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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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