Home Outreach Leaders Articles for Outreach & Missions Is Your Church Exclusive? (You'd Be Surprised)

Is Your Church Exclusive? (You'd Be Surprised)

Like many other things, contextualization arises from a good seed (goal) but can sometimes grow into an unhealthy flower. We want to see people come to know Jesus, so we work hard to remove the cultural hurdles that come into play when we communicate the gospel. Contextualization in its most faithful form aims to remain faithful to the text (Bible) amid an ever-changing context (culture).

There can be some unintended consequences to an overly acute contextualization. Perhaps “blind spot” is a good term to capture this. Let me provide an example. Let’s say First Baptist Church (FBC) is working hard to reach the 20-somethings in their community. They build their staff, gear their services, consider their language and even tailor all of their communication toward this age group.

Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt that they are being absolutely faithful to the text in this context. We have best motives and best practices, so to speak. After a couple of years of slugging it out, they have 150 young people coming on a Sunday morning. Within four years, this doubles. They are plodding ahead. Their contextualization at FBC seems to be well thought out, careful and faithful.

What could possibly be a drawback or a blind spot to this? Whenever you focus on a particular group of people, you will always exclude others. This may not be intentional, but incidental exclusion is still leaving people out. In my example above, you may draw some people toward your fellowship who are outside of the focus, but this will be the exception rather than the rule.

This is the heart of the blind spot and the issue that I wish more mission-minded, contextualized churches would realize: An overemphasis upon a particular “subculture” will exclude the majority of the types of people who “should” make up a church.

One might say, “Who are you to say what should make up a church?” Well, I can’t. I don’t. The Bible does, though. Churches should reflect the people in the communities around them as new disciples are made, trained and sent out. As just one example, take a stroll through the pastoral letters and you will see this.