Contextualization

Today was incredible. Today, tomorrow and Wednesday I am traveling around the district with a group of interns visiting various local churches and talking with their staff. Today we went to Silver Lake Wesleyan, Watermark Church, Holland Central Wesleyan, La Rossa, and Engedi. Two of those are church plants, one is a Spanish speaking church and Holland Central is the largest church in the district, if not the denomination.

It was great to get to see a wide range of churches. Watermark is a church plant that is currently meeting in a high school. Although they do not intend to stay there forever, they also have no intentions of getting into a permanent building. Whereas Central Holland has a very large church campus and is almost always in the processes of a building campaign.

The interesting thing is that despite the wide difference in church styles they all have a similar missiology. All of these churches have a similar belief that the Kingdom of God is bigger than their local church. Likewise all of them have effectively contextualized the gospel for their local setting.

The entire day reminded me of the importance of context. No matter if you are dealing with an age group, a racial group or any other demographic, there are some ways of communicating that will work better for some people than for others. The only way to effectively communicate the unchanging gospel to a changing culture is through contextualization.

Over all it makes me wonder if the other church plants in Calgary were effective in contextualizing the gospel. I have heard that Calgary is a difficult city to plant a church, but perhaps it is because we have been trying methods that simply do not work there.