Robert Hunt – Response to Philip Wingeier-Rayo: Implications of Online Education for the Future of the Church, Part II

Today’s post is by Dr. Robert A. Hunt. Rev. Dr. Hunt is Director of Global Theological Education and Professor of Christian Missions and interreligious Relations This post responds to an earlier series of posts by Rev. Dr. Philip Wingeier-Rayo, which can be found here: [1], [2], and [3].

In my last post, I suggested that the move to online-only M.Div. degrees is another sign that theological education across-the-board must be completely rethought in a radical way. Only by so doing can we respond to the fundamental changes in the self-understanding of contemporary people and thereby hope to present a comprehensible gospel to the contemporary world.

There are ways that theological education can address some of these challenges, and they go hand in hand with the new possibilities for online learning.

First, we must recognize that while a set-apart community life is an important phase in preparation for ministry, it is not necessarily its heart. Instead of assuming that putting students in proximity with one another will manufacture community life, we need to build intentionally constructed retreat-like experiences combining learning, worship, and spiritual formation as part of the theological education experience. There are multiple possible models for this, and any and all will need to be operative depending on specific needs and circumstances.

Moreover, we must take seriously the possibilities for real, virtual communities, many of which already exist. This isn’t simply a matter of capturing the imaginations of Millennials and Gen Z. One of my differently abled students pointed out to me that the best-intentioned disability access programs are still burdensome compared to entering a virtual world in which he and his friends can meet without navigating any physical restraints. For many “virtual” worlds are at least in part better and more fulfilling than “real” worlds, assuming that this distinction is even valid.

Second, given the unsettled state of our churches and church institutions, it is unfair to ask students to commit to a degree program as their initial engagement with a theology school. We’ll need to accept and move toward what are commonly called “stackable” credentials based on focused training in particular skills or realms of inquiry that persons already in ministry need to master. These could then be built up to credit for a full semester course and so-on to a degree. And we need to accept that many competent pastors will not need to complete a degree to begin and carry on good ministry.

Third, we’ll need to recognize that online pedagogy is completely different from classroom pedagogy, but it does match much of what has been accepted in higher education for the last 15 years or more. The “sage on the stage” isn’t dead, but for the most part needs to be replaced by the “guide on the side,” a model suited to online and hybrid education. And after all, I had incredible sages in seminary at Perkins who were no more available to me emotionally and spiritually than if I’d been watching a video of the lecture. People of my generation reveled in the sage on a stage. That simply isn’t true of millennials and Gen Z.

Fourth, this means that credentialing for teaching needs to be seriously reconsidered. American PhD programs are designed to reproduce 20th century scholars, researchers, and authors of monographs, not necessarily teachers and leaders. The church needs professional theologians, but seminaries also need teachers and guides.

Fifth, we must master the emerging digital media as means of communication and interaction.

One of the things most difficult to accept, but absolutely necessary to understand in a rapidly changing multi-cultural context, is that there is no universal standard for either ordering information so that it constitutes understanding and knowledge or conveying that understanding in a comprehensible way. We must become open to the fact that a standard academic essay is only one of many possible models of thinking rationally from question to answer, and thus only one of many possible models of conveying understanding achieved to others. We are training pastors to engage the world with the gospel, not to become members of the academic guild. They must speak the languages of the people to whom they minister.

Sixth, and following from the above, theological educators must create curricula and course content relevant to a rapidly changing social and cultural situation. Precisely because the socio-cultural situation is rapidly changing, there is no fixed model for theological education that won’t soon be out of date. Instead, theology schools will need to create models for learning that have clear goals but are internally flexible -- with the capability of changing on a semester by semester, or at most year by year, basis. There will be no comfortable place where we have mastered our field of study and the ways in which to communicate our knowledge to students.

Similarly, pastors and church leaders cannot be trained just to become competent spiritual guides and denominational functionaries. United Methodist theological education in the 20th century assumed a stable organization within which changing theological expressions would address a changing society. That stability is gone. Now, pastors and church leaders will need to be prepared to foster creativity and manage change within congregations. Critical theological reflection will need to be supplemented by teaching more practical forms of leadership.

Finally, balancing this focus on teaching with the need for faculty to pursue longer term research projects will require new ways of thinking about how research requiring commitment over years fits with the need for constantly changing subject matter in courses. A tenure system that rewards only monographs that take years to write will exclude the necessary faculty who are willing and even desire to engage the edges of change in a field or many fields. Dilettantes and non-credentialed experts have an important role in theological education and shouldn’t be pushed into second tier positions.

There is a church in County Durham in England called the old Saxon church. It has stood for 1250 years. It was built from stones taken from Hadrian’s Wall, which was no longer relevant to the defense of England. Stones intended for one purpose were used for another.

Modern theological educators must look at the stones we have, look at the challenges we face, and begin to both tear down and rebuild. It will not be easy. The old barbarians remain a danger. And yet our defenses against them convey no gospel, no good news to rising generations.

Suggested Readings: Raymond Martin, John Barrisi, The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self; Charles Taylor, A Secular Age; Calvin Schrag, The Self in Post-Modernity; Jeffry Bishop, Anticipatory Corpse; Meghan O’Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine; Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head.

Robert Hunt – Response to Philip Wingeier-Rayo: Implications of Online Education for the Future of the Church, Part I

Today’s post is by Dr. Robert A. Hunt. Rev. Dr. Hunt is Director of Global Theological Education and Professor of Christian Missions and interreligious Relations. This post responds to an earlier series of posts by Rev. Dr. Philip Wingeier-Rayo, which can be found here: [1], [2], and [3].

