Conversion, Culture and Contextualization
ten
REFLECTIONS ON CONVERSION
Chris Wright
He being dead yet speaketh” (Hebrews 11:4 KJV), words sometimes found on the gravestones of famous Christian preachers or writers, could well be applied to John Stott. Again and again, as I have read and reread the chapters of this small book, I have been amazed at how often he anticipated, in a short paragraph or even a passing sentence, issues that have engaged the minds of Christian theologians—especially missiologists—in debates that have waged on through the following decades. Three such issues in this chapter stand out.
Conversion and “Insider Movements”
In the section “Conversion and Church,” Stott quotes M. M. Thomas, a renowned Indian scholar only a few years older than him.
Dr. M. M. Thomas, for example, argued for what he called “a Christ-centered secular fellowship outside the church” and—in the context of India—“a Christ-centered fellowship of faith and ethics in the Hindu religious community.” He elaborated his position by adding that “conversion to Christ” should not necessarily imply “conversion to the Christian community.” Instead converts should seek to build up “a Christ-centered fellowship of faith within the society, culture and religion in which they live, transforming their structures and values from within.” . . . A convert from Hinduism should not be obliged to separate himself “from the Hindu community in the social, legal and religious sense.”
What M. M. Thomas “argued for” has, in fact, been happening on a remarkable scale in recent decades, not only in India among people living within a Hindu culture, but in several majority Muslim countries. The phenomenon has come to be referred to as “insider movements”—that is, movements of people to faith in Jesus as Savior and Lord, while remaining “inside” their former and surrounding faith communities, or at any rate not leaving those communities in a visible way by joining an established Christian church (or creating one in the traditional image). Not surprisingly, this is a development that has aroused considerable controversy among both theologians and practitioners of Christian mission.
It is remarkable that, although there is no doubt that Stott disagreed with M. M. Thomas at many points (and said so in some of his other writings), his initial response on this point is far from hostile. He writes, “Revolutionary as Dr. Thomas’s proposals sound, I think we need to respond to them sympathetically.” He gives two reasons for his “sympathy”: First, the “disastrous” results of extracting converts from their cultural environment into Christian churches and communities that are effectively isolated from the wider society, and have little influence as salt and light. And, second, the “unattractive” nature of the church that converts are expected to join. To these sad realities, others could doubtless be added. In some countries the word Christian is associated with all kinds of historical baggage (whether deserved or not is beside the point—the perception is reality for many), including the legacy of the Crusades, colonialism and the feeling that Christianity is an alien, “Western religion” imposed by missionaries and imperialists. Since the word Christian itself began as a nickname and occurs only three times in the New Testament, the argument goes, why should those who come to faith in Jesus be required to adopt a name that is immediately open to distorted assumptions, prejudice and hostility? We should distinguish, it is urged, between the genuine “offense of the cross”—the cost of discipleship itself—from the historic and offensive accretions of Christianity as a religious, cultural and institutional phenomenon.
The controversy over “insider movements” tends to crystallize around a few core questions. Are those who profess faith in Jesus yet retain some or most of their association with the religion of their surrounding cultural community not engaged in a form of syncretism that effectively denies the uniqueness of Jesus Christ? But if the alternative (clear renunciation of their family’s and community’s religious practice along with public confession of Christ) leads to rejection, expulsion and even (as if often does) death, is that not worse? Or, on the contrary, are those things not the expected cost of confessing Christ, including martyrdom, according to the New Testament?
In missiological circles, the debate has raged over whether insider movements should simply be recognized (where they are even visible to “outsiders” at all), with a humble acceptance of the sovereignty of God’s Spirit to work where and how he wishes, or whether such insider movements should actually be fostered and encouraged as a matter of mission strategy, or actively discouraged as a betrayal of the gospel and a serious threat to people’s genuine salvation. And for some of us, another question arises: What gives those of us who live in the West, who live and breathe one of the most syncretized forms of Christian faith the world has seen, the right to dictate what does or does not “count” as “real” allegiance to Christ in very different cultures where God is at work? Why must we, in our habitual urge to manage and strategize, be the ones to provide the labels and taxonomies and criteria?
