Missionary Mentality:
The Church and Culture
MI482
Rachel Whitehurst
Kayla Beckner
15 December 2010
“When Paul says that Christ has disarmed the powers (not destroyed them), and when he speaks of the powers as being created in Christ and for Christ, and when he says that the Church is to make known the wisdom of God to the powers, I take it to mean that this means that a Christian neither accepts them as some sort of eternal order that cannot be changed, nor seeks to destroy them because of the evil they do, but seeks to subvert them from within and thereby to bring them back under the allegiance of their true Lord” (Newbigin, Truth to Tell 82).
“Understanding context, or a missionary mentality, is a key component in Transformational churches” (Stetzer, 47). In other words, culture is important to Transformational churches. Before churches determine how they are going to do ministry, they should consider where they are doing ministry and to who they are doing ministry. “Transformational Churches live out the essence of disciple-making in their activities through worship, community, and mission. But they do so in the context of their culture” (Stetzer, 47).
According to the research of Ed Stetzer and Thom Rainer, Missionary Mentality is a core value of a transformational church, and 64% of transformational churches strongly or moderately agree that the activities of their church are designed to relate to the type of people who live in their city of community.
The missionary mentality of the church is what speaks to the community in a way that the community feels welcomed into the church. “Simply put, Transformational churches know, understand, and are deeply in love with their cities, communities, and people” (Stetzer, 47). The people of the church are people who reach out to the community and let others know that they care. Programs and activities aren’t always the way of getting people into the church or relating to the culture we live in. We need to make efforts to go to people outside of activities and programs and get to know them. People like to know that they are important. When they are given true relationship and love, they are more likely to accept a relationship with the One who is Love. When programs and activities come first, it is less likely that relationships are going to be established.
Stetzer and Rainer found during their research on Transformational churches that out of the churches surveyed:
· Our church leadership understands the cultural context surrounding our church (77 percent strongly or moderately agree)
· Everything we do is in the language and culture of the people we are trying to reach (58 percent strongly or moderately agree)
Church values must be expressed in a way that makes sense in their context. A heart and love for culture is key. “A critical mindset shift toward a more missionary mentality is from the idea that people have stories to people are stories” (Stetzer, 48). Rather than something that we can definitively figure out, culture is always changing.
We must consider what culture purposes for the church. If it’s not what God purposes, we are being misconceived. There will always be persecution and unbelievers can’t fully understand that the church is the fullness of Christ. Still, that doesn’t mean that we should ignore the negative perceptions that culture holds. When we reach out to the culture around us with the love of Christ, transformation not only takes place within the community around us, but it also takes place within the church.
“The nature of the interaction between the church and the culture it seeks to address needs to be rethought. In other words the church must re-imagine its mission. Part of that re-imagining concerns our relationship with people who live entirely in secular space, in this world. It can never be sufficient to constantly construct programs designed to pull people into sacred space” (Robinson, 29).
”In truth, the church itself is not the object of ministry, but it is instead the instrument of the ministry into the world, which is the true object of ministry of the church” (Robinson, 184). The church is not just supposed to be a ministry; rather it should be a minister. The community we live in may never know the love of God unless the church goes out and shows them. The church’s mission is to go out and make disciples, equipping them to do the same. Ministry is not all about the church and the number of people at Sunday morning service, but it’s about sharing the good news with others.
There is a crisis in the life of the churches of North America. The crisis, most simply put, is that the social function the churches once fulfilled in the American life is gone... The distress caused by this radical change in social role and cultural value manifests itself in various ways: a lack of focus in the midst of a proliferation of church programs, a loss of meaning in the work of clergy and laity alike, and an uneasiness that our faith does not really fit in the world where we live. (Hunsberger, xiii)
Historical Changes:
For the purposes of this project, it is important to define a few concepts. Firstly, modernism will be the term used to describe the cultural environment between the late 19th century and 1980. Secondly, postmodernism will be the term used to describe the cultural environment during the late 1900s and early 2000s.
Between 1980 and 2000, the transition from modernism to postmodernism caused significant changes in the American church. The modernistic worldview seemed vehemently opposed to a Christian worldview.
