When we talk about contextualization issues, I often find myself or others setting up the conversation at some point with something along the lines of, “How far can we go?” Its true that it is a discernment process of what is good and redeeming and redeemable with a culture or a religious tradition that we can use directly or give new meaning to give glory to God and encourage people to remain within their culture and family while being followers of Jesus. And of course, this process is primarily that of the indigenous believers interacting with the Holy Spirit. Outsiders and missionaries like myself can never be the most effective at spearheading this process. Though I find we often have to jumpstart it here to overcome centuries of mission work and Christianity in Thailand that set up stereotypes and ways of doing mission, evangelism , and church that are disinclined to contextualization.
Missionaries pre-field, however, like Perspectives students, often are taught about contextualization as a spectrum or a scale (like the C-1 through C-6 scale for example) where the implicit or explicit message is, “Go far enough to win people, but don’t go too far to where you’re entering into syncretism.” I think this way of putting syncretism at the far end of the contextualization scale is a misunderstanding of what syncretism is. Syncretism and contextualization are two different issues entirely, on two different planes. Or rather, the phenomena of syncretism is the lack of effective contextualization in animistic contexts. I think rather that we must ask, “How far must we go in contextualizing to ensure against syncretism?” In fact, the process of contextualization is one in which we take captive every thought and make it obedient to the Messiah, just as Paul instructed. Read the rest of this entry »
Some of my immediate neighbors in the Permsup community are the drug dealing ring here. A number of these young men and a couple women hang out in front of the community every day and night. In my first year here, I used to hang out with them a fair amount, especially this one kid Gaeng. But in the last few months, it has been a rare occasion that I’ve stopped and chatted with this group. This has been somewhat intentional, in order to focus my energies on the family oriented group that includes Ratchai, Komsorn, YaiGao, etc. in which we already have well-established relationships and significant inroads for ministry. But I think its been partly in avoidance also. This group can be much crasser and the sobriety quotient is much lower. Its just less comfortable to hang out with this crew.
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