Tag: Gospel and Culture

Jesus is Cultural (and so are you)

Posted on April 22, 2010

Culture is everywhere, interwoven in everything, for everyone. Your attire, your values and your behaviors — artifact, assessment and action. Wearing flip-flops is cultural. Driving to work is cultural. Talking on a cell phone is cultural. Going to church is cultural. Covenants are cultural (patterned after Hittite treaties). Your Bible is cultural (a product of Gutenberg’s press). The cross is cultural (Roman torture device).

No one is culturally neutral. We are all enculturated from infancy to grave. To be human is to be cultural, and when Jesus became man, He became cultural. Jesus spoke Aramaic, went to Jewish temples, drank wine, wore sandals and grew a beard. Jesus is cultural and so are you.

Read the rest of this article.

Toward A Missional Hermeneutic

Posted on January 29, 2009

The Gospel and Our Culture Network recently convened the 7th annual meeting. Papers were presented, responded to, and the status of a missional hermeneutic for interpreting Scripture reassessed. George Hunsberger offers summary reflections from that meeting noting: “The time is ripe for a rigorous and robust missional hermeneutic!” To that end, Hunsberger identifies four streams of hermeneutical thought:

1. The missional direction of the story.

The framework for biblical interpretation is the story it tells of the mission of God and the formation of a community sent to participate in it.

2. The missional purpose of the writings

The aim of biblical interpretation is to fulfill the equipping purpose of the biblical writings.

3. The missional locatedness of the readers

The approach required for a faithful reading of the Bible is from the missional location of the Christian community.

4. The missional engagement with cultures.

The gospel functions as the interpretive matrix within which the received biblical tradition is brought into critical conversation with a particular human context.

These papers, reflections, and hermeneutical directions will prove important in shaping an honest, faithful, and missional reading of the Bible that promotes a gospel-focused, narrative-couched, missional theology for practitioners and the church alike. No doubt these streams of thought will influence many in the books and articles to come on Missional Church and Theology. Read the whole article here.

The emerging four questions are questions that should shape our churches for decades to come:

1. What is the story of the biblical narrative and how does it implicate us? (missio Dei)

2. What is the purpose of the biblical writings in the life of its hearers? (equipping witness)

3. How shall the church read the Bible faithfully today? (located questions)

4. What guides our use of the received tradition in the context before us? (gospel matrix)

Missional Church Refresher

Posted on September 23, 2008

The most helpful, readable introduction to missional ecclesiology I have found is Craig Van Gelder’s The Essence of the Church. Many readers were grateful for my partial review of his book The Ministry of the Missional Church. In The Essence of the Church, Van Gelder explains what the church is, its historical development (pros and cons), articulates a clear missional ecclesiology, and charts a way to organize the missional church.

I am currently working on a master document that re-roots our functional ecclesiology in biblical theology, while also outlining a long-term vision of mulitiplication and growth. I forgot that Van Gelder does some of this in Essence. I went back to Van Gelder for a refresher and have been wonderfully refreshed. He describes the church as “a people of God created by the Spirit to live as a missionary community.” Though this description doesn’t include the gospel, it captures the missional nature of the church very well. He certainly is gospel-centered and warns us that “Failing to understand the anture of the church can lead to a number of problems. Defining the church functionally—in terms of what it does—can shift our perspective away from understnading the church as a unique community of God’s people.” A good word. A good book, for that matter.