In his recent posts, Phil Wingeier-Rayo has brought our attention to the United Methodist University Senate’s recent decision to allow fully online M.Div. degrees for United Methodist ministry candidates. Phil asks what the implications of this decision will be for students, the denomination, and seminaries and suggests a hybrid model as an alternative to a fully online degree.

In my comments about online teaching and the future of theological education, I will essentially make two points.

The first is that modern hybrid theological education actually goes way back to the 1960s and 70s. There are well formed pedagogical models for bringing students together over a period of one or two weeks, and then interacting with them remotely over the rest of the semester. This is classic theological education by extension (TEE). It was pioneered by Pentecostals in the Netherlands, conservative Christians from Texas and California, and others extending theological education to underserved areas.

I was the Director of such theological educational programs in both Malaysia and Singapore. The key feature of these programs was that they focus on forming proven leaders rather than young people who thought they might potentially be leaders. The TEE model allows men and women already in ministry to gain the education and professional skills they need to lead more effectively. Allowing fully online degrees simply makes it possible to do in the United States what has already been well done for many decades in some places.

The second and more radical point is that higher education across-the-board must be rethought. The idea that degrees are necessary to the preparation of persons or ministry must be abandoned. The Master of Divinity degree is declining because it is seen as irrelevant. It is irrelevant to The United Methodist Church, and it is irrelevant to people who are seeking to serve Jesus Christ. Indeed, the very concept of academic credentials needs to be rethought, as it is being rethought across many fields and industries.

Further, in rapidly changing times every possible question that can be asked must be asked. Do pastors actually need to be theologians? Why is critical thinking important for ministry? Why teach people to think theologically, and then demand that they pass tests for doctrinal correctness?

Are pastors entrepreneurial leaders and potential missionaries, or are they functionaries with defined tasks in relation to the congregation and its maintenance? Are the contemporary fields of study in a theological school actually relevant to contemporary Christian ministry? Are PhD programs in theology relevant to creating teachers for men and women entering Christian ministry?

Is it not possible that the entire system linking preparation of pastors to institutions of higher education is no longer useful or relevant? Is it not possible that we should be taking the resources that we have and deploying them in completely new and different ways to serve the church?

Ultimately, I would suggest that Philip is not radical enough. Contemporary theological education is based on an enlightenment understanding of both religion and the human person. We are in the midst of a sea change in which those understandings are being swept away, and along with them, the institutions that served their intellectual and spiritual needs.

We are moving into an era in which changes in the self-understanding of contemporary people will rival and surpass those changes created by the Enlightenment and modernity. These factors at the least are changing human self-understanding. 1. The rise of AI and, related to it, changes in psychology and neurobiology. 2. Advances in medical science, particularly related to the manipulation of genes and the mechanization of the body. 3. Cultural shifts with regard to sexuality. 4. Emergent understandings of the human biome in relation to the biosphere under the influence of evolving evolutionary theory. 5. Multi-cultural and multi-ethnic environments as the norm for human experience. 6. Changing ways in which contemporary people construct their human identity.

These factors are rapidly making Enlightenment era models of human personhood obsolete. As a result, articulations of the meaning of God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ for 21st century persons must inevitably change to address them as they are.

In this situation, all past theological work, from the apostolic witness in the New Testament to the theologians of the 20th century, is better understood as normative examples of the process of faithful contextualization rather than as generators of normative doctrines. And that alone tells us that all Enlightenment era constructions of theological school curriculum and even individual courses need to be reworked.

As importantly, the church must learn to speak the contemporary vernacular, a vernacular that is either missing or transforms the theological language of 20^th century Christianity. And it is the task of theological educators to prepare pastors to learn that vernacular, which means first that theological educators themselves learn it, something that many if not most appear reluctant to do.

In my next post, I will suggest some of the ways in which theological schools and theological educators can engage in that very task.

Kirk Sims: Is the Essence of Methodism about Method?

Today's post is by Rev. Dr. Kirk Sims. Rev. Dr. Sims is a United Methodist missionary with the General Board of Global Ministries, serving as a consultant and theological educator based in Prague. He is an ordained elder in the North Georgia Annual Conference.

One misconception about Methodism is that we are all about method. In fact, it’s in our name! Yes, Wesley and the other members of the Holy Club of Oxford had a method to their pursuit of living holy lives. When others used “Methodists” in a derisive way, they embraced it as a name of honor. And yes, Methodists have been known for keeping meticulous records and holding to a Book of Discipline.

However, to conclude that we are primarily about method is to miss the essence of what it means to be a Methodist. In his widely distributed pamphlet, John Wesley described “The Character of a Methodist.” According to Wesley, “We do not place our religion, or any part of it, in being attached to any peculiar mode of speaking, any quaint or uncommon set of expressions. … Nor do we desire to be distinguished by actions, customs, or usages, of an indifferent nature.”

Rather, he described a Methodist as “one who has the love of God shed abroad in his heart by the Holy Ghost given unto him.” Wesley chose to speak in general terms. A Methodist gives thanks in all things, prays without ceasing, loves neighbors, keeps God’s commands, serves, does good, and thinks and lets others think.

Wesley does not define Methodists by a method, but by a way of life and commitment to Christ.

Sure, Wesley had his forms, but even in his lifetime, he would innovate and adapt based on what he was seeing in society and what was working—all for the aim of ensuring a people with the love of God shed abroad in their hearts. According to Howard Snyder, “John Wesley saw that new wine must be put into new wineskins. So the story of Wesley’s life and ministry is the story of creating and adapting structures to serve the burgeoning revival movement.”

