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Contextualising the gospel to culture
26/04/12 09:00 View entire series at: Next Level | Grow 2012
This GROW 2012 excerpt is taken from Vineyard College’s Next Level on Vision, Values and Practice, which you can download in it’s entirety here
Why does the Vineyard talk in the language of values? Because John [Wimber] primarily wanted to build a church that people who he knew before he met Christ would want to go to. The church would have to feel like “home” to those sorts of people, it would have to taste, smell, sound, dress, talk and be like them without compromising the gospel. This is the task of every missionary–to contextualise the gospel to a culture, or to make the gospel “fit” the culture so it is not seen as “foreign”. Being trained in sociology and willing to use its language, John wanted to create a church that had many of the same values as the people he was trying to reach, a church that would express his own values as someone who came to Christ from a non-church background in his thirties.
The dangers of this approach are the same for any missionary who attempts this process. We can go so far that we become no different from those we are trying to reach and compromise the gospel – syncretism. In the other direction, shunning the culture, we can become such a sub-culture, so different from the prevailing cultural values, that we ourselves are a hindrance to conversion and can only grow by families having more children and transfer growth. The Amish are Christians, but how many new converts do they get?
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Resurrection Stories
Shore Vineyards intern, Rachel Ross, makes short films. She is a director and writer, and is embarking on a dream of being a film-documentary maker about where the worlds of secular and faith meet.
At Shore Vineyards this Easter, the team wanted to celebrate the resurrection stories that where within their own church family. So, they made this film to document them and used it as the main focus for their Easter service on Easter Sunday.
We thought you might like to see it so we have posted it here, and if you would like to show it in your church, contact Rachel to access a high res version of it.
Letters To A Young Leader:
The Lord works in mysterious ways
03/04/12 11:00 View entire series at: Letters To A Young Leader
Letters to a young leader is a series of leadership mentoring advice. It is written by Vic Francis who is the Chairman of the VCANZ board. Vic and his wife, Fran, pastor Shore Vineyards in Auckland and have four children.
The Lord works in mysterious ways
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“All the great religious leaders eventually learn that they must do ministry within the confines of a human body. Having a body means being finite, having limits, being vulnerable to fatigue, illness and death.”
Roy Oswald
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I nearly died a few years ago. Over several months I was in hospital three times with a range of conditions including meningitis, an abscess in my spinal column and liver shutdown due to a massive drug reaction.
Throughout that touch-and-go winter, my wife and church supported me wonderfully, while Christians around the world prayed fervently for my life and my health. It was a strange experience, though, because I never felt moved to ask God for healing for myself. Instead, I asked him to reveal himself to me in my illness.
Eventually I recovered 100 per cent – triumphantly taking my last antibiotics in the backblocks of India – and today I have no on-going ill-effects of that ordeal. But I look back at that adversity and consider it one of the most growing experiences of my life.
It was there that I received my one and only vision. It was there that I learned I won’t be afraid to die when my time comes. It was there that I once and for all proved God’s faithfulness in the tough times.
I don’t want to go back there. But I’m grateful it happened.
My somewhat Pentecostal theological background tells me that Christians have no right to get sick. By his stripes we are healed, the curse is lifted, the Garden of Eden is restored.
My experience is somewhat different, though. I see God often walking with people through health issues or life crises rather than plucking them out of them. I see God drawing closer as we cry out in pain or desperation. I see God growing in our lives during our darkest days. Recently I sat with four unemployed men who shared the small blessings of an hour or two of work, or a meal delivered to their home, or a bill which was less than expected. God was at work in the room, and it wasn’t through me, the employed one.
I have learned more through my failures than my successes. And while I don’t embrace negative experiences as a primary means of connecting with God, I do know that in his mercy he is particularly close during failure, or sickness, or depression, or fear, or despair.
The Lord does, indeed, work in mysterious ways.
Next entry: God will provide
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Four M's
02/04/12 11:53 View entire series at: Lloyd's Leaders Letter | Grow 2012
This GROW 2012 excerpt is taken from Lloyd’s Leadership Letter Vision, Values and Structure, which you can download in it’s entirety here
Every generation needs to redesign or re-develop what the church could and should look like so that it remains connected to the culture it finds itself amongst. When we work cross-culturally, it is obvious that we need to contextualize both the gospel (what the words and concepts mean in that culture) and the structures (how we do things) if we are to connect at all to the people we are trying to reach. It is just as vital to contextualize to a generation, a socio-economic, an ethnic context.
The four main elements we need to work with are:
- The Message - while we must never add to or take away from the gospel as expressed in the Bible, it must be translated into the place we find ourselves.
- The Messenger - those who have embodied or incarnated the Message - people like you and I who are living the message of the gospel in such a way as to encourage as many other people as possible to follow.
- The Media - the various ways we carry or communicate the gospel. These obviously change with technological advances and culture changes. For example, websites, blogs, YouTube and social media were not mainstream communication forms even five years ago.
- The “Market” - our culture, society and communities are dynamic and ever-changing and so we must change with them, or be left behind as an irrelevant group.
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