In order to escape from its deeply entrenched cultural captivity and become a witness of God’s kingdom the church must go beyond reformation and pursue a stance of “continual conversion.”

The church’s cultural captivity has its source in a reduced gospel that focuses on individual needs rather than God’s call to mission. For the most part, the American church proclaims a personal, privatized, and churchless gospel. The ease with which American Christians separate the gospel from community is demonstrated by the perceived effectiveness of parachurch ministries.[2] Parachurch evangelism “implies that the evangelistic mission of the church can be separated out from the rest of the institutional church and function as its own distinctive ministry. That works, of course, when the gospel one proclaims evangelistically is reduced to the individual, the personal, and the private” (136).

In such a setting, church life is optional, voluntary, and self-serving. The church exists for the needs of its parishioners rather than as a witness of the kingdom. Ministry is done for parishioners rather than with them. The support given by the church is primarily directed to an individual’s inner life and struggles and not to the community’s external calling to be a sign, instrument, and foretaste of God’s kingdom. Worship is viewed as either an emotional boost or an end in itself and not as divine preparation for sending out into the community. Preaching is “the impartation of clerical wisdom to help the saints prepare for heaven while coping with this ‘vale of tears’” rather than “the exposition of God's Word to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ (Eph. 4: 11ff.)” (135).

In this context, the gospel is not a call to mission, but to personal self-improvement. Evangelism is not the mission of the entire church community, but a specialized activity – steeped in programs, techniques, and standardized resources – that individuals perform. Mission is relegated to cross-cultural efforts in far-off countries rather than local mission to the surrounding community.

Though all this religious activity has the appearance of fulfilling God’s mission, it is little more than a religious imitation of the dominant culture. It is guided by and appeals to the same cultural values as most other secular organizations – individualism, narcissism, privatization of faith, etc. The mission of God is held “culturally captive” when the church embraces the culture’s values with only minor religious embellishments.

A culturally-bound gospel has resulted in a culturally-captive church that is unable to see its own bondage because it has distinguished its expression and experience of the gospel as universal, absolute, and definitive. Its inability to see how its host culture has shaped it – both positively and negatively – causes it to feel its expression of the gospel is pure, pristine, and privileged. The culturally captive church is blind to its cultural accommodations and thus, arrogant in regard to its perceived privileged position as an absolute, ultimate, and complete expression of the gospel.

The Gospel: A Call to Incarnational Mission

The gospel call is to kingdom mission.[3] As such, the call is not individualistic or private. It is not a blatant appeal to a person’s self-interests. Instead, it is a call to participate in God’s mission to the world – to embody God’s values, to incarnate the Spirit’s presence, to express Christ’s love to those within and without the church. This is primarily done in community and always for the sake of the world. In other words, God’s mission is accomplished in, with, and for community. The entire church is involved in evangelistic ministry as God’s chosen witnesses of God’s gracious kingdom. This is the mission to which God has called his church. Evangelization is more than simply repeating rehearsed slogans; evangelization is “being, doing, and saying the witness to the gospel” (vii).

“You shall be my witnesses” (Acts 1:8) is the most comprehensive definition of Christian persons and communities. All Christians are evangelists – bearers of good news. To reduce evangelism to a committee within a church undermines the full scope of God’s call to the whole community of believers. The church’s mission is rooted in, and an expression of, God’s mission to the world.

The classical doctrine on the missio Dei as God the Father sending the Son, and God the Father and the Son sending the Spirit (is) expanded to include yet another “movement”: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit sending the church into the world. . . . mission is not primarily an activity of the church, but an attribute of God. God is a missionary God. . . . Mission is thereby seen as a movement from God to the world: the church is viewed as an instrument for that mission. . . . There is church because there is mission, not vice versa. (20)

