Facilitating Church Planting Movements #1 - Contend and Contextualize

Recently I went to a learning event with Ed Stetzer, author of Breaking the Missional Code at the Center for U.S. Missions on the Concordia, Irvine campus. The event was "Facilitating Church Planting Movements." Stetzer talks about 2 fundamental tasks in church planting and being missional. Here is a summary of his comments:

Contend and Contextualize – We must do both!

Contend:

Jude 1:3 Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt I had to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints.

Ed Stetzer does not believe in abandoning denominational distinctives but rather carefully defining them. The church that engages the culture while contending for the "faith once delivered to the saints." We must decide what is the essence of being Lutheran Christians so that we will know exactly what are contending for. By doing so, we will also determining what we will not contend for.

Contextualize:

1 Corinthians 9:22-23 To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some. {23} I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.

"Contextualization is a delicate enterprise if there ever was one. The evangelist and mission strategist stands on a razor's edge, aware that to fall off on either side will have dreadful results.

Fall to the right and you end in obscurantism, so attached to your conventional ways of practicing and teaching the faith that you veil its truth and power from those who are trying to see it through very different eyes.

Fall to the left and you tumble into syncretism, so vulnerable to the impact of paganism in its multiplicity of forms that you compromise the uniqueness of Christ and concoct another gospel which is not the Gospel.

Whichever you are more afraid of – your temptation will likely lean toward the opposite.

I agree with Stetzer -- how to both contend and contextualize will be one of the biggest challenges new church plants will deal with in the years ahead. Congregations who will parent these new missions will also need to do much praying and thinking about how to faithfully share the Gospel in new places and with new people groups over these next few decades.