Wesley could see that some things may work in one context but not another. For instance, even though he embraced an episcopal polity, he was certain to say that was not the only way prescribed by the apostles or the scriptures. And when he chose an edited version of the Articles of Religion for what would become the Methodist Episcopal Church, one phrase remained.

“It is not necessary that rites and ceremonies should in all places be the same, or exactly alike; for they have been always different, and may be changed according to the diversity of countries, times, and men’s manners, so that nothing be ordained against God’s Word. … Every particular church may ordain, change, or abolish rites and ceremonies, so that all things may be done to edification.”

For Wesley, forms were secondary to a living and active faith. In fact, Wesley said, “I am not afraid that the people called Methodists should ever cease to exist either in Europe or America. But I am afraid, lest they should only exist as a dead sect, having the form of religion without the power.” A living [Methodist] faith is not about perpetuating forms of religion but a living faith.

The early Methodists borrowed and innovated. Wesley learned and adapted the approach of bands from Peter Böhler and the Moravians, and he sort of stumbled into the concept of classes in Bristol. The high churchman “submitted to being more vile” through field preaching as he met people where they were. Francis Asbury knew he could not simply be appointed superintendent for America. The democratic culture demanded that he be elected by Conference. As the faith spread, circuit riders saw that the camp meeting was an effective means of evangelism, so they embraced that form.

In fact, Methodism is at its best when it uses forms that fit cultural contexts and point to deeper meanings. When the emphasis has been on making the love of God shed abroad, we have often seen growth—when we are less worried about maintaining a strict method or form.

In the latter half of the 20th Century in the US, many churches began to use instruments in worship similar to the style of music that people listened to in their free time. Methodists in India saw the value of retreating in culturally relevant ways, and Christ-centered Ashrams developed there. In many African contexts, it is fitting to express joy through dance, and many Methodists have incorporated collective dance into their worship. And in recent days, we have seen innovation in the digital realm.

As Methodists, our “method” is to point people to a living faith, one where the love of God is shed abroad.

Temba Nkomozepi: Mission and Food – The Mujila Falls Perspective

Today's post is written by Temba Nkomozepi. Nkomozepi is a Global Ministries missionary and an agriculturalist at Mujila Falls Agriculture Center in Kanyama, Zambia. This post is part of an occasional series on food and mission.

Mission and food are inseparable, and the interaction between them is inevitable. A study of the early Church in Corinth found that sharing food was significant as a way to show love and helped to displace former conceptions which tolerated inequality and uneven distribution (Blue, 1991).

Often, missionaries would have to give out food to the poor after delivering sermons. Instead of giving out food, many missionaries introduced and demonstrated new techniques to improve the local agriculture. From as early as 1822, in the tribal hilly areas of Odisha in India, a group of missionaries introduced the sloping agricultural land technology which allowed locals to sustainably grow crops and harvest good yields on steep slopes, which was previously attempted without success (Nayak, 2018). In the 1920s, Emery Alvord, an American missionary, successfully promoted the use of the plough and integrated crop-livestock farming in Zimbabwe. More recently, another agricultural missionary, Brian Oldrieve, through Foundations for Farming, is a proponent for a technique known as conservation agriculture based on crop rotation, minimum-tillage and retention of crop residues (Baudron et. al, 2012).

The Mujila Falls Agriculture Center (MFAC), a United Methodist Church mission center also promotes and demonstrates good agriculture practices and works to promote rural development. This purpose of this article is to present the fusion of mission and food from the perspective of us at the MFAC.

The Mujila Falls Agriculture Center lies in a typical rural area at about 50 km away from a small district town called Mwinilunga in the North – Western Province of Zambia in Southern Africa. (11°29'34.8"S 24°48'27.6"E). The region is predominantly occupied by the Lunda people. The area receives high rainfall and has high temperatures that are suitable for most crops and livestock.

The project started in 1999 when its founder, Rev. Paul Lee Webster was evacuated from Musokatanda in the Democratic Republic of Congo following civil strife. The project’s motto is derived from the second part of John 10:10 that says, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full”. The initial objectives were to increase access to food with high protein and vitamin content, but later morphed to include rural and church development.

The interactions of mission and food at the MFAC have been multifaceted as a result of the diverse skills of the missionaries and the circumstances surrounding the formation of the project. One of the biggest successes to date has been the teaching and demonstration on growing maize. Despite that maize is the staple in Zambia, cassava is the staple food in the vicinity. For years, locals had been unsuccessfully trying to farm maize without much success. It was only after training and demonstration on critical factors such as seed selection, land preparation, weed control and harvesting that the yields grew and more people were encouraged to cultivate maize as a cash crop. Over the years government also increased support in input supply (subsidies) and marketing.

Mujila has been successful in providing fresh milk and eggs. The project provides the community with over 80 liters of fresh milk and between 1,500 to 2,700 eggs per day. The eggs are sold at an affordable price, while the milk is distributed free of charge as a response to the need and requests from several health practitioners. Efforts to have the local farmers produce their own milk and eggs are hindered by lack of access to improved cattle and chicken breeds, poor road network, support services and lack of funds for investment.

In addition, Mujila has seen both success and failure in introducing various appropriate technology and types of small livestock and vegetables. For example, in appropriate technology, the bicycle frame cultivators were a big success largely because they are effective and old bicycle frames are widely available without much utility.