Most Christians would agree with the importance of evangelism, however, they would define it differently than Guder. Most likely, evangelism would be relegated to an aspect of the church rather than perceived as the very essence of the church. The common way of understanding evangelism is as something done for others – an outward-oriented task focused on local unbelievers and foreign peoples. This is a tragic mistake. In the New Testament, evangelization is not simply directed to the world; it is a constant process directed to the church. The church is constantly challenged to become more evangelized in its experience, expressions, and mission. Consequently, the church stands in constant need of experiencing evangelization under the gospel. Guder calls this process of church-directed evangelization, the “continuing conversion of the church.” The church cannot remain faithful to its mission apart from this continual process of evangelization.[4]

A truly evangelical church is shaped and directed by the evangel – the gospel, the good news. As willing participants in God’s kingdom the church experiences a foretaste of future glory. As evangelists – bearers of good news – the church embodies and effects God’s mission in the world. As such, the church is a witnessing community that serves as a sign, instrument, and foretaste of God’s kingdom.[5]

The church does not participate in divine realities because of any moral or intellectual superiority. The church is chosen by God through grace unto mission. Just like all God’s elect in the past, the church consists of sinful people.

The biblical record makes abundantly clear that the people to whom God speaks and reveals God's self are just as sinful as all the rest of creation. There are no special qualifications or virtues that set apart Abraham, Moses, David, or the prophets and make them more appropriate recipients of the divine self-disclosure. The fallibility of the disciples is documented in all the Gospels, as well as in Acts and the epistles. (74)

It is the particular, local, and historical manifestation of the church that allows it to concretely and tangibly witness of the reality of God’s kingdom. The church is the body of Christ, and as such, it incarnates (enfleshes, embodies) Christ’s mission. Like God’s incarnation in Christ – a particular revelation of a particular person in a particular time, place, and culture who embodied the universal word of the kingdom for all people – the church manifests God’s kingdom in a particular time, place, and culture. It is this local, historical, and temporal community that manifests God’s kingdom to the world in concrete, visible, and tangible ways. The church is an “incarnational witness” precisely because there is no other type of witness possible.

The basic unit of Christian community is formed and lives out its witness in particular places, where its members can gather regularly for worship and work. Proximity, frequency of direct contact with one another, mutually supportive relationships, sharing of resources, struggling and growing together in the faith – these characteristics of a Christian community define its shape. The people of God must have a visible, tangible, experiencable (sic) shape… Every mission community is a historical witness to the work of God being carried out; it is concrete evidence of God’s purposeful action. (145, 146)

This is the only way God’s people have ever existed – in a particular culture in a particular time, space, and history. “Through the particular encounter of God with Israel, the good news that God is loving and purposeful enters into human history and becomes knowable” (29). This is the means through which God has chosen to work.[6] This was true in biblical times; this is also true in our time. The historical manifestation of God’s kingdom demonstrates that God is knowable within history. All these “particulars” provide the foundation from which the church indwells and proclaims the universal message of God.

Apart from such a particular history, Christianity has no universal message to proclaim. The Bible is not a collection of universal ideas cloaked in a particular culture. Universal ideas cannot be the good news that the concrete testimony of a particular people at a particular time can well be, if their witness is credible. (29)

The mission of incarnational witness calls for committed relationships expressed in “frequency of contact and communication, common worship and Christian activity, and mutual responsibility and support” (148). All of these things take on monumental importance within a missional view of the church. No activity is insignificant. All activities – personal and theological discussions, worship, preaching, mutual care and support – witness to the reality of God’s gracious kingdom in the midst of the world. The mission shapes everything communal and corporate. Through a shared life intentionally shaped by the gospel, the community constantly is challenged to become a “missional outpost” in its host culture. It can only faithfully do this if it both evangelizes and is being evangelized. This process is what Guder refers to as “the continuing conversion of the church.” This conversion is never complete.

Other Churches and Other Cultures as Impetus to Continuing Conversion

One key to “continuing conversion” lies in evaluating our local and particular expression of the gospel in light of other church communities across diverse cultural spectrums. The church is able to more clearly see its own areas of cultural compromise when it evaluates its expression and experience of the gospel in light of other churches in other cultures.

The church is not captive to any one culture. In order to fully reflect God’s kingdom, it must be diverse and multicultural. This was true of the earliest ecclesiastical communities.

