Cultural Baggage and The Gospel

When I was growing up in the 90’s, I wore a “Counter Culture” T-shirt because the Punk band “Guttermouth” rocked it at the VANS Warped Tour.  So there I was, a “Christian,” 14 years old, listening to music designed to invoke anger and offend, promoting counterculture propaganda, and having no idea what any of it meant!  Youth are sometimes ignorant.  But what about the older/wiser/educated?  We (grown ups) are definitely held to a higher standard - at least we should be.

So here’s the question: What is “Culture?” - And how we engage it?  If anyone wants to “Change the World” or go “Counter Culture” - whether a revolutionary, soldier, missionary, evangelist, pastor, preacher, teacher, church worker, minister, etc, etc… They must first know the culture in which they seek to engage.

Understanding “culture” is non-negotiable in any kind of outreach.  Any organization seeking to be involved with or serve a community should properly understand the culture in which they are engaging in order to have maximum impact.

Christian Anthropologist, Charles Kraft calls culture, “…the complex structuring of customs and the assumptions that underlie them in terms of which people govern their lives.”  He goes on to clarify it as “a way of life” in which nobody can escape.  In other words, a “culture” is a way in which people live - it’s just the way it is.

Andrew Walls concludes that people (i.e. all of us) receive the truths of Christianity “wrapped in a baggage of a particular cultural context.”  I agree.  And so does  Ed Stetzer, who adds, “Contextualization matters because we are not eternal, timeless, and a-cultural.”  Yes, we perceive reality through our cultural contact lenses, which may be a little more like cultural Lasik surgery in my opinion.

The four models of contextualization mentioned in Stetzer’s Christianity Today article originate with Paul Hiebert.  The four models include: no contextualization (i.e. a belief that there is no cultural baggage in which truth is wrapped) , minimal contextualization (i.e. minimal baggage), uncritical contextualization (i.e. culture > the gospel), and critical contextualization (i.e. the balance of scriptural truths and the realities of cultural baggage and its effects on evangelism).

The Church in America (i.e. Western Christendom) has a lot of cultural baggage that hinders how they do outreach.  It's true: we perceive (fill in the blank) truth through cultural lenses.  Isagogics - interpreting the scriptures in the timeframe in which they were written - is becoming noticeably rarer in congregations.  With minimal reference to original language, context or Sitz Im Leben, it becomes very easy for our cultural baggage to distort our message. 

Let me be brutally honest, most people in suburban/middle-class church are going to look at someone who has tattoos, smokes, and curses, and write them off as a non-believer!  I know that sounds silly, but it's true!  That’s the cultural “baggage” with its distortions in full effect.  When Americans think of a Christian, chances are they think of a Ned Flanders type from the Simpsons.  Why?  Because most American Christians have made looking clean cut on the outside, talking “finely dandely, doodely, blah blah blah” as essential to becoming a Christian.  Everything's “a-ok” and “nothing is wrong,” and “we don’t struggle like those people…”  It’s madness.

American ethnocentrism, of which I am guilty is a problem in the Church.  When I went to Bible college, I found out that Jesus was not the white male that I grew up seeing in Jesus films.  It hit me hard.  I thought to myself, wait.  Jesus is Middle Eastern!?  Christianity is Easter Religion?!   I also learned that they didn’t speak English in Jesus day (although I believe he could have).

Some of us have heard they saying, “I don’t smoke, I don’t chew, and I don’t go with the girls who do!”  That’s so Ned Flanders, and it’s so unlike Jesus.  Stetzer, Kraft, and Walls might agree with me that it’s all “cultural baggage” and in my words, that baggage sticks to our Gospel presentations like gum on a shoe on a hot day.  

I think we were all inundated this year with the presidential elections and the “Make America Christian Again” rhetoric.  That is really cultural baggage that ends up creeping into the way we present the “Good News.”  But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Perhaps a proper understanding of “culture” and the acceptance of our tendency to mix “cultural baggage” with the Gospel message is a good place to repent and get pointed in the right direction.  If we can distinguish between our cultural norms and the universal message of the gospel, we will be careful not to blur the lines and present a distorted gospel.

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Read Ed Stezer’s article: http://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2014/october/what-is-contextualization.html