On the other hand, introducing the use of animal draught power was not adopted much because of the high entry cost barrier. Even those who can afford cattle rear them long distances away from their homes and fields. Similarly, experience has also proved that vegetables or foods that go along with the main starch (Nshima) such as cabbage are usually accepted, whilst those that do not like rhubarb/beetroot are not easily adopted. Experiencing local food has helped the missionaries at MFAC to develop cross-cultural understanding and intelligence (Sterkenburg, 2013)

MFAC does not only help with food practices as practical decisions influenced by nutritional needs but sometimes in ways that are fundamentally social or cultural (Reddy & van Dam, 2020). An example is how the Mama Roxanne Day Care center was introduced as an intervention for child safety and protection.

The mission center received reports of incidents where minor children under the watch of older siblings would injure themselves trying to heat or prepare food. In most cases, the mothers who are normally the primary caregivers to children would be out preparing cassava flour. Processing cassava has not changed much over the last few decades; it is laborious and time consuming which involves soaking, chipping, drying and pounding (Alamu et al., 2019).

On the surface, it is unclear why families prefer to use the old ways to process cassava, also why they chose cassava to be a food security crop and maize to be a cash crop. Key informants have revealed that the reasons are largely traditional and are also linked to the status of a wife or family. It is against this background that MFAC started a day care center where children between the ages of 4 and 7 can be looked after while receiving basic education.

Similarly, MFAC has also strengthened local congregations by providing opportunities to the church and church members through employment or income generating agricultural projects. The work done at Mujila provides a platform where people who gather for any program such as training and employment can be part of religious services led by missionaries. The advantage is that it makes it possible to reach to people who would not normally respond to an invitation to church.

Overall, the interactions of mission and food at MFAC are complex, and the approach is distinctive because of the diverse skill set of the missionaries and the uniqueness of the local area. Food provides a platform for exchange because it can be used to mark religion, ethnicity (or tribe) and gender (Bonnekessen, 2010).

Furthermore, understanding the food value chain; what a society eats; how it is produced and processed, how it links to tradition and status can also help mission centers to bring much needed interventions such as the Mama Roxanne Day Care Center. On one hand, the missionaries train and demonstrate how people could possibly eat better and earn a little more, while on the other, they also teach how people may have life, and have it abundantly!

References
Alamu, E.O., Ntawuruhunga, P., Chibwe, T. et al., 2019. "Evaluation of cassava processing and utilization at household level in Zambia." Food Security, 11:141–150. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-018-0875-3

Baudron, F., Andersson, J.A., Corbeels, M., Giller K.E., 2012. "Failing to Yield? Ploughs, conservation agriculture and the problem of agricultural intensification. An example from the Zambezi Valley, Zimbabwe." The Journal of Development Studies, 48 (03):393-412. 10.1080/00220388.2011.587509. hal-00807097.

Blue, B.B., 1991. "The house church at Corinth and the Lord’s Supper: Famine, food supply, and the present distress." Criswell Theological Review, 5(2):221-239.

Bonnekessen, B., 2010. "Food is good to teach: an exploration of the cultural meanings of food." Food, Culture & Society, 13(2):279+. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A236333285/AONE?u=googlescholar&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=0b3da1fe. Accessed 19 May 2022

Nayak, S., 2018. "Role of Missionaries in Development of Sloping Agricultural Land Technology in Odisha: A Historical Study." The Researchers' International Research Journal; Jharkhand, 4(1): 27-32.

Reddy, G. & van Dam, R.M., 2020. "Food, culture, and identity in multicultural societies: Insights from Singapore." Appetite, 149, 104633.

Sterkenburg, D.R., 2013. "Teaching Cultural Awareness Through Food Traditions." Business Administration Faculty Presentations. 21.

William Payne: Biblical Interpretation, Gender Equality, and the Evangelistic Mandate

Today's blog post is written by Dr. William Payne. Dr. Payne is the Harlan & Wilma Hollewell Professor of Evangelism and World Missions and Director of Chaplaincy Studies at Ashland Theological Seminary.

John Wesley famously stated that he was homo unius libri (a man of one book). Following that lead, United Methodism affirms that Holy Writ is the primary authority for issues related to right faith and right practice. Considering this, how should Bible-affirming people make sense of the New Testament’s mixed messages about female Christ-followers?

In Titus 2:2-4, Paul says that the old women should behave themselves with reverence and not gossip or drink too much. They should give a good example, teach the young women to love their husbands and their children, remain judiciously pure, be keepers of the home, remain full of kindness and be subject to their husbands.

On the surface, this sounds very sexist and out of step with our modern world. After all, American society values gender equality. I also value gender equality because the spirit and teaching of the New Testament establishes this ideal.

In the church, the cultural categories that diminish women should be reconsidered in the light of the gospel message that emphasizes equality in Christ (Gal 3:28). As such, I do not believe that American women need to follow Paul's exhortation as if it were a universal law to be mimicked.

Why do I say this? Verse 5 makes the point. Do all of this so that "no one will be able to speak badly against the gospel message."

In other words, the culture of the people to which Paul was writing had normative expectations regarding the proper way for a woman to behave in public and in the home. If Christian women acted contrary to the cultural norm, they would bring discredit on the Gospel and would cause the unbelieving public to think that Christianity was a bad religion that should be shunned.

First Peter 2-3 makes a similar point when writing to slaves, to women who are married to harsh unbelievers, and to Christians who live under an evil government. In this light, one should not read 1 Peter 2:18ff as if it were establishing slavery.

The larger teaching of the New Testament points to an in-breaking kingdom of God that transforms human societies that are under the tutelage of the gospel. Ultimately, God will abolish all forms of injustice and sin to include slavery.

