Seven Dynamics for Advancing
Your Church in Missions

Page 9 — Dynamic #7: Contextualization

This dynamic relates missions to contemporary audiences. Contextualization is an important mission concept that needs to be applied in Borneo but also in Burbank. However, for all intents and purposes, I believe the mission violates contextualization when it comes to mobilizing churches in missions. Until recently the mission industry in North America had largely been the concern of the pre-baby-boom generation. We are facing a major crisis in the next few years because Christian baby boomers and busters have shown little interest in missions as it has been presented.

Jerry Nelson, the missions pastor at College Avenue Baptist Church in San Diego, told me recently that 85% of his mission budget come from people over 55 years old. And this is a boomer-buster church! The “graying” of the mission program in churches is a strong trend across the nation that many churches are only recently recognizing.

Unless we begin to look at the boomers and busters as genuine subcultures with distinctive values and assumptions and begin to re-engineer our methods and communication techniques in terms of their culture, missions will become increasingly marginalized in the North American Church. In the words of the apostle Paul, we should seriously consider: “I became a baby boomer in order that I might win the baby boomers.” The dramatic contrast in the backgrounds and values of these two generations have greatly expanded the traditional “generation gap” between them. The information age is adding additional complexities to the different ways these two generations view and interact with the world.

The mission community has been slow to take this gap seriously. I believe we need to apply a missionary perspective and strategy to this problem. We need to analyze the boomers as we would any other culture and develop appropriate strategy, methodology and techniques accordingly. The mission community is dominated by the pre-boomer values of loyalty, duty and responsibility. These values helped this generation to excel during the Great Depression and World War II. We are greatly indebted to the accomplishments and values of this past generation. But to use those values to mobilize missions to the boomers and busters is to appeal to their weaknesses rather than their strengths. It just doesn't work.

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Articles Index

Pages:
1 Seven Dynamics
2 Four Major Obstacles
3 Vision
4 Management
5 Spiritual Disciplines
6 Integration
7 Leadership
8 Modeling
9 Contextualization
10 Three Values