what's happening all around them: Christians sin, God doesn't like it, but when they confess it, he forgives them because he loves them.

Is it familiar to them? Certainly not! But unfamiliarity is not the same as unintelligibility.

But when you stop to think about it, Christian worship is unfamiliar to everyone before they become Christians (just like the culture of Bangkok is unfamiliar upon one's first visit). As with the entire Christian life, the longer we walk with Jesus and worship him, the more comfortable and familiar we become with him, his people, his Word, and his worship.

After all, if creating a church experience that is completely familiar to the non-believer is our goal, we'll have to ask ourselves, "But if our church is no different from what they get in the world, why would they bother to show up?"

Enter the Xboxes, the velcro walls, and whatever else will entertain the religious consumers.

Gimme That Ol' Time, Middle Eastern, Reformed Religion!

There are a couple objections on the part of the "contextualizers" that I'd like to address briefly in this post and the next.

The first is that churches with "traditional worship" (a phrase I hate) are simply replacing worship that would be relevant in this culture with worship that was relevant in the culture of Calvin's Geneva 500 years ago.

This is simply false.

As anyone who has studied the history of Christian worship will testify, in no sense whatsoever were the Reformers trying to reinvent the worship wheel. Rather, they were interested in going back to the earliest sources they could find in order to separate primitive Christian worship from its medieval Roman Catholic distortions and aberrations. As liturgical scholar Hughes Old has ably demonstrated in his Patristic Roots of Reformed Worship, the services in all the sixteenth-century Reformed churches were every bit as ancient to those people as they seem to us today. Reformed worship, therefore, is not white, Genevan, or Northern European.

In fact, the early church in the book of Acts worshiped according to the pattern of the Jewish synagogues, which was characterized by set patterns, liturgy, readings, and prayers. This means that the worship of Reformed churches in North America today is not only similar to that of Geneva, but to that of the early church fathers, the apostles, and the people of God during Old Testament times.

If you ask me, that's pretty good company....

Pop Culture, Folk Culture

What do the advocates of "contextualization" mean exactly by that term?

Yeah, yeah, I know: We're supposed to communicate in terms that the culture can actually understand. But everyone agrees with that (at least in theory). Beyond the obvious, though, what should churches do in order to be contextual?

It is here that a crucial distinction comes into play: pop vs. folk culture.

Many seem to presuppose that pop culture sets the terms of the discussion, and then the Christian church must conform. So, since Boomers in our culture want a relaxed worship experience in which they can hear Beach Boys style music surrounded by people in leis and hula skirts, we should give them that. After all, as long as the message is good, the form it takes doesn't matter, right? Welcome to Margaritaville Community Church!

But pop culture is a pretty recent concept (until the invention of analog tape and the subsequent ability to mass-market and mass-produce it, pop culture didn't have a leg to stand on).

Christianity, however, has always been a folk culture. We are a "peculiar people" with a calendar, language, and history that are unique and distinct from the world's (with some overlap, of course). So rather than asking, "How many X-Boxes will our children's ministry need to have a large, successful church?" we should be asking, "What, according to the Bible's folk culture, should our children's ministry look like?"

When we ask the right question, we find (to our contemporary culture's horror) that it is biblical for kids to worship together with their parents from as early an age possible, and that dividing the body of Christ by age or musical tastes is an incredibly American thing to do.

But isn't insisting that families forget their own personal tastes and worship together "irrelevant" in today's society?

Maybe. But when a society's popular culture is out of accord with the Bible's folk culture, it is the former, and not the latter, that is the truly irrelevant one.

Missional Marxism?

With all the careful attention given to demographics research by cultural critics and missiologists alike, it seems, to me at least, that amid the myriad of categories we stick people into (Boomers, Gen-Xers, D.I.N.K.s, urban hipsters, Bobos, wealthy white suburbanites) we Christians have forgotten the most important demographic cultural label of all: Adamic.

According to the Bible, all people fall into one of two categories: "in Adam" or "in Christ."

This amazing (re)discovery ought to revolutionize our approach to outreach and evangelism. Not only will it save us countless hours that otherwise would have been spent calculating the effects of our PowerPoint presentations on Asian-Americans versus Anglo-Americans, it will help us streamline our approach by giving us an understanding of our target audience that is actually relevant.

You see, focussing on whether someone makes $25,000 a year and drives a Gremlin or $75,000 a year and drives an Audi is a very shallow way to treat people. As if our detailed analyses of the incomes and spending habits of the people we're trying to reach could really capture who they are (what are we, Marxists? Pretty soon we'll be calling the former the proletariat and the latter the bourgeoisie).

But when we move beyond the surfacy and superficial, we discover that all people -- black, white, rich, or poor -- have one common denominator that makes all their apparent differences pretty meaningless at the end of the day: They are in Adam, and their culture is Adamic.

(And if you think I'm painting with too broad a brush, go read Eph. 2:1-3; 4:17-19.)

Once we recognize this, we can spend less time trying to figure out which TV shows to integrate into our multimedia presentations ("Is The O.C. too white? Is The Shield too edgy?"), and we can spend more time dealing with the tainted presuppositions that our fallen hearers come in with every Sunday (such as: Jesus is supposed to give me a more fulfilling life, or, Church is supposed to meet all my needs). But unfortunately for our hearers, those are often our presuppositions too.