As such, 1 Peter does not endorse slavery. Rather, it assumes the unjust reality of slavery in the Roman Empire. It was a social fact for the people of its time. In the context of slavery and other forms of unjust systems, 1 Peter tells Christian slaves how they should live so they can influence others for Christ. In other words, Peter tells his audience that those who abuse you will be drawn to you and the Christ in you because of your exemplary behavior. As such, “always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Pet 3:15b).

First-century slaves did not have the freedom to preach or to protest against social injustice. However, they could lay a foundation for witnessing by living a life that was beyond reproach. When we approach 1 Peter and other similar verses from the perspective of social justice, we miss this point.

For Paul and 1 Peter, the evangelistic mandate was more important than personal liberty. That is why Paul affirms that he compromises his personal liberty by becoming all things to all people in order to win some to Christ (1 Cor 9:19-23). Paul did not ask others to do something he was not willing to model in his own life.

In both Paul and 1 Peter, the evangelistic mandate requires that Christian act in ways that do not bring discredit to the gospel to the extent they can without compromising the gospel message. This is a critical point. To do this, we must identify what is essential and what is cultural. On points related to the essential, we cannot water down the faith or change the clear teaching of scripture.

In the context of today’s debates, I place sexual purity in this category because it is a moral imperative. However, I do not place social gender roles in this category. Different societies have different social structures. The Bible does not establish a normative social structure for every culture. An old professor used to say, “The gospel will offend. However, it should offend for the right reasons.”

Let me offer a simple example that shows why scripture must be interpreted in terms of meaning rather than form. Proverbs 23:13 opines, “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” Many people who fail to make a distinction between meaning and culture have used this proverb as a mandate for corporal punishment. However, this proverb is not mandating corporal punishment. Rather, it is mandating that parents correct and discipline their children in order for them to grow up well. Corporal punishment was the culturally appropriate way that people did that in the time of the proverb.

United Methodists have to affirm that scripture is sacred and that it is the word of God. We must place ourselves under the authority of God as it has been mediated to us through the divine witness of scripture and tradition. However, we must make cultural adjustments as we interpret it and apply it to any given social context. Scripture has to be interpreted before it is rightly applied!

Darrell Whiteman: Contextualization, Relevance, and Biblical Fidelity in the Church and Mission

Today's post is by Dr. Darrell Whiteman, the leader of Global Development, an organization that seeks to "enable missionaries, pastors, and lay people to better distinguish the universal message of the gospel from their local interpretation and practice of living out the gospel within their communities."

As a young Free Methodist missionary in Central Africa (1969-1971) nearly 50 years ago, I wondered why the churches over there attempted to look so much like the churches back home. It seemed like they were almost “carbon copies” in worship, theology, polity, and ministry.

What’s wrong with this picture?
I couldn’t articulate why that made me so uncomfortable, but it didn’t seem right. Why should churches in Africa look so much like churches in the United States? Something was wrong, but I didn’t know why or what it was. The strategic goal seemed to be denominational extension more than advancing the Kingdom of God by joining Jesus in his mission.

I now realize years later that what was missing was contextualization—a term that didn’t even appear in missiological discourse until the early 1970s. Since then there has been a plethora of academic and missiological publishing on this important concept, even though in practice there is still a lack of contextualization in much mission activity today.

Ironically, long before his time, the provocative Methodist missionary to India and the world, E. Stanley Jones, understood the need for contextualization which he expressed eloquently in his classic book, The Christ of the Indian Road (1925).

Let me begin by discussing what contextualization is and why it is important and close with some suggestions about why it is relevant to the United Methodist Church and its global mission efforts today.

What is contextualization?
Contextualization is both a method and a perspective and relates to the challenge of connecting the gospel to culture. As a method it attempts to communicate and live out the gospel and to establish the church in ways that make sense to people within their local cultural context. In this way Christianity meets people’s deepest needs and penetrates their worldview, thus enabling them to follow Christ and remain within their own culture. Jesus may be the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow (Hebrews 13:8) but cultures are constantly changing and more rapidly than ever in the present era.

Advocating cultural change or conversion to Christ?
Much of the postcolonial critique of mission in the age of colonialism has come because too many missionaries too often confused following Jesus with adopting the cultural ways of the missionary while simultaneously condemning the culture of their converts. Perhaps without realizing it, they were advocating a kind of cultural conversion more than conversion to Christ within their own culture. They didn’t understand or appreciate the principle hammered out in the Jerusalem Council’s decision that Gentiles could become followers of Jesus without having to become culturally and religiously Jews, as recorded in Acts 15.

Will contextualization lead to syncretism?
Opposition to contextualization sometimes comes from those who fear it will lead to “watering down” the gospel and its requirements to become a follower of Jesus.

In reality, however, the opposite is true. Contextualization doesn’t take the sting out of the gospel, it intensifies it. Contextualization sharpens the focus and offence of the gospel, it does not dilute it. If the gospel doesn’t critique culture, then culture wins every time and the transforming power of the gospel is lost.

One way of looking at the relationships between the gospel and culture is as follows: The gospel affirms most of culture, critiques some of culture, and transforms all of culture. I take this to mean that converts can and should remain within their culture and follow Jesus (I Cor. 7:17-24), recognizing that there will be aspects of their culture that will undergo change because of their allegiance to Christ. Following Jesus will put disciples at odds with aspects of their culture in every society, whether ancient or modern. The gospel has always been offensive, (foolishness to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews, I Cor. 1:23) so let’s be sure we offend people for the right reasons and not the wrong ones. Too much mission activity is so culturally offensive that people don’t experience the offensive of the gospel.