The New Testament community, beginning with the circle of the twelve disciples, was a radically multicultural community that found its unity in Christ and in its common calling to witness. An essential aspect of the joyful message was the powerful love that breaks down human barriers and creates a community beyond ordinary imagination. Thus, among the twelve there is a tax collector and a Zealot; the community in Acts is made up of Palestinian and Hellenistic Jews who are being made into one people; Peter must learn that the gospel is intended for all, even Roman centurions. The transforming work of the Prince of Peace is to create a community that would not be humanly possible, where there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave owner nor slave, as the tangible evidence of the inbreaking kingdom. (69)

God’s pattern is not to reject all human cultures or to create a generic “de-cultured” culture (as if that were possible), but to embrace all cultures in the sweeping sovereignty of the kingdom. God’s embrace of all cultures is clearly and fully demonstrated at Pentecost – the official birth (the “grand opening”) of the church.

It has often been suggested that Pentecost reversed the confusion of human tongues at Babel. But the history of salvation is not cyclical; it does not move backward but forward to the “new” which God has promised and brings about. Thus the confusion of tongues at Babel was not reversed by the creation of one tongue. Instead, the Holy Spirit made translation into all tongues possible. In the gracious economy of God, the joyful message was intended from the very outset to be infinitely translatable and multicultural; it is to be conveyed into every language and culture of the world. (79)

Because the kingdom is trans-cultural, it neither privileges nor rejects any particular culture.[7] No one culture – not even Western culture – is granted primacy. “Thus, no particular culture, not even the traditional Jewish culture, may now be regarded as normative for the gospel community. The gospel may be translated into every language and lived out in every culture. Every human culture is thus both honored by the gospel witness as well as challenged by it” (69).[8]

On one level, God’s multicultural embrace is recognized and appreciated by Western Christians. We believe that the gospel is relevant and translatable to every culture. But on another level, God’s multicultural embrace is overwhelmingly threatening when it undermines the Western Christian’s sense of possessing an absolute, complete, and permanent expression of truth. This is the disturbing truth: “No national church, no ethnic Christian tradition possesses absolute truth or permanent validity” (92). For centuries, Western Christianity “has assumed that it represented the cultural perfection of the gospel” (92). When we lose cultural privilege in shaping the “correct” expression of the gospel, we lose control over what the gospel may look like in other places among different people in different cultures.

The translatability of the gospel is a challenge, even a shock for rebellious humans. As beings who are so concerned about control, we find the cultural openness of the gospel offensive. A translatable gospel is fundamentally not controllable. It unsettles us to discover that faithfulness to Christ can, in cultures different from ours, look different from the patterns we have evolved. We build up a certain security in our cultural faith traditions, as did Israel in its faith. (90)

Since the gospel is always culturally experienced and expressed, our participation in it is limited, contextual, and relative. Our inability to accept this makes it impossible to be critical of the subtle ways that our culture shapes our expression and experience of the gospel. Whether we like it or not, our churches, because they are culturally limited, are partial and incomplete. An awareness of this should humble us in our demands for absolutes, finality, and completeness.

[T]he real point here is that one should in all research, whether in theology or the natural or social sciences, never think in mutually exclusive categories of “absolute” and “relative.” Our theologies are partial, and they are culturally and socially biased. They may never claim to be absolutes. Yet this does not make them relativistic, as though one suggests that in theology – since we really cannot ever know “absolutely” – anything goes. It is true that we see only in part, but we do see. . . . We are committed to our understanding of revelation, yet we also maintain a critical distance to that understanding. In other words, we are in principle open to other views, an attitude which does not, however, militate against complete commitment to our own understanding of truth. . . . It is misleading to believe that commitment and a self-critical attitude are mutually exclusive. (100)

Our temptation is to reduce the gospel message in order to better control it.[9] Yet we cannot control the essence of the gospel – the revelation of the person of Jesus Christ.

