You must become a lifelong, in-depth student of three things. Here I want you to see three new concentric circles regarding this concept of contextualization. I want you to see the culture component, that's one circle, then I want you to see the church component, and then I want you to see the gospel component.

Being an in-depth student of the gospel, an in-depth student of the culture, and an in-depth student of who you are, and what is the makeup of your church in that particular culture.

Sometimes there is a shocking dissimilarity when a third-party comes into a church and the pastors or the church leaders jaws just drop open when they realize the radical dissimilarity between their little subculture that’s like an island in that geographical area, and the surrounding culture is radically dissimilar much more than they realized.

When these three areas are properly understood and converge in ministry, normally the result is transformation of both people and culture.

Church planters are often activists by nature, and they tend to ignore or neglect the serious study of the unique culture to which they been called to serve. This seems to be especially true of church planters in the Western world. Through my studies at Fuller School of World Mission, I became familiar with Charles Kraft’s teaching on anthropology. Here's the key quote where he drives home this concept: “historically, Westerners [and is true frankly is true of all people, all people are by nature the technical term is ethnocentric]. Historically, Westerners, like nearly all people have tended to treat culture like we treat the air we breathe. We simply assume its existence and ignore it.”

Those who have taught and written on a relationship with God have therefore usually made little or no overt reference to the cultural waters in which humans exist.

The key is not only to pursue a greater understanding of your culture, the gospel, and your church independently of each other, but also to integrate those understandings so they converge in transformational ministry. So let me show you how this has worked itself out in frighteningly scary ways, and is still happening today and you will have a propensity to fall prey to one of these particular classic errors in church planting or in pastoral ministry if you're not on guard.

The first one, classic example, someone who really knows the gospel, someone who really not just knows the gospel, but somebody that knows and has the pulse of the culture, has exegeted Scripture well, and exegeted culture well, but they don't have a church-centered ministry paradigm. The church, defined as the Protestant Reformation defined the church, where there is the preaching of sound doctrine, the proper administration of sacraments, and the key, the concept of discipline, meaning elders who have spiritual authority to oversee the purity of the doctrine and who is admitted to baptism and the Lord's Table. You can have the gospel down, you can have the culture exegeted well, and you can have a churchless form of Christianity and actually tragically miss the mark.

Our secular cultures are not atheistic, they're very, very spiritual, and the church is actually not a part of this, it's very Western rugged individualism advocating a new form, which is basically knowing the gospel, and knowing the culture, and living it out individually. That is churchless Christianity. That is a danger.

I'm a big advocate of organizations like Wycliffe, and Campus Crusade, and Young Life, and these kinds of groups, but para-church can become so set apart from the church that it’s not alongside, it’s totally independent. “Para” means alongside, and those organizations normally are alongside. It's a church-centric mission, it’s a church-centered vision that is often at risk today. So that would be Gospel and culture minus church, equals churchless Christianity.

Number two, church plus gospel. Very committed to the church, very committed to the gospel, just clueless as it comes to understanding culture. We know the gospel, we love Jesus, we lift him up, we love Christ’s church. Understand the world? Are you kidding? That would be worldly to even understand the world, just clueless in terms of understanding culture. This breeds what's called cultural fundamentalism, often in evangelicalism. It's the sense that the world is like a building on fire, that the culture’s like a building on fire, and the only the only relationship we would have with the world is running in there like good firemen and snatching people from that world that’s going to ultimately burn up while we are disembodied spirits forever worshiping Jesus. There's a disengagement with the culture that breeds an isolationism, a separatism, sometimes called cultural fundamentalism. And notice the dynamic: the first dynamic, we got gospel, we got culture, we don't have church. That's a risk. Second risk: we've got the church, we’ve got the gospel, we don't really get culture. That's fundamentalism, isolationism.

Then there are those who really get the church, who really understand the culture, they just don't understand or get the gospel. Quite frankly, it's just like another religion. Earn your way to heaven by good social works and come to church, and this is classically called liberalism, whereas, the other one is called, traditionally, fundamentalism.

And of course, the task before us is a radical commitment to understanding the gospel, the church, and the culture, the result of that is transformation. Transformation not only of human hearts but transformation of culture.

I'll bet you if we had time, I could ask every one of you listening to this to tell me a story, tell me a story of one of these categories. But what’s most significant here and terms of the old Greek axiom, “know yourself,” is which one of these three areas is your heart and soul compass more prone to than the others.

If you can't say, “I am more prone to this,” then you’re at risk. In this training module, our primary focus is to help you gain a better understanding of the unique culture of your ministry focus group, and yourself. In the next training modules, we’ll go into depth regarding ways the church and the gospel can and should transform the surrounding culture. But this module is an introduction to the philosophy module where we’ll study contextualization in much more depth.