Singing the Gospel in a New Key
I had to learn the hard way. When I went to the Philippines as a missionary educator, I was fresh out of graduate study. I was eager to share my biblical and theological knowledge with my Asian students who were preparing for ministry. But I soon discovered some of the "answers" I gave them didn't connect to their questions or to the questions of the people to whom they ministered. They wondered things like: What does the Bible teach about suffering and oppression? What do we tell people who are afraid of evil spiritual powers? Is it wrong to honor our ancestors? Such questions had seldom been considered in the settings where I had studied and lived my faith. But they were burning issues for my students, and I needed to address those questions if the Good News was going to truly touch people on the streets where my students walked.
This isn't just an issue that missionaries to other countries have to deal with.
Every church and every Christian has the responsibility to tell and live the gospel in ways that make sense to people within their own cultures and life circumstances. Churches in the West may not have to combat the same issues as those in the Philippines, but they must still struggle with challenges such as finding fresh ways to embody the gospel for an increasingly postmodern culture, or ministering to communities of people who come out of a different cultural or religious background. We sometimes refer to this task as contextualizing the gospel—enabling God's good news to come to life in the context of every culture or local setting. But isn't there a danger here? In our efforts to be "relevant" to all people, don't we risk changing or watering down the message? How do we present God's Word in new ways without losing the gospel in the process? Are there any models to guide us? Fortunately, there are. Although talk about contextualizing the gospel is fairly new, the task is as old as the Church. From the beginning, Christians expressed the Good News in flexible ways so it could be a word on target for the listeners. The New Testament provides us with many models of how the first missionaries and theologians shaped their messages to appeal to different audiences, while allowing the one gospel to challenge people to change.
One of the most striking examples of this is the story of Paul's evangelistic ministry in Acts. Let's compare Paul's preaching to a mainly Jewish audience in Pisidian Antioch (Acts 13:13-52) with his message to Gentile pagans in Athens (Acts 17:16-34). In the first case, Paul assumed his listeners already knew the biblical story and accepted the authority of Scripture. So he started his message by reviewing the history of how God had been faithful to Israel in the past and then showed how Jesus fulfilled scripture's promise of a Messiah from King David's line. The approach fit the audience.
When Paul addressed a group of educated philosophers in Athens, however, he framed the good news in distinctly different terms. Unlike the Jews in Antioch, these people were biblically illiterate and didn't believe in only one God. Rather than condemning their religious beliefs, Paul began by finding a point of contact that built a bridge to their lives. He used something already familiar to them—an altar to an unknown god that he noticed in their city—as a steppingstone to proclaim the one true God who had made Himself known to all people. Paul then talked to them about things they could identify with—God's creation and care for the world, and humanity's desire to seek and know God. In the process, he found common ground by using language and concepts that were familiar in Greek philosophy, and even quoted their own poets (Acts 17:28). This all prepared the soil for Paul's announcement that the Greeks needed to repent and embrace the good news of the resurrected Jesus (Acts 17:30-31).
Although Paul was flexible in the language and approach he used to address people at their point of need, in both cases he called his audience to be transformed through an encounter with the risen Christ.
The central truths of the gospel do not change, but we have no "one-size-fits-all" way of telling the story. It isn't hard to see how Paul's pattern speaks to us about the need to contextualize our witness to people with church backgrounds on the one hand and to those who don't know the Bible's story on the other. We find another example of contextualizing the gospel in Paul's letters to mission churches. Communicating to young Christians, he speaks a language they understand. Jesus had talked to Galilean villagers using pictures of fields, fig trees, foxes, and fishermen. Paul adopted a whole new set of images for the Gentile city dwellers of the Roman world. For instance, he took track and boxing metaphors from the sporting world of Gentile culture (1 Corinthians 9:24-27). He used the image of a Roman general leading conquered captives in triumphal procession from the military arena (2 Corinthians 2:14-16; Colossians 2:15). He also drew the offer of a guarantee from the field of commerce, assuring Christians that the Holy Spirit was a down payment of what was to come (2 Corinthians 1:22, 5:5). Such images from daily life in the Greco-Roman world provided a lens through which people gained a fresh vision of God's saving work and their response to it. Paul even tailored his explanation of the gospel to the needs of each church. The theme of "justification by faith" was crucial to his unpacking the Good News in Rome and Galatia, where Christians' relationship to the law was a big issue. But in 2 Corinthians, he talked about the "weakness" of the cross in response to his rivals' accusations that he was a "weak" apostle. In each letter, Paul enabled the one gospel to speak a targeted word to the specific audience.
Look for other examples of creatively contextualizing the gospel as you read the pages of the New Testament. We not only learn from what the Bible teaches, but also how the New Testament writers and missionaries drew out the transforming implications of the gospel for new circumstances. They show us a magnificent balance between faithfulness to the message and flexibility in expressing it. Following their lead, we can also learn to sing the old, old story in new keys.
Dean Flemming is a Nazarene missionary and teaches biblical studies at European Nazarene College.
Holiness Today, May/June 2006
Please note: This article was originally published in 2006. All facts, figures, and titles were accurate to the best of our knowledge at that time but may have since changed.