My point here, however, is not to survey that whole missiological debate, but simply to point out how Stott anticipates it as he reflects on what conversion should mean, but also what it need not mean. I am sure that for all Stott’s “sympathy” with M. M. Thomas’s call for a more truly indigenous Indian expression of faith in Jesus, he would have been very alert to the dangers of syncretism, and would have been concerned that new converts to Christ, no matter how “inside” they may be, should grow up in Christ, should learn the distinctive truth and unique redemptive story of the whole Bible, and be assured of their identity as communities of Jesus followers—even if all that has to take place somehow without the trappings of institutional Christianity and traditional church structures, where they are alien to that culture. I never had the opportunity to discuss this missiological issue with Stott, but I can imagine he would have handled it with his characteristic balance and discernment: being greatly encouraged by the manifest work of God’s Spirit in the empirical fact that many people from diverse religious backgrounds are becoming followers of Jesus (and thereby members of his church, even where no institutional church may exist, or be allowed to), while at the same time being anxious that such discipleship should be protected from the dangers, so evident in the Bible, of mixing the worship of the living God with idolatrous assumptions drawn from an unchallenged surrounding cultural worldview.
Since I do know that he had the whole of the Cape Town Commitment read to him, and rejoiced to agree with it, I expect he would have endorsed its paragraphs (necessarily brief) on the matter. They come within section IIC, “Living the Love of Christ Among People of Other Faiths,” and read as follows:
Love respects diversity of discipleship
So called “insider movements” are to be found within several religions. These are groups of people who are now following Jesus as their God and Saviour. They meet together in small groups for fellowship, teaching, worship and prayer centred around Jesus and the Bible while continuing to live socially and culturally within their birth communities, including some elements of its religious observance. This is a complex phenomenon and there is much disagreement over how to respond to it. Some commend such movements. Others warn of the danger of syncretism. Syncretism, however, is a danger found among Christians everywhere as we express our faith within our own cultures. We should avoid the tendency, when we see God at work in unexpected or unfamiliar ways, either (i) hastily to classify it and promote it as a new mission strategy, or (ii) hastily to condemn it without sensitive contextual listening.
A. In the spirit of Barnabas who, on arrival in Antioch, “saw the evidence of the grace of God” and “was glad and encouraged them all to remain true to the Lord [Acts 11:20-24],” we would appeal to all those who are concerned with this issue to:
i. Take as their primary guiding principle the apostolic decision and practice: “We should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God [Acts 15:19].”
ii. Exercise humility, patience and graciousness in recognizing the diversity of viewpoints, and conduct conversations without stridency and mutual condemnation [Romans 14:1-3].
Conversion, Church and Gospel
Still in that section “Conversion and Church,” Stott turns to the Bible and reminds us that the church is not a building or an institution, but a people—indeed the people whom God has been, and still is, calling and creating for himself. Stott does not mention the Old Testament by name, but by referring to the Bible’s “consistent witness” and “the historical process” he doubtless intends us to understand that God’s people span all the ages of both Testaments through the whole Bible story. Then he adds, in one of those amazingly condensed but “pregnant” sentences, “According to the letter to the Ephesians this redeemed community is central both to the gospel and to history.”
And of course, not only was he right, but also he anticipates the growing awareness of two things that have become more sharply focused in recent evangelical theology: that the church, by its existence, is an integral part of what the gospel means; and that the church is in its essence missional (which is why it is central also “to history”). Or in technical language, we should neither divorce our ecclesiology from our soteriology, nor our missiology from our ecclesiology.
But why single out Ephesians? The most immediate reason is that it was very much on his mind at the time. When, in 1979, he published his exposition of Ephesians, God’s New Society, he tells us in the preface that “during the past five years and more I have been studying the text of Ephesians, absorbing its message, feeling its impact and dreaming its dream.” So it is not surprising that his sentence quoted above is reflected in two subheadings of his comments on Ephesians 3. After stating that “the major lesson taught by this first half of Ephesians 3 is the biblical centrality of the church,” he outlines how “the church is central to history” and “the church is central to the gospel.”
As for history, Paul speaks about the eternal purpose of God, a divine plan that belongs to history and eternity, the creation of a multinational community of reconciled Jews and Gentiles, “which has no territorial frontiers, which claims the whole world for Christ,” “his own new society, the beginning of his new creation.” That is a missional understanding of the church, because it sees the church as integral to the ultimate mission of God to bring the whole creation into unity under Christ (Ephesians 1:10).
As for the gospel, Paul has argued that God’s goal of cosmic integration in chapter 1 has issued in ethnic reconciliation (Ephesians 2:11–3:11) between Jew and Gentile. And he sees that as the peace-making accomplishment of Christ through the cross (Ephesians 2:14-18), and the outworking of the “mystery” of the gospel itself (Ephesians 3:3-6). The gospel is the good news of what God has done, and that includes the fact that he has created a reconciled community—reconciled to God and to one another in Christ.
