Baller 21

What Missionaries Have Known For Centuries

by Chris Harvey on 02/27/08

Breaking the missional code: Your Church Can Become a Missionary in Your Community, is a book that I have just finished reading.

What missionaries have known for centuries is that there are cultural barriers, in addition to spiritual ones, that keep people from truly hearing the gospel. The task is to find a balance between presenting the unchanging gospel and having it in a culturally relevant form that speaks peoples language. The academic world calls this contextualization.

The question is (with all the discussion on how we do church), if missionaries have been and are continuing to contextualize in different cultures around the world, why shouldn’t we do the same in North America?

Here are a few points from my reading:

• If we are going to join God on his mission, we have to recognize that we are missionaries….wherever he places us-just like the first disciples.
• North America is a mission’s field (Your city is a mission’s field, the world has come to us, but we still need to go).
• Breaking the code= no longer seeing missions and evangelism as two separate disciplines. (should be intertwined into the whole life of the church).
• Being a Christian= living like Jesus did, loving like he did, leaving what he left behind ( sacrifices made to reach others).
• Leaders who break the code= understand their community, ask the right questions of the right people. (Who is that? The unchurched and disconnected in your context.)
• Leaders who break the code= are willing to pay the prize (what ever it takes to connect the disconnected to God and his church).

Code breaking churches will look different from culture to culture, generation to generation, and in our world today, street corner to street corner. The point is that this is a good thing.

Churches that have diverse styles in how they communicate and relate to a community should be encouraged and supported because our communities and world are made up of diverse people.

I have been trying to think how to apply some of this principles to our community (Mexican, Cuban, South American, Spanish -speaking, second and third generation English- speaking, traditional preferences, youth craving for something different, unchurched backgrounds, plenty of opinions), and as you can imagine, with challenges in your own community, this will be a process.

C.Harv