David Fitch with yet another excellent post on postmodernity and the church:
for me, contextualization is a modern move that must be deconstructed. For so often contextualization assumes there is a message which can be extracted from a given culture and translated into another culture’s language and cultural practice. Yet this move in itself is naive to the pitfalls of modernity. For it sets us up to repeat the errors of commodifying and/or consumerizing of the gospel. Instead I subscribe to a much slower approach (if indeed I am called to enter a foreign culture with the gospel). Let us as a church understand our own allegiances and cultural formation first. Then, with who we are and what God has given us (historically) let us take up (incarnational) residence in a different culture and allow God to build relationships in mutual submission out of which God works through hospitality, humility and love. Allow God to transform the relationships we participate in as we live the gospel in historically continuous enScripturated ways which shape those very relationships. Out of this, a community forms which indeed takes on its own cultural (Christian) identity forming a bridge into the new cultural context.