The good news of the unsearchable riches of Christ which Paul preached is that he died and rose again not only to save sinners like me (though he did), but also to create a single new humanity; not only to redeem us from sin but also to adopt us into God’s family; not only to reconcile us to God but also to reconcile us to one another. Thus the church is an integral part of the gospel. The gospel is good news of a new society as well as of a new life.
This perception of the church as central to the gospel and mission can be seen in other parts of Paul’s writings. In Colossians 1:15-20, he includes the church, the body of which Christ is the head, within his survey of the supremacy of Christ over “all things in heaven and on earth,” by right of creation, redemption and inheritance. Paul regards the Christian community of believers in Corinth, for all their faults, as “a letter from Christ” (2 Corinthians 3:2-3), demonstrating the truth and authenticity of the apostolic gospel. He commends their contribution (as Gentiles) to the collection for the famine-stricken poor in Jerusalem (Jewish believers) as their “obedience in acknowledging the gospel of Christ” (2 Corinthians 9:13). And he could assure the Gentile believers in Galatia that their faith in the Messiah Jesus had incorporated them into the spiritual seed of Abraham—and that that in itself was the substantive demonstration of God’s faithfulness to his promise to Abraham, which Paul expresses with explicitly gospel language. “Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘In you shall all the nations be blessed’ ” (Galatians 3:8).
For Paul, the gospel (the good news that God promised the world) began in Genesis and is now made visible in the church—and visible not only on earth. The church, according to Paul in Ephesians 3 (meaning, in context, the church as the new humanity of reconciled Jews and Gentiles through the cross), is God’s showcase to the whole cosmos of spiritual powers, proving the truth of “the mystery of Christ” and the accomplishment of God’s great redemptive mission: “Through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places. This was according to the eternal purpose which he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Ephesians 3:10-11).
And since the church is central to the gospel, how the church behaves, in living, loving and worshiping together, is a central part of its witness and mission in the world—as Paul so regularly goes on to insist. The church is not just the mail carrier delivering the message, but in itself is an embodiment of the message (however imperfectly in this fallen world).
This gospel- and mission-centered nature of the church has been taken up in recent works. It is strongly evident, for example, in the work of N. T. Wright (so much so that he has sometimes been accused—quite wrongly in my view—as substituting ecclesiology for soteriology). It is also a major concern of Scot McKnight in various writings, most recently Kingdom Conspiracy. My own book The Mission of God’s People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission stresses the historical continuity of God’s people through the whole Bible from Genesis onward, and how they (we) are called into existence to be a people who embody the good news of the biblical gospel, who bear witness to it in word and deed as the essence of our mission—our reason for existence within history. And, like so many other “recent” favorite missiological themes, this understanding of the centrality of the church to both gospel and mission was already heralded in the work of Lesslie Newbigin, who spoke of “the congregation as hermeneutic of the gospel” with the powerful, missional, words, “How is it possible that the gospel should be credible, that people should come to believe that the power which has the last word in human affairs is represented by a man hanging on a cross? I am suggesting that the only answer, the only hermeneutic of the gospel, is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it.”
As I said, Stott had this theme very much on his mind in the 1970s, and it is evident also in the 1974 Lausanne Covenant. The following words come from paragraph 6, “The Church and Evangelism”: “The church is at the very centre of God’s cosmic purpose and is his appointed means of spreading the Gospel. But a church which preaches the Cross must itself be marked by the Cross.” This leads to an ethical imperative, reminiscent of the way Paul moves from the indicative of the gospel to the imperative that must characterize those who believe and obey the gospel. “[The church] becomes a stumbling block to evangelism when it betrays the Gospel or lacks a living faith in God, genuine love for people, or scrupulous honesty in all things including promotion and finance.”
The same integration of ecclesial, missional and ethical dimensions lives on within the Lausanne Movement, in the Cape Town Commitment. It is interesting that the section on the church (part I.9, “We Love the People of God”) moves rapidly to the role of the church in relation to mission, and the ethical demands that generates, while the section on mission (part I.10, “We Love the Mission of God”) moves rapidly to the identity and role of the church and the quality of its life in the world. Ecclesiology and missiology cannot be pulled apart.
The people of God are those from all ages and all nations whom God in Christ has loved, chosen, called, saved and sanctified as a people for his own possession, to share in the glory of Christ as citizens of the new creation. As those, then, whom God has loved from eternity to eternity and throughout all our turbulent and rebellious history, we are commanded to love one another. For “since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another,” and thereby “be imitators of God . . . and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us.” Love for one another in the family of God is not merely a desirable option but an inescapable command. Such love is the first evidence of obedience to the gospel, the necessary expression of our submission to Christ’s Lordship, and a potent engine of world mission [2 Thessalonians 2:13-14; 1 John 4:11; Ephesians 5:2; 1 Thessalonians 1:3; 4:9-10; John 13:35].