The person and work of Jesus, as history with a future (eschatology), defies the control mechanisms with which we seek to reduce them to manageable proportions. The favored way to accomplish this over the centuries has been to diminish the historical particularity of Jesus by reducing him and his message to a set of ideas, an intellectual system, often connected with a codified ethic, and managed thematically within the church's rites and celebrations. (101)

This admittance of cultural relativity, ecclesiological incompleteness, and partial truth disturbs those unwilling to recognize the constant temptation to privilege their own religious expression as ultimate and absolute. Won’t an openness to such vast diversity bring constant challenges, difficulties, and disagreements? Certainly, it will, but this is not necessarily a bad thing.

Disagreeing Christianly is one of the most powerful forms of incarnational witness the church can practice. It should not surprise us that there are differences and disagreements within the faith community. This has been true since Pentecost. Only if the church were fully converted, that is, had arrived at a complete and final understanding and practice of the gospel, would this not be true. (165)

Certainly, differences, difficulties, and disagreements will arise when we refuse to privilege one cultural expression of Christianity over another. This is part of the continuing conversion of the church. Just as in the days of the early church, we should expect these disagreements to further, rather than hinder, God’s mission to the world.

Acts develops its missional theology as it documents early Christian disagreements that led to profound passages of continuing conversion. Suspicion of the expanding mission of Christ in Samaria (Acts 8:4-25) is replaced by joy at the unexpected work of the Spirit there. Deeply engrained prejudices are transformed by the conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26-40). Peter's encounter with Cornelius (Acts 10) leads him through a spiritual battle with God to a conversion to the gospel that crosses all boundaries and leaves no one out. The controversy about Gentile Christians is resolved by the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15) in a way which serves as a model for the incarnational witness in situations of disagreement. There, the Christian community confesses that God's Spirit works through compromises that are the result of honest struggle among disagreeing Christians.

In Paul's letters, we see reported instances of such struggles. The apostle's response is invariably a combination of clear teaching and even-handed correction, coupled with compassion and the acknowledgment that those with whom he disagreed were no less Christian than he. Everyone of those controversies was, in fact, an occasion for the continuing conversion of the church. Maintaining unity in the midst of disagreement and controversy was, for the apostle, a priority of the church that is faithful to its Lord. (166)

In our attempts to grasp the extent of the cultural captivity upon our understanding of the gospel, we must assume that our expression of it has been reduced. This is especially important if we participate in a long-standing institution. The cultural accretions of such institutions build up over time.[10] They are often hard to perceive, and even harder to remove.

The church’s constant critical analysis to expose and correct gospel reductionism is an act of love. By evaluating our experiences and expressions in light of the Bible, the variety of Christian traditions, and the ecumenical diversity of the church, we enlarge our hearts and expand our scope. The ultimate goal is to see and embrace God’s universal perspective – a perspective that constantly challenges us to wider, broader, deeper, and higher expressions of faithful mission. “The perspective of the gospel is universal: ‘God so loved the world’ (cosmos). Any local church that wants to be renewed must, therefore, confront its own gospel reductionism” (151).

Missional Leadership for Continuing Conversion

The call to the continuing conversion of the church demands a reconsideration of the pastoral office. Here, in this highly specialized area, it is very clear how the culture has negatively impacted the concept of Christian leadership.

It is now clear, as we look back over the last 100 to 125 years, that the value systems and operating structures of the large American corporation have become the dominant model for the institutional church, whether it was the denomination or the independent mission society. Over the last century, the Christian religion has become a big American business. We have centralized for efficiency and good management, developed major headquarters, accepted numerical and financial growth as the most important indications of success, introduced statistical measurement to determine that success, and made religion into a product. Denominational headquarters have generated programs and curricula. Marketing has become an essential function of religious management. Public relations and the canons of effective advertising define our activities. Local congregations are run as businesses, where giving, membership numbers, growth, and attendance are all evaluated as evidence of a healthy religious bottom line. (196-197)

Guder provides a heart-wrenching picture of how Christian leadership has become culturally captive in the Western world. “When Christian priests and pastors of warring nations bless the weapons and encourage the soldiers of their respective fronts with the message that their nationalist military goals may be equated with the Christian mission, then this reductionism is seen in its most dreadful form” (194).