I think many people oppose contextualization because they don’t understand it and fear it will become the slippery slope that leads to syncretism—a mixture of biblical and non-biblical beliefs and practices. Actually, the opposite is true. Contextualization is the best hedge against syncretism because it sharpens the focus of the gospel.

How can the church be relevant to culture while remaining faithful to the Bible?
Contextualization is concerned with both cultural relevance and biblical fidelity. Good contextualization is both relevant to the cultural context and faithful to the biblical text, and this is not easy to do. It’s not easy because the cultural context is constantly changing, and it is also challenging because there are sometimes divergent interpretations of the meaning of the biblical text.

Nevertheless, without the effort of doing contextualization the church becomes stagnant and irrelevant. Because of the lack of contextualization Christianity is often perceived as a foreign religion by many in the Majority World and an irrelevant waste of time by some in the West. Many in the West are increasingly turned off to organized religion, i.e. the church, but are still interested in Jesus and his teaching.

Who is responsible for doing contextualization?
Contextualization must be done from inside the culture and community, not attempted by outsiders. It should always be done in community, not by distant desktop theologians. It benefits from knowing how to exegete the biblical text, but also how to discover the deeper underlying values and worldview of the cultural context. Skills in biblical exegesis and anthropological ethnography can help. And finally, it cannot be done adequately without the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Contextualization is important, because without it the church can drift into cultural irrelevance and/or wander away from biblical teaching. How do we maintain a balance between cultural relevance and biblical fidelity in an increasingly post-Christian and secularizing society in the West? It requires dialogue and respect for the other when there is a difference of opinion and often repentance when holding to our cherished position in a debate causes us to dehumanize the other or dismiss their perspective out of hand.

Is contextualization helpful in an increasingly divided church?
Could some of the divisions within the United Methodist Church today be less strident if all sides in the discussion understood and practiced contextualization in community and were led by the Holy Spirit? Would our mission efforts be more effective if we encouraged contextualization by followers of Jesus in other cultures and religions that are different from our own? Would we better understand that the Spirit of Christ in one person greets the Spirit of Christ in the other, and closes the distance between them? As we contemplate the importance and practice of contextualization today we may have to relinquish our need for certainty in exchange for our quest for understanding.

Robert Hunt: The Connection Between Text and Context, Part 3

Today's post is written by Dr. Robert Hunt, Director of Global Theological Education, Professor of Christian Mission and Interreligious Relations, and Director of the Center for Evangelism at Perkins School of Theology. It is the third of a three-part series on contextualization. Here are the first and the second parts of that series.

As the Church carries on its mission in a multi-cultural world, it is critical to understand what it has learned from its engagement with the Word about that world.

In the Bible human history begins with a generic human, Adam. This human is first separated into male and female, and then over endless generations into families, clans, tribes, and ethnic nations. Thousands of new peoples and cultures come into being, and notably God is with each, guiding its history. (Amos 9:7)

Part of the story of the generic human is the introduction of sin into human life. As a result, the story isn’t just about a happily growing diversity of cultures spreading away from Eden. It is also about how humans move further and further from what God intends for them.

What the story doesn’t tell us is how the sin which entered Adam’s life (Genesis 3) is perpetuated in the lives of Adam’s descendants. All we know is that is it ubiquitous, reappearing in every people and culture and manifesting itself in behavior characterized as “unrighteous.” So one thing we know about the world we inhabit is that it is a realm in which sin is present.

The Bible also tells a story about differentiation and diversity. God’s fundamental command to Adam, reiterated to Noah, is “be fruitful and multiply and cover the face of the earth.” As humans are fruitful they quickly diversify, stopping only once (at Babel) to try consolidate themselves before God blows that plan apart and essentially forces them to spread and thus diversify.

After the Tower of Babel story in Genesis 11 the Old Testament increasingly focuses on the life of Israel as a community knowing God, beginning with Abraham and moving forward in narrowing circles to the original tribes from which the ethnic nation of Israel traced its descent. This focus on Israel is hardly surprising since the Israelites wrote the Old Testament. Naturally it is all about them and their special covenant with God.

But the story offers plenty of evidence that it isn’t the only story about God accompanying humanity, with Amos 9 being notable as well as Isaiah 19:19-23. Psalm 87:5 and many passages in Isaiah create a fascinating narrative arch, in which Zion becomes not only the final destination of all human nations but also somehow retrospectively their birthplace as well, the urquelle of their peoplehood. There are many human communities that know God, because despite sin (which in any case is found in both Israel and the Church) God is involved in every human society.

This story of finding God’s self-revelation among the nations, and indeed righteousness among the nations is continued in the story of Jesus, whom the gospels depict as continually coming into contact with God’s work outside of Israel. And this is ratified by Peter’s vision in Acts and the subsequent conversion of the gentiles to Christ. Those visions in Isaiah and the Psalms suddenly become much less eschatological dreams and far more a historical movement of discovery of God among the nations embodied in the Church.

Unfortunately, and I’ve documented much of this in my The Gospel Among the Nations: A Documentary History of Inculturation, the Church, imbued with the Roman exceptionalism that was part of its earliest cultural context, struggled to see God at work among the “barbarians” and “heathen” encountered on the edges of the empire. It was a struggle that continues to this day, now articulated in terms of the newly invented word “culture.” The concept of culture gives us the ability to talk about “inculturation” as a way of doing mission (a term which I and other missiologists have tended to use anachronistically.) It also gives us the ability to dismiss non-Christian cultures as lazy, ignorant, sinful, totalitarian, and so on. And unfortunately it can mislead us into believing that there is some divine “text” that can be separated from its cultural context, and that this cultural context can somehow be differentiated from its human community; a true distinction without a difference.