A) Love calls for unity. Jesus’ command that his disciples should love one another is linked to his prayer that they should be one. Both the command and the prayer are missional—“that the world may know you are my disciples,” and that “the world may know that you [the Father] sent me” [John 13:34-35; 17:21]. A most powerfully convincing mark of the truth of the gospel is when Christian believers are united in love across the barriers of the world’s inveterate divisions—barriers of race, colour, gender, social class, economic privilege or political alignment. However, few things so destroy our testimony as when Christians mirror and amplify the very same divisions among themselves. We urgently seek a new global partnership within the body of Christ across all continents, rooted in profound mutual love, mutual submission, and dramatic economic sharing without paternalism or unhealthy dependency. And we seek this not only as a demonstration of our unity in the gospel, but also for the sake of the name of Christ and the mission of God in all the world.
After summarizing the mission of God, as “central to our understanding of God, the Bible, the Church, human history and the ultimate future,” the section on mission continues:
Our participation in God’s mission. God calls his people to share his mission. The Church from all nations stands in continuity through the Messiah Jesus with God’s people in the Old Testament. With them we have been called through Abraham and commissioned to be a blessing and a light to the nations. With them, we are to be shaped and taught through the law and the prophets to be a community of holiness, compassion and justice in a world of sin and suffering. We have been redeemed through the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and empowered by the Holy Spirit to bear witness to what God has done in Christ. The Church exists to worship and glorify God for all eternity and to participate in the transforming mission of God within history. Our mission is wholly derived from God’s mission, addresses the whole of God’s creation, and is grounded at its centre in the redeeming victory of the cross. This is the people to whom we belong, whose faith we confess and whose mission we share.
And this is the people, we might add, in relation to the theme of Stott’s chapter, into which converts are grafted, when they become repentant, trusting and obedient disciples of Jesus Christ—whatever kind of “church” they may or may not be aligned with in their immediate culture and historical circumstances.
Conversion, Culture and Contextualization
The section “Conversion and Culture” in Stott’s chapter raises issues that have deep roots in the history of the church (and by that I mean that they go right back into the Old Testament too), and continue to exercise the heads, hearts and hands of mission theologians, strategists and practitioners.
Given the prominence of the “contextualization” debate (or “enculturation” as it has been called in the Roman Catholic church), in the history of Christian mission (and not just in modern times; the Jesuit mission movements struggled with it in India and China), it is well worth remembering that the relationship between the people of God and the cultures that they necessarily inhabit (there is no human life without culture) is an issue in the Bible itself. The New Testament shows the earliest followers of Jesus working hard to relate the claims and challenges of their faith to the cultures of first-century Judaism and then to Greek and Roman cultures. But also in the Old Testament, Israel faced the challenge of a whole sequence of ambient cultures (ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Canaanite, Babylonian, Persian, Greek)—with an all-too-human mixture of successful distinctiveness and abject capitulating accommodation. So much of the message of the Torah and the Prophets is illuminated by understanding this struggle—which was at heart a missional one: would they live as a nation among the nations (a culture in the midst of cultures), as the distinctive (“holy”) people God had created and called them to be? That is a major thrust of the great “sermon” we know as the book of Deuteronomy.
Whatever conversion means, then, it has to take place within culture—in dynamic and inescapable engagement with culture. That is clearly so when we examine the biblical language used in relation to the phenomenon itself—whether in the Old Testament, with its constant appeals to Israel to “turn” (in all its meanings—to turn away from other gods, to turn back to the living God and so on), or in the New Testament, with the imperative of the kingdom of God on the lips of John the Baptist and Jesus to their fellow Jews to “repent and believe the good news,” or the appeal of Paul to pagan polytheists to turn “from idols, to serve a living and true God” (1 Thessalonians 1:9).
This interaction of conversion and culture was explored in some depth in an issue of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research titled “Christian Conversion and Mission.” Andrew Walls explored the crucial difference between what is known of Jewish proselytism in first-century Judaism and the nature of Christian evangelism and conversion practiced by Paul and the other apostles among the Gentiles. I surveyed the theme of conversion in both Testaments, noting that it included the radical displacement of all other gods, ethical transformation and significant missional implications connected to the blessing of the nations.
Stott makes some seminal statements in this section, worth quoting again.
Conversion is not the automatic renunciation of all our inherited culture. True, conversion involves repentance, and repentance is renunciation. Yet this does not require the convert to step right out of his former culture into a Christian subculture that is totally distinctive. . . .