The Modern world required rational, scientific proof of everything. Everything was discoverable; only the objective mattered. Everything was possible. The world was to be used. There was no need for god. Science was king. Darwin, Freud and Marx were its prophets. In the modern world, the self is all powerful. (Olson)
Because it focused almost solely on the tangible and discoverable facts of reality, faith in an unseen God was hard to propagate within its context. “In the Modern World, Christians, Pastors and Churches had to adapt to the rules of the Enlightenment or be viewed as Reactionary” (Olson). Believers separated themselves from culture because it seemed to be incompatible.
“In 1985, John Paul II appealed to all Catholics to participate in evangelization/new evangelization… The pope’s appeal has stirred both positive and negative reactions among Catholics. His critics hear a call to reestablish Christendom” (shenk, 76). John Paul II called his parishioners to create a Christian culture separate from modern culture.
Visser’T Hooft had a different perspective.
W.A. Visser’t Hooft, founding general secretary of the World Council of Churches, having experienced Nazism firsthand, was deeply aware of the fundamental contradictions and demonic tendencies within modernity. In 1994 he addressed the new religiousity that was arising in reaction to secularization- which he definitively termed ‘neo-paganism.’ Visser ‘t Hooft called first for a thorough ‘spring cleaning.’ Then, he said, we must go the the roots of modern culture as seen through philosophers, poets, and novelists. Also, the church itself must encounter the gospel afresh as the first step in discovering the Word for contemporary life. (Shenk, 75)
Paul Heibert emphasizes the split between Spirit and Matter, and separation of Welfare State from Civil Religion as major cultural systems of modernity in his essay The Gospel in our Culture: Methods of Social and Cultural Analysis. However, as the postmodern movement took over, culture opened to the idea of God. Inquisitiveness replaced certainty and seekers replaced pragmatists.
The Post-Modern world is characterized by uncertainty. Chaos theory and quarks are two scientific paradigms of postmodern uncertainty. There is skepticism and cynicism about over-certainty. Communal life replaces individualism. History and tradition rise in value. The world is to be cared for. Story is king. There is spiritual curiosity, but not necessarily Christian in orientation. (Olson)
The Evangelical church found openness to spiritual conversations and acted upon it. “[Remedies] were adopted in the early 1990s in the context of the Decade of Evangelism (or Evangelization). Willow Creek with its Seeker Service approach, Rich Warren and his Purpose Driven Church, experiences of the Toranto Vineyard Church or Pensacola, came and went” (Robinson, 24). The Mega-Church Movement sought to break the “stained glass barrier” with contemporary music, topic-driven sermons, and convention center architectural style. A person could “listen in” and learn about church culture while maintaining a sense of anonymity. “In 1980 the number [of megachurches in the Unites States] had increased to fifty. Ten years later it was 250“ (Jethani, 89).
The Evangelical church realized that certain aspects of culture could be used to connect church and culture. Evangelical Christians were encouraged to go out into culture and engage unbelievers themselves. “In the 1900s missions became institutions and organizations. In the twenty-first century, missions translates to kingdom- it’s everyone, everywhere, and every infrastructure. Not just religious vocational workers, but everyone!” (Roberts, 49). There were many perspective shifts within the church: vendor to mission, program to embodiment, committee to team, clergy dominated to laity oriented, recruitment to mission, and entrepreneur to missionary (Hunsberger, 344).
Rather than create a separate Christian culture to minister to secular culture, Evangelicals started to engage their surroundings. There once again began a cultural ebb and flow. They saw ministry as within culture, not to culture.
“once we understand this, we are warned against conceiving the ‘gospel and culture’ encounter as one that is merely a matter of audience analysis, as though it has only to do with sizing up the thoughts, feelings, and values of the target population to make our communication of the gospel sharper. Nor is it adequate to conceive of the encounter as merely our effort to bring about changes in the personal and collective ethical choices of the society so that they more closely approximate the ideals we see to be those of the gospel… these responses represent the persistence of an “us to them” mission mentality too easily operating out of a conquering spirit or an urge to control, vestiges of a former Christendom that no longer lives anywhere but in the impulses of our minds.” (Hunsberger, 290)
Evangelical churches slowly began to grow. In fact, they were the only churches that grew at all.
The American church was still not growing fast enough to keep up with the population. Ron Dempsey said in his 1997 book, Faith Outside the Walls: Why People Don’t Come and Why the Church Must Listen, “George Barna found that only 37% of Americans attend church on a given weekend, which is a decrease in attendance from only five years ago.”