The concept of culture can become particularly problematic when we speak of “the gospel and culture." We mistakenly assume, as I suggest in Part 1, that these are two distinct things; the first needing to be expressed in terms comprehensible to the second. It is far more accurate to understand that the Church in its ongoing life in mission with God’s Word continually enters into dialogue with other bodies of human beings who have likewise been engaged in a life with God. The Church engaged with the Word enters into dialogue with others whose societies are also engaged with God in different ways. And this means that each has the possibility of learning things about God that it did not know. And of course each has the responsibility of questioning and rejecting so-called knowledge of God contradictory to its own ongoing encounter with the Divine.

Put in other words, “inculturation” isn’t planting the gospel in another culture, nor is it clothing the gospel in another culture. Inculturation is the emergence of new expressions of the Church's engagement with the Word arising out of the ongoing life of the church in mission.

One should not imagine that these new expressions are limited to matters of music, dress, language, and so on found in worship. They may be, as we find in Anselm’s doctrine of the atonement, a new way of speaking about Christ’s work on the Cross that couldn’t be conceptualized within the limitations of Greek and Roman culture.

Or they may be, as found in modern political theologies and the understanding of the equality of men and women, new ways of knowing what it means to be a human in society that couldn’t be conceptualized in the pre-modern culture of European Christendom. The United Methodist Social Principles Creed, for example, arises of the Methodist church engaged with God’s word in ongoing dialogue within modern societies, and it reaches conclusions impossible in European and American Christianity only a few hundred years earlier.

What makes this process of dialogue between the Church and the societies (and thus cultures) it encounters in mission both challenging and troubling is that our inner life of encounter with God’s Word can never give us complete confidence in our grasp of who God is and what God wants of us. At the same time God’s life with societies outside the church means we can never dismiss out of hand their insights into God’s righteousness. We may not always be right, and they may know things we don’t know. Thus, our only confidence, given the limits of our humanity and the ubiquity of sin, is confidence in God’s grace and forgiveness in Christ.

That is why we begin our worship with confession, placing ourselves in the context of our limited grasp of God’s righteousness and our ability to enact it. It is only after confession and absolution that we can meaningfully speak the words, “And now with the confidence of children of God. . .”

For many Christians, faced with the assaults of a contemporary society that denies God and worships its own self-sufficiency, engaging in dialogue within this sometimes-hostile culture is psychologically impossible. Being the Church engaged with the knowing of God outside the church is too difficult, too threatening, too complex. They are not prepared to open themselves to the possibilities that even an apparently hostile culture is a realm in which God’s Word is at work.

And that is okay. CS Lewis in his letters to Malcom on prayer noted that we are not all called to the front lines. There is a place for the keepers of the flame just as there is a place for those who bear it into the tempest to seek out the lost. There is a place for those who keep a warm hearth and welcome the refugees from modernity, as there is a place for those looking for new outcroppings of solid rock on which to build new houses of God. And for all there is the Word of God, abiding outside our doors even when we cannot recognize it.

Which means, and this is good news, that it is also abides within the Church even when we cannot see it within ourselves.

Recommended reading: Mission Year in Review

As 2017 draws to a close, this is in the season for year-in-reviews. UM & Global will have our own retrospective of 2017 and look forward to 2018 next week. In the meantime, I recommend you check out Rev. Scott Parrish's "Mission Year in Review." Parrish makes a passionate plea for churches to try new things and engage with their surrounding culture. This plea makes it a very forward-looking year-in-review.

Steven Ybarrola - Response to Wonder, Love and Praise

This blog post is one in a series containing responses to the denomination's proposed ecclesiology document, "Wonder, Love and Praise." These responses are written by United Methodist scholars and practitioners around the world. This piece is written by Dr. Steven J. Ybarrola, Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Asbury Theological Seminary.

Let me begin my reflection on the “Wonder, Love, and Praise” document by situating myself in this conversation. I am a secularly trained anthropologist (PhD Brown University) who taught 15 years at a loosely church-affiliated liberal arts college, and for the past 11 years have been teaching anthropology and missiology at a Wesleyan theological seminary (Asbury). Therefore, I approach this document more from a theologically-informed social scientific perspective than a social scientifically-informed theological one. Also, I am not a member of the United Methodist Church, so approach the document from a critical outsider’s perspective, which has its advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that I am not encumbered by longstanding theological discussions and divisions within the denomination when it comes to the topics covered. The disadvantage is obviously the same—I am not evaluating the document based on issues that the UMC may have been dealing with for some time now. What follows is an anthropologically and missiologically Wesleyan-informed outsider’s perspective on this important document.

Based on my reading, I find this document to be a positive attempt to deal with the global diversity found within the Body of Christ. As the demographic shift has taken place from the West to the Majority World as far as the growth and expansion of Christianity is concerned, churches like the UMC, which tend to be declining in the West but growing, and in some cases thriving, in the Majority World, have had to come to terms with how to deal with this cultural diversity. This document, “Wonder, Love, and Praise,” seems to be a welcome response to this demographic shift of Christianity (though I will leave that final judgment to my brethren in the Majority World).