Christians who break loose entirely from the society in which they were nurtured may find themselves rootless and insecure, and may even—with conventional restraints removed—lapse into moral license. They may even develop a Christian “communalism” that gives them a new security in which to live but cuts them off from their former friends and relatives. Also they may arouse opposition. When Christians are seen as undermining the fabric of traditional society, they are regarded as dangerous fanatics and provoke fierce, irrational hostility.
As we saw earlier, that speaks straight into the controversy over “insider movements.” Stott would not, of course, have regarded such a brief observation to be in any sense the last word on a very complex issue. But it does show he was aware of the kind of problems that “insider movements” seek to overcome—however controversial they may then prove to be for theologically minded and mission-committed observers. He writes,
It is vital for us to learn to distinguish between Scripture and culture, and between those things in culture that are inherently evil and must therefore be renounced for Christ’s sake and those things that are good or indifferent and may therefore be retained, even transformed and enriched. . . .
It is not a necessary part of our Christian allegiance to be iconoclasts, and to destroy the culture of the past for no better reason than that it is old or that it was part of our preconversion life. Culture is ambivalent because human beings themselves are ambivalent. As the Lausanne Covenant expressed it, “Because man is God’s creature, some of his culture is rich in beauty and goodness. Because he has fallen, all of it is tainted with sin and some of it is demonic.” So “culture must always be tested and judged by Scripture,” and we need discernment to evaluate it.
As I just said, that process of discernment is evident within the Bible itself. In one of my own earliest books (in which I am sure I was influenced by having read this 1975 book by Stott), I explored how the Old Testament bears witness to Israel’s complex relationship to surrounding culture—in ways that echo Stott’s first paragraph above. We can observe that Israel’s response (evident particularly in the Torah) ranged from total “rejection and prohibition” through “qualified toleration” (for example, of polygamy, divorce and slavery) to “critical affirmation” (for example, of the importance of kinship and family cohesion and viability).
Very soon after Lausanne 1974 and the publication of this book in 1975, Stott gave his mind, his convening authority, his unmatched skills as a conference chairperson and his drafting abilities to a consultation on this pressing issue of gospel and culture. It took place at Willowbank, Bermuda, in January 1978, and it produced “The Willowbank Report—Gospel and Culture.” It is an outstanding thirty-six-page document that still offers some exceptionally clear definitions, distinctions, theological reflections and practical recommendations. It begins as follows:
The process of communicating the gospel cannot be isolated from the human culture from which it comes, or from that in which it is to be proclaimed. This fact constituted one of the preoccupations of the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in July 1974. So the Lausanne Committee’s Theology and Education Group convened a consultation on this topic to meet in January 1978. It brought 33 theologians, anthropologists, linguists, missionaries and pastors together from all six continents to study “Gospel and Culture.” Co-sponsored by the Lausanne Committee’s Strategy Working Group, it had four goals:
Many mission agencies and many Christian churches in countries that had been former “mission fields,” and were therefore seeking to work through the issues of a postmissionary engagement with their indigenous cultures, found some very helpful guidelines in this document—one of the earliest of the Lausanne Occasional Papers.
The literature on contextualization and the relationship between gospel, mission and culture has grown steadily since the 1970s, as has the number of conferences and consultations convened to wrestle with the issues involved. The following endnote samples only a small selection of titles, some of which include much more extensive bibliographies.
But we should give John Stott himself the final word. As so often, he returned from contemplating all kinds of human questions, strategies, challenges and intentions to summon us to humility before God. Whatever mission may mean to us, it is God’s mission we are called to share. Whatever salvation includes, it is God alone who saves. Whatever conversion entails, it is God who does the turning.
In contrast to the proud, self-confident mood of the modern age, the apostles’ humble reliance on the power of the Holy Spirit stands out in bold relief. They believed (and we should believe with them) that people are dead in trespasses and sins, blind to spiritual truth, and slaves of sin and Satan. In consequence, they cannot “turn” themselves or save themselves. Nor can any of us “turn” other people or save them. Only the Holy Spirit can open their eyes, enlighten their darkness, liberate them from bondage, turn them to God and bring them out of death into life. Certainly repentance and faith are plainly declared in the New Testament to be a human duty (Acts 2:38; 16:31; 17:30), but, as we have seen, they are also the gift of God (for example, Acts 11:18; Ephesians 2:8; Philippians 1:29). And however perplexing this antinomy may be, it is necessary in our human-centered world to assert it, so that we may humble ourselves before God.