In another Barna Study from 1994, he said “More adults are capable of accurately naming the top-rated prime-time television shows… than are able to accurately state the defining characteristic of the Christian faith” (Barna, 36). There is no denying that culture is important to people. “In many cases, nonbelievers have earnestly sought out the answers to meaning of life and the probable outcomes after death. Their inquiries and explorations often have resulted in dead ends, however, because well-intended Christians have used impenetrable language and concepts to tell nonbelievers about the world’s greatest gift” (Barna, 41).
Historically speaking, Christians in America have not communicated the gospel clearly because of three potential reasons. They have either (1)neglected to contextualize the gospel, (2)not paid close enough attention to cultural language, or (3)not discovered a viable redemptive analogy. “Relevance is a big issue in people’s lives today. Unless we perceive something to be relevant, we tune it out immediately” (Barna, 41).
Where are the church’s priorities? A 1994 study said “The average Protestant church spends more money on buildings and maintenance that it does on evangelism. For every dollar devoted to outreach activities, the average church will spend more than five dollars on real estate” (Barna, 84). Perhaps building megachurch buildings without engaging unbelievers has simply created competition among other denominations. It certainly did in regards to Catholicism between 1990 and 2001.
The point of this project is not to focus on the church’s shortcomings, but "The Church seems afraid to invest in new modes of being the Church, breaking free from antiquated models and irrelevant traditions toward living the gospel in a twenty-first-century context" (Barna, 44).
This view of recent history should not discourage Christians. It should encourage them to continue in search of cultural connections to Kingdom realities.
At its best, Christianity has the adaptive ability to connect with an enormous diversity of cultures around the world. At its worst, Christianity has the lamentable propensity to become completely intertwined with its host culture. When this happens, it is difficult to distinguish where the culture stops and the church begins. While it is imperative that Christians communicate and live out the gospel so people within the culture will connect with the message, at the same time the church is to be, by its nature, countercultural. The message of Jesus challenges all social, religious, and political powers. The church must dance between these two polarities. If the church’s message is too aggressively countercultural, few people will hear its words. If the church over identifies with the culture, the gospel becomes tame and loses its power to transform lives. (Olson)
If we can learn anything from this study, it should be that we must become students of culture. We have to examine our surroundings to make sure that we are contextualizing the gospel without giving in to syncretism. Along with study, we must pray for God’s wisdom in discerning culture. If we believe that God’s kingdom supersedes the one of this world, surely He is able to help us share his love in this context.
Today we stand on the other side of Christendom. Some explicitly refer to the West as post-Christian. No one seriously argues that Christendom in any substantial form still exists. The notion of the secular has come to mean that which is opposed to religion. In such a situation, the church has been forced to look afresh at its context, to consider the post-Christian West as a mission field. The church in the West has been assisted by the arrival of missionaries from those very lands that were the original target of the modern missionary movement. But to think of our context as mission field is a very long way from becoming a missionary church. The challenge for the church now is to stop thinking merely about methods to reverse decline but to reconsider the basic purpose and call of the church. To return to mission as the core raison d’etre of the church will inevitably mean that the shape of church will change. (Robinson, 56)
In order to better understand how different sects of Christianity have approached this topic in our immediate context, we chose to interview Catholic, Baptist, and Christian Missionary Alliance representatives from Huntington Indiana.
On one side of the spectrum, Father John from St. Mary’s Catholic Church defined culture as “the environment in which we live.” He said that although culture surrounds us, the church should seek to influence culture without being influenced itself. His reasoning is that “there are so many pagan aspects of culture: obsession with power, money, and sex. Just to name a few.” This is a valid response to the problem of church and culture that mirrors Leviticus 20:26 when God said to his people to be holy as He is holy.
Father John simply put it this way: “We live by example.”
Baptist Pastor Jimi Staton from New Life Fellowship is a bit farther along the compatibility spectrum. He believes that we must let culture influence us so that we can relate to the people we’re reaching out to, but not conform to it or letting it change us. Pastor Staton says, “Christians should be part of the world but not of it.”
Baptist Pastor Jimi Staton from New Life Fellowship is a bit farther along the compatibility spectrum. He believes that we must let culture influence us so that we can relate to the people we’re reaching out to, but not conform to it or letting it change us. Pastor Staton says, “Christians should be part of the world but not of it.”
He reasons that church and culture are related because culture is comprised of people. Where Father John views culture as simply our environment, Pastor Staton views culture as a representation of people’s lives. “The church has much to do with culture. The reason is because the church consists of people and all people are part of some type of culture. And a church must be relevant to the surroundings that it's in if it wants to relevant to the people it is trying to reach.”