In order to combat cultural captivity, the role of the Christian leader must change. “Our congregations today urgently need to be ministered to by evangelist-pastors… It would revolutionize the structures of the church if the primary purpose of our polity were mutual evangelization” (163). With this as his or her focus, the evangelist-pastor must lead the way in encouraging continual conversion within the church for the sake of faithful witness to God’s mission.

The faithful evangelist-pastor will constantly challenge the church to stay true to its divine calling. There is no end to the various issues, concerns, and demands – some good, others, not so good – that vie for the attention of the church. The faithful pastor will help his or her flock evaluate the cacophony of voices and remain true to the one divine voice that summons to the unique mission with which the church is entrusted – that of revealing the grace, love, and goodness of Jesus Christ to one another and to the world. At times, in order to minimize distractions, the pastor will have to emphasize what is not the mission of the church in order to focus attention on what the mission actually is.[11]

The faithful evangelist-pastor will make sure the ecclesiastical institution serves rather than obscures the mission of the church. “The institutional formation of the church is unavoidable. There is no continuation of the Christian movement within history without institutional forms and patterns. Whether or not the missional church is an institution is, therefore, not really a question to be debated. The question, rather, is whether its institution supports and serves its missionary vocation” (185).

The faithful evangelist-pastor will lead the congregation away from sectarianism and toward a more catholic and diverse Christianity. Appreciating diversity demands catholicity. Sectarianism is a denial of the church’s catholicity. Ecumenical exchange with diverse congregations is necessary in order to enable the church to better evaluate its own position within culture. “This is perhaps the most profound reason for ecumenical exchange: the continuing mutual conversion of Christian communities in diverse cultures. Every particular culture's translation of the gospel contributes a witness that corrects, expands, and challenges all other forms of witness in the worldwide church” (90).

The faithful evangelist-pastor will aid the congregation in learning to analyze the culture and discern appropriate responses to its various influences. Living in but not of the world is a difficult tightrope to walk. The church should both embrace and challenge its culture. “The call to discipleship may be shaped in every culture and will always be both a blessing and a scandal in that culture – if it is faithful to Christ” (93). While Paul encourages people to follow his model as cultural chameleon (1 Cor. 9:19-23), he also calls Christians to live in ways that oppose the dominant culture’s values and priorities (e.g., Col. 3:7-8; Gal. 4:8ff; Eph. 5:3ff.; 1 Thess. 4:1-12). Paul neither baptizes culture nor is he anti-cultural. Instead, he presents us with the difficult task of loosely, yet lovingly, engaging our culture. Learning how to better do this in the midst of a rapidly changing culture is part of the continuing conversion of the church.

As in every other culture in the world, Christian witness engages Western culture in diverse ways: accepting, adapting, changing, and rejecting. This means, among other things, that the culturally bilingual church must expect to change and be changed, must expect its own continuing conversion, as it encounters Christ the Lord in the cultures into which it now is sent as his witnesses. (96)

Finally, the faithful evangelist-pastor will use the Scriptures “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ.” Scripture will not be read individualistically, narcissistically, or simply for personal self-improvement. Instead it will be “read and interpreted as the Spirit-empowered testimony that equips God’s people for their mission, that is, for their incarnational witness” (x).

A reduced gospel that focuses on individual needs rather than God’s call to corporate mission has resulted in the cultural captivity of the church. Yet, there is hope. “Reductionism does not mean that what remains is wrong; it means that what remains is too little” (189). The problem with reductionism is

not that the gospel was no longer heard. The problem was and is that the gospel is larger, more cosmic, more transforming, more revolutionary in its scope than such an individualized and privatized reduction of it reflects. The world of the principalities and powers is little challenged by a private and personal, vertical-relationship gospel. And that suits the powers and the principalities fine. (190)

The gospel of the “alls” of the Great Commission (Matthew 28:20) – “all authority, all nations, all that I have commanded you, always I am with you – is the transforming power that will continue to convert the church until Christ comes” (208).

© Richard J. Vincent, 2005