Focus Introduction (Focus Series 1 of 6)

This is our module on focus, and the key question in this module is: how well do I know my focus group? Another question to help you understand the essence of this module is, what are my ministry focus group’s greatest needs.

A previous professor of mine, David Hesselgrave, wrote a book called Planting Churches Cross-Culturally. I would like to have you look at this quote: “Before we can get on with the task [meaning the task of church planting] we must decide on definite areas and peoples that will become the foci of our immediate attention and labors.”

One of the fundamental problems with much of our study concerning church growth is that principals are studied without incorporating them into a plan for reaching a specific target area. In a very real sense, the task does not become clear until we decide the questions of whom and where.

Now in this church planting collection up to this point, you could have coasted in terms of a lot of the applications, but from this module all the way to the end of the collection, it is critically necessary for any of this to make sense or to apply, for you to have either a real or a hypothetical church plant in mind in a particular geographical area among a particular ministry focus group, as the rest of the principles and the concept we’ll be talking about won't make sense unless you have a particular ministry focus group or context and culture into which you can apply the principles.

This article will address the church planters need to have a deep understanding of the unique culture into which the church is being planted. Historically, this has been the problem of a large degree of Western missionaries who have gone to plant churches among other nations and other cultures and people groups, in that they have either imposed Western values and Western behaviors on to the culture at a superficial level, or they have attempted to develop incarnational ministry and not gone deep enough.

That's been one the most serious problems with the Christian missionary movement. There was a propensity for them to not be as aware as they needed to be of how much Western cultural baggage they were carrying with them into these other cultural contexts.

The concepts that we're studying in this particular session called “Focus” used to be for people who were preparing for cross-cultural ministry and not mono-cultural ministry. In other words, this material used to be for missionaries and there was another set of material that was used for church planters. There is no such dichotomy anymore; the materials are exactly the same.

With the insurgence of postmodernism, and with the secularization of the Western culture, all church planting by its nature is cross-cultural. The concept that used to be critical or you couldn't make it in a cross-cultural missionary context, if they're not understood you don't make it in almost anyplace in the world today.

If you could picture in your mind concentric circles and the outer circle is what we would call the “behaviors of the people” in your ministry focus group: what they eat, how they dress, how they wear their hair, how they talk, what their customs are, etc. There's the behavior circle, and the essence of the focus module is how do we have truly incarnational ministry in terms of our identification- to the Jew, I’m a Jew, to the Greek I’m a Greek, to those under the law, under the law, to those not under the law, I’m not under the law that I might win some.

And how do you contextualize without falling prey to syncretism, without compromising the gospel? And so we’ve got this dichotomy of a commitment to sound doctrine, and a commitment to contextualization. If there is ever not a tension, then you're probably a risk; you’ve gone to one side or the other.

Hudson Taylor, for instance, when he went to China, he dressed like the Chinese. So that's the contextualization- I'm going to eat like they eat, if they go to coffee shops, I’m going to go to coffee shops, if they dress a certain way, if they wear their hair a certain way, that's the behavioral. I don’t want to minimize it, but it's the superficial. It's the external. It's the concept of behavior.

The question then becomes: what is it that drives those behaviors? The next concentric circle are certain values. People dress a certain way, eat a certain thing, follow a certain custom, because they have certain values that drive the behaviors.

Why do people have certain values? They have certain values because there are some core beliefs that are truths or what they perceived to be truth, that shapes the values that actually shapes how they act and react in their behaviors in life. And a huge breakthrough in missions in this last generation is recognizing that beneath beliefs is a core set of beliefs that has actually been set apart from within beliefs called worldview.

There is a worldview that is at the core of our beliefs, and the concept of worldview is basically the answers that every culture gives to what we call “ultimate questions of life” that transcend every generation, that all human beings in any culture developing or developed are asking. They are questions origin, they are questions of evil and suffering, they are questions of what is our hope for the problem of evil and suffering, and there's the ultimate question of what lies beyond. Is there anything that lies beyond?

And so a worldview is at the very core of our beliefs about the ultimate questions in life, and our beliefs affect our values, and our values drive our behaviors. If you're going to be having a ministry of the gospel that goes beyond mere external behavioral modification but it's truly transformational, then your task as a minister of the gospel is to understand that culture way beyond their behaviors, but their values that drive the behaviors their beliefs the drive their values, and their core worldview underneath their beliefs, and how the gospel actually applies.

When you think of it at the very core, the question of origins, where did everything come from, in the Gospel, that's the doctrine of creation. There's an infinite personal God who exists, he's created everything that is. Why is there evil and suffering? Why are things the way they are? Things are not the way they're supposed to be because of the fall of humanity into sin. What is the hope? The hope is that God has solved the ultimate problem of the ages in Jesus Christ, and that hope is found not in a set of propositions that people seek to keep to earn God's favor, but that hope was found in a resurrected and ascended person who will one day make all wrongs right.

That’s the hope of redemption, and what lies ahead is not a neo-Gnostic disembodied experience in the afterlife but a very earthy experience of this ascended Christ is returning and he's going to make all things new. Where there is injustice, there will be no more. Where there is pain, there will be no more suffering, and our bodies will be united with our souls where we will worship and we will serve forever on the new earth with a new body.

That's good news, and that actually speaks to the ultimate questions of every culture, and out of that come beliefs and values that have a profound impact on behaviors. At the very heart of church planting ministry is infiltrating a culture and seeking to exegete not just the word that’s what church leaders are normally trained to do. They’re trained to exegete the word but not the world. Exegeting God's word is important, but if you don't have it exegete God's world and then apply God's word to God's world in a way that shows the preeminence of Christ over humanity in every sphere of life and answers the fundamental questions of every race of humanity in every generation, then you've lost the battle from the very beginning.

We are not only interpreters of God's word but interpreters of God's world.