Finally, Allie Brown from 509 Community, a CMA church, proposes that church and culture are compatible to a degree.
Finally, Allie Brown from 509 Community, a CMA church, proposes that church and culture are compatible to a degree.
I don't think they're synonymous, but I also don't think they have to be mutually exclusive. For example, our church community seeks to find truth and beauty in "secular" art, whether it's film, photography, music, painting, etc. We're still human beings functioning in the world, trying to connect with other broken human beings and seeking to love the other, which means understanding things that broken people are about. However, I think there are ideas within Christian culture that are rejected within secular culture and vice versa. (Allie Brown)
She expressed an element of Stetzer and Rainer’s missionary mentality when she referenced story. “I think that there are ways to connect with secular culture in terms that make sense to most people. It seems like a lot of the issue is working through the stories of people and seeing how they're broken, what they're seeking, what their identity is ,and where the Holy Spirit is present even though they're not using those words… then being present with them, listening and then being able to translate the language of the gospel (without sacrificing its power) into their story.”
Again, these are simply approaches to the topic of church and culture. There are biblical foundations for all of them, and we are not arguing for one over another.
At its best, Christianity has the adaptive ability to connect with an enormous diversity of cultures around the world. At its worst, Christianity has the lamentable propensity to become completely intertwined with its host culture. When this happens, it is difficult to distinguish where the culture stops and the church begins. While it is imperative that Christians communicate and live out the gospel so people within the culture will connect with the message, at the same time the church is to be, by its nature, countercultural. The message of Jesus challenges all social, religious, and political powers. The church must dance between these two polarities. If the church’s message is too aggressively countercultural, few people will hear its words. If the church over identifies with the culture, the gospel becomes tame and loses its power to transform lives. (Olson)
We must become students of culture and prayerfully discern the impact of culture on us as the body of Christ. We must avoid the extreme of faddishness while remaining relevant. We must also avoid the extreme of isolation while remaining righteous. This is Missionary Mentality.
Works Cited
Barker, Kenneth L., and Donald W. Burdick. NIV study Bible: New International Version. Fully rev. ed. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2002. Print.
Barna, George. Evangelism that works: how to reach changing generations with the unchanging gospel. Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 1995. Print.
Barna, George. Leaders on leadership: wisdom, advice, and encouragement on the art of leading God's people. Ventura, Calif., U.S.A.: Regal Books, 1997. Print.
Barna, George. The second Coming of the Church. Nashville: Word Publishing, 1998. Print.
Dempsey, Ron. Faith outside the walls: why people don't come and why the church must listen. Macon, Ga.: Smyth & Helwys, 1997. Print.
Hiebert, Paul. "The Gospel in our Culture: Methods of Social and Cultural Analysis." The Church Between Gospel and Culture 1 (1996): 139-157. Print.
Hunsberger, George. "Acquiring the Posture of a Missionary Church." Insights 108 (1993): 19-26. Print.
Hunsberger, George R., and Craig Gelder. The Church Between Gospel and Culture: the emerging mission in North America. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1996. Print.
Jethani, Skye. The Divine Commodity: discovering a faith beyond consumer Christianity. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2009. Print.
Newbigin, Lesslie. Truth to tell: the gospel as public truth. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans, 1991. Print.
Olson, Dave. "Cultural Change in America." The American Church - Church Attendance Research in the United States. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Dec. 2010. <http://www.theamericanchurch.org/>.
Roberts, Bob. Transformation: how glocal churches transform lives and the world. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2006. Print.
Robinson, Martin, and Dwight Smith. Invading Secular Space: strategies for tomorrow's church. London: Monarch Books, 2003. Print.
Shenk, Wilbert. "The Culture of Modernity as a Missionary Challenge." The Good News of the Kingdom 1 (1993): 1992-99. Print.
Stetzer, Ed, and Thom Rainer. Transformational Church: Creating a New Scorecard for Congregations.. Nashville: B and H Publishing Group, 2010. Print.
Van Gelder, Craig. "A Great New Fact of Our Day: America as Mission Field." Missiology: An International Review 19.4 (1991): 409-18. Print.
Hunsberger, George. "Sizing Up the Shape of the Church." Reformed Review 47.2 (1993): 133-44. Print.
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