Following the teaching of Christ, and given the limits of space, let me concentrate on love. The document does a very nice job of pointing out that the UMC is but one manifestation of the Church universal, and as such, needs to take a humble and loving approach to our brothers, sisters, and their respective denominations, when it comes to working together in the missio Dei. The mission of God is not confined to any one denominational expression or understanding of God, but is what should unite us, even while we acknowledge and appreciate our different practices and, to some extent, beliefs. As the document states, “We might want to say, then, that, theologically understood, the church is not an association of like-minded individuals serving purposes they may have devised for themselves. Instead, it is a community established by God, grounded in the very life of God, an aspect of the new creation” (lines 400-403). The ecumenical focus of the document is refreshing, emphasizing as it does our unity as the Body of Christ without sacrificing or watering down the key elements of what it means to be the church in our contemporary global context.

The tension between our unity in Christ and our cultural/theological differences is a key theme in the document. As an anthropologist, this is a tension I am quite familiar with, as anthropologists distinguish between the emic (i.e., experience-near) and etic (i.e., experience-distant) in our research and analysis (see Geertz 1983 for an anthropological discussion of this distinction, and Priest 2006 for a more theological discussion).

The Scottish theologian and missiologist cited in the document, Andrew Walls, cogently discusses this tension by delineating the “Indigenizing Principle” and the “Pilgrim Principle.” Most of the readers of this blog will be familiar with Walls’ distinction, but let me briefly outline each of these as I believe it gets at an important element that this document is addressing. The indigenizing principle as Walls describes it is the idea of “[t]he impossibility of separating an individual from his or her social relationships and thus from his or her society [which] leads to one varying feature in Christian history: the desire to ‘indigenize,’ to live as a Christian and yet as a member of one’s own society, to make the Church…‘A place to feel at home’” (1996, 7).

In other words, when people become Christians they do so within their sociocultural context, and as such become Christians within that particular understandings of the world. This may be referred to as the “particular” aspect of the gospel—to truly take root it must always be understood within its local sociocultural environment. But Walls continues that we as Christians should never feel too much at home in these environments, because we are also called to something greater, to see ourselves as pilgrims in whatever sociocultural context we find ourselves. He states,

Along with the indigenizing principle which makes his faith a place to feel at home, the Christian inherits the pilgrim principle, which whispers to him that he has no abiding city and warns him that to be faithful to Christ will put him out of step with his society; for that society never existed, in East or West, ancient time or modern, which could absorb the word of Christ painlessly into its system….Not only does God in Christ take people as they are; He takes them in order to transform them into what He wants them to be” (1996, 7).

This can be understood as the “universal” nature of the gospel, that the Kingdom of God calls us to be countercultural in whatever context we find ourselves, and unites us with believers from all over the world and from very different cultural backgrounds.

What this calls for, and which the document acknowledges (lines 107-109, and elsewhere), is an intentional reflexivity. As culturally different believers in the Kingdom of God we must be willing not only to learn from each other, but we must also be willing to take a critical look at our own beliefs and practices in light of how God is working in these different contexts. This has been one of the great blessings, and challenges, I have had in teaching students from different parts of the world, as well as traveling to different parts of the Majority World. Interacting with these believers has made me realize how deeply affected I have been by a modernist view of the world which, among other things, focuses on the material over the spiritual. I recall sitting in the international airport in Nairobi after participating in a consultation with believers from different contexts in east Africa, and feeling like a fraud because what I said I believed was just a shadow of what the Christians I interacted with had actually experienced. This is one of the real advantages of being reflexive in the context of world Christianity.

I’m certain there are constructive criticisms to be made of the “Wonder, Love, and Praise” document, some of which I’ve read and appreciated, but from a critical outsider perspective I believe the document is a positive step forward for the UMC as it struggles to maintain its unity not only as a denomination, but with Christianity globally, amidst the tremendous cultural and theological diversity that makes up the Body of Christ worldwide.

Recommended Reading: Robert Hunt on Cross-Talk in the UMC

Many digital bytes have been spent responding to and analyzing the recent Judicial Council decision on the South Central Jurisdiction's challenge to the Western Jurisdiction's nomination, election, consecration, and assignment of Karen Oliveto as a bishop. Of all that's been said, perhaps the most insightful piece I've read was written by Rev. Dr. Robert Hunt before the decision was announced. Dr. Hunt uses missiological analysis to reach a broader perspective on the debate as a whole.

In his piece, Dr. Hunt analyzes the various arguments on both sides of the debate to identify the sources of authority to which each appeals. He notes six: biblical arguments, arguments from the early church, arguments from Wesley and the distinctively Methodist tradition, arguments from God's providence at work in history, arguments about the basis of valid ministry, and legal arguments. As Dr. Hunt notes, both sides in the debate use all six, but in very different ways from one another.

Dr. Hunt traces the disparate interpretations of these six sources to what might be termed two different theologies of inculturation or contextualization:

"On one side are those who argue that Christianity is about certain essential principles that must be enacted in different ways in different times. For them the Bible and all successive Christian tradition is a contextual document, telling us how those principles were to be enacted in a particular places and times. The combination of general principles and specific instances of their realization over time helps us clearly understand the principles, but doesn’t force us to accept those enactments as precedents that must be followed.

"On the other side are those who argue that Christianity is precisely about fidelity to the precedents set by Christ, his apostles, and the apostolic church. The principles of Christianity are not mere abstractions, but specific structures, laws, and actions commanded by Christ that must be upheld in all cultural and historical contexts."

As Dr. Hunt notes, such a debate is not unique to this issue, to United Methodists, or even to Christians. Seeing the debate in this light does not indicate how we should move forward. (Indeed, Dr. Hunt suggests the UMC is at an impasse over this difference.) It does, however, add perspective in understanding the debate.