Center Church

Timothy Keller

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780310494195
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Ministère chrétien

Practical and Gospel-centered thoughts on how to have a fruitful ministry by one of America's leading and most beloved pastor.

Many church leaders are struggling to adapt to a culture that values individuality above loyalty to a group or institution. There have been so many "church growth" and "effective ministry" books in the past few decades that it's hard to know where to start or which ones will provide useful and honest insight.

Based on over twenty years of ministry in New York City, Timothy Keller takes a unique approach that measures a ministry's success neither by numbers nor purely by the faithfulness of its leaders, but on the biblical grounds of fruitfulness.

Center Church outlines a balanced theological vision for ministry organized around three core commitments:

• Gospel-centered: The gospel of grace in Jesus Christ changes everything, from our hearts to our community to the world. It completely reshapes the content, tone, and strategy of all that we do.
• City-centered: With a positive approach toward our culture, we learn to affirm that cities are wonderful, strategic, and under-served places for gospel ministry.
• Movement-centered: Instead of building our own tribe, we seek the prosperity and peace of our community as we are led by the Holy Spirit.

"Between a pastor's doctrinal beliefs and ministry practices should be a well-conceived vision for how to bring the gospel to bear on the particular cultural setting and historical moment. This is something more practical than just doctrine but much more theological than "how-to steps" for carrying out a ministry. Once this vision is in place, it leads church leaders to make good decisions on how to worship, disciple, evangelize, serve, and engage culture in their field of ministry—whether in a city, suburb, or small town." — Tim Keller, Core Church

CITY

Center Church ministry is neither undercontextualized nor overcontextualized to the city and the culture. Because the city has potential for both human flourishing and human idolatry, we minister with balance, using the gospel to both appreciate and challenge the culture to be in accord with God’s truth.

CITY

Fruitful ministry in this century must embrace the unavoidable reality of the city. A Center Church theological vision affirms that center cities are wonderful, strategic, and underserved places for gospel ministry and recognizes that virtually all ministry contexts are increasingly shaped by urban and global forces. Regardless of your particular cultural or geographical context, you will need to consider the city when forming a theological vision that engages the people you are trying to reach. In other words, because the world is on its way to becoming 70 percent urban, we all need a theological vision that is distinctly urban. Even if you don’t go to the city to minister, make no mistake: the city is coming to you.

In part 3 (Gospel Contextualization), we look at the biblical foundations for balanced contextualization and examine how we can contextualize the gospel in our communication to the culture in a way that is both respectful and challenging.

Churches and ministries that flourish in urban and cultural centers are marked by what we call City Vision. In part 4, we examine the key characteristics of city vision. It is based in an understanding of how the city develops as a theme throughout Scripture, from its anti-God origins, to its strategic importance for mission, to its culmination and redemption in glory. Most important, a city vision will give us a genuine love for the place we are called to reach with the gospel, rather than hostility or indifference toward it.

We will also examine the need for thoughtful Cultural Engagement. In part 5, we will discuss four models for engaging culture, acknowledging that each model has strengths and weaknesses — ways in which it accurately reflects a particular biblical emphasis and other ways in which it reflects an unbiblical imbalance or idol. The Center Church model for cultural engagement blends the key insights of each model in a way that we believe is more biblically faithful and also fruitful for reaching urban culture.

part 3: Gospel Contextualization

chapter 7
INTENTIONAL CONTEXTUALIZATION

Redeemer City to City is an agency that promotes church planting and gospel movements in the great city centers of the world.¹ As part of our global ministry, we have had opportunities to talk with Chinese house church leaders. God is blessing the church in China with extraordinary growth. However, when Chinese churches and ministers who had experienced God’s blessing in their rural ministries entered the mushrooming cities of China and tried to minister and communicate the gospel in the same ways that had been blessed in the countryside, they saw less fruitfulness.

Over a decade ago, several Dutch denominations approached us. While they were thriving outside of urban areas, they had not been able to start new, vital churches in Amsterdam in years — and most of the existing ones had died out. These leaders knew the gospel; they had financial resources; they had the desire for Christian mission. But they couldn’t get anything off the ground in the biggest city of their country.²

In both cases, ministry that was thriving in the heartland of the country was unable to make much of a dent in the city. It would have been easy to say, “The people of the city are too spiritually proud and hardened.” But the church leaders we met chose to respond humbly and took responsibility for the problem. They concluded that the gospel ministry that had fit nonurban areas well would need to be adapted to the culture of urban life. And they were right. This necessary adaptation to the culture is an example of what we call “contextualization.”³

SOUND CONTEXTUALIZATION

Contextualization is not — as is often argued — “giving people what they want to hear.”⁴ Rather, it is giving people the Bible’s answers, which they may not at all want to hear, to questions about life that people in their particular time and place are asking, in language and forms they can comprehend, and through appeals and arguments with force they can feel, even if they reject them.

Sound contextualization means translating and adapting the communication and ministry of the gospel to a particular culture without compromising the essence and particulars of the gospel itself. The great missionary task is to express the gospel message to a new culture in a way that avoids making the message unnecessarily alien to that culture, yet without removing or obscuring the scandal and offense of biblical truth. A contextualized gospel is marked by clarity and attractiveness, and yet it still challenges sinners’ self-sufficiency and calls them to repentance. It adapts and connects to the culture, yet at the same time challenges and confronts it. If we fail to adapt to the culture or if we fail to challenge the culture — if we under- or overcontextualize — our ministry will be unfruitful because we have failed to contextualize well.

Perhaps the easiest way to quickly grasp the concept is to think about a common phenomenon. Have you ever sat through a sermon that was biblically sound and doctrinally accurate — yet so boring that it made you want to cry? What made it tedious? Sometimes it’s the mechanics (e.g., a monotone delivery), but more often a boring sermon is doctrinally accurate but utterly irrelevant. The listener says to himself or herself, “You’ve shown me something that may be true, but in any case I don’t care. I don’t see how it would actually change how I think, feel, and act.” A boring sermon is boring because it fails to bring the truth into the listeners’ daily life and world. It does not connect biblical truth to the hopes, narratives, fears, and errors of people in that particular time and place. It does not help the listener to even want Christianity to be true. In other words, the sermon fails at contextualizing the biblical truth for the hearers.

When we contextualize faithfully and skillfully, we show people how the baseline “cultural narratives” of their society and the hopes of their hearts can only find resolution and fulfillment in Jesus. What do I mean by this? Some cultures are pragmatic and prod their members to acquire possessions and power. Some are individualistic and urge their members to seek personal freedom above all. Others are “honor and shame” cultures, with emphasis on respect, reputation, duty, and bringing honor to your family. Some cultures are discursive and put the highest value on art, philosophy, and learning.⁵ These are called “cultural narratives” because they are stories that a people tell about themselves to make sense out of their shared existence. But whatever these personal and cultