Conversion and Contextualization

Re-Examining Our Expectations of Gospel Change

According to Andrew Walls, the word "conversion" has been used in two main ways throughout Christian history .[1] The first meaning of conversion denotes "an external act of religious change." This act reflects a movement towards Christian faith, individually or collectively. The other meaning of conversion refers to "critical internal religious change" within the Christian community. This meaning of conversion gets at what we might call “gospel change.”

Not All Gospel Change is Identical

Missionaries of the 19th and 20th centuries exported their understanding and experience of Western “gospel change” to non-Western peoples. This often included a conversion that issued “in a holy life typically marked by a period of deep consciousness of personal sin followed by a sense of joyous liberation dawning with the realization of personal forgiveness through Christ ." In other words, missionaries expected Non-Western peoples to undergo a pattern of gospel change similar to their own. However, while the gospel certainly changed the peoples of Africa, India, and Asia, not all change produced by the gospel was identical.

Gospel change in some cultures is more gradual than instantaneous. The American Evangelical tradition of “deep consciousness of personal sin followed by a sense of joyous liberation” is not common to all cultures. Missionaries labored for years before they saw a single conversion, and even then, the conversions were sometimes very different than what they expected. Cultures that are more communal experience conversion differently that cultures that are highly individualistic. In many African and Asian cultures, conversions come in pairs or families instead of by single individuals. Not all gospel change happens identically, especially across cultures.



The Emerging Post-Christian Context
What these missionaries encountered "on the field" is beginning to occur in the U.S. Many church planters have a pre-Christian past that is very “Christian.” We inherited the evangelical, pietistic conversion experience of our forefathers. Like the conversions of our missionary forefathers, our personal conversion relied heavily upon a prevailing Christianized culture, common basic knowledge of God, sin, faith and Christ. But America has changed. We cannot assume our listeners possess the same knowledge and experience that we did, which is precisely why it is so crucial that we exercise pastoral wisdom through contextualization.

In regions such as the Pacific Northwest, New England and spiritually similar cities of the U.S, we are now encountering a post-Christian cultural climate. No longer can we assume a basic level of evangelical capital upon which the Spirit of God may act. Instead, we are engaging un-churched and resistant peoples who have forgotten, redefined, or never known the Gospel. As a result, the conditions of conversion have changed, as should our methods for sharing, telling, speaking, teaching, and preaching the Gospel. Our idioms, illustrations and language must change if we are going to reach the unreached, the unchurched , and the resistant peoples of America.

Like the former missionaries, we must reconfigure our understanding and expectation of how people undergo gospel change and how disciples are made. We must be more open to “process conversions” while also guiding that process toward full commitment to Jesus as Lord. Our goal should not be to replicate our personal conversion experience, but to preach the gospel effectively so that we can make disciples in the emerging post-Christian context. We must heed the failures of the past and call people, not to our experience of conversion, but to the experience of the Spirit’s converting, whatever that process may entail.

HT: Q