So I'm all for attention to demographics and contextualization, just as long as we focus on what really matters.

Paul the Demographer

When discussions arise about evangelism and, more specifically, "contextualization," usually about 17 seconds elapse before I Corinthians 9:19-22 is brought up.

In this passage Paul claims to become "all things to all people, that by all means I might save some."

"Notice Paul's missional sensitivity," we are told. "He was willing to adapt to any culture in order to make the gospel intelligible."

Not to rain on anyone's parade or anything, but I don't see Paul's attention to demographics as being particularly accute or especially sensitive. If you take the time to read the context of the passage, you'll note that the apostle explains exactly what he means by his supposed adaptability:

"To the Jews I became as a Jew... to those outside the law I became as one outside the law."

Far from being the cultural chameleon that many claim him to be, Paul basically lumps all people into one of two broad categories: Jews under the law, and Gentiles without the law (and this is no isolated incident -- he talks like this all the time, cf. Acts 20:21; Rom. 1:16; 2:9, 10; 3:9; 10:12; I Cor. 1:22, 24; 10:32).

Now let's be honest: Most missions agencies would fail a person for that sweeping a generalization. What about income level? Age? Musical tastes? Demographic classification (Boomer, Buster, Gen-Xer)?

Though Paul certainly did take advantage of his being a Hebrew of Hebrews raised in Hellenistic Tarsus (Acts 17:28; Tit. 1:12), it is a huge leap to say that, since he desired to be all things to all men, he therefore catered his evangelistic efforts to the supposedly unique situations of each and every village he ministered in.

Which brings us to the real question (which I'll address in my next post): Are the rich, the white, the young, the old, the poor, and the black really that different anyway?

Church Planting and "Incarnational" Ministry

In the church planting world there is no shortage of buzzwords, but among the most commonly-used are the terms "contextual" and "incarnational."

Insofar as I understand these words, their meaning appears to be that, in order to reach our communities with the gospel, we must adapt our message and methods to our target audience so that they actually understand what we're trying to tell them.

So far, so good. I mean, if I were to attempt to speak to the unchurched culture of the Northwest by preaching a 32-week sermon series called "The Filioque Clause and its Ramifications for Eastern and Western Ecumenicity," I hardly think we'd run out of chairs.

(If I preached a series called "Biggie, Tupac, and the East Coast / West Coast Feud" I might have more luck.)

But my hesitance concerning the whole "incarnational" approach stems from the fact that it seems to assign to the unbelieving community the task of setting the rules for the game. Contemporary culture (which is assumed to be both autonomous and neutral) gets to decide what is significant in "the real world"--whatever that means--and the Church, ever perilous of slipping into irrelevance, has to fall in line, hat in hand, like a dutiful servant.

Am I the only one who sees this as problematic?

The Myth of Relevance

In a previous post I mentioned the paradoxical fact that many sincere believers desire to stand out from the unbelieving crowd while engaged in common-grace cultural activities like work, school, or art, but then, when engaged in sacred activity like worship, they try to blend in with the world in an attempt to be "culturally relevant."

Hence we hear descriptions of evangelical worship services that sound something like this: "At our church, you'll hear practical teaching that is actually relevant and helpful in the real world."

Here's my question:

Doesn't this way of thinking assume that, when the world of the Bible and the world of contemporary culture are out of sync, it is the former that must be adapted to fit the norms of the latter?

It seems that in our desperate effort to make the Gospel "relevant" to people with cell phones we have emptied Christianity of its Christian-ness and, thereby, sold our priceless birthright for a bowl of beans.

When it comes to being "profane," Esau had nothing on us (Heb. 12:16) ....

When to be Countercultural

I find it curious that as evangelicals we get so confused about when to be cultural, and when to be countercultural. Let me explain....

As citizens of both the cultic and cultural kingdoms, it would seem obvious that our behavior should be (to some extent) consistent with whatever kingdom we happen to be operating in at the moment.

So when I'm engaging in cultural activity Monday through Saturday -- like working or playing baseball -- I am doing so alongside believers and nonbelievers alike. There's nothing odd or unique about it. But when I am participating in cultic activity on the Lord's Day -- such as hearing the Word preached or eating the Supper -- what I am doing is completely distinct, strange, and countercultural.

Here's the interesting part, though: Evangelicalism teaches us to try as hard as we can to stand out from the crowd while at work, at school, or at play. In other words, in the cultural kingdom, be countercultural.

But then on Sunday we experience a change of heart, and pull out all stops in order to make divine worship as comfortable and non-threatening as we can for unbelievers. Or, in the countercultural kingdom, be cultural.

So we buy Christian T-shirts ("This Blood's For You!") and put IXOYE fishes on our cars, but when we go to church on Sunday we're embarassed if we bring our unbelieving neighbor on a week where we sing "Be Thou My Vision" and to top it all off, celebrate Communion.

I'm all for being weird, as long as we do it at the right time, and in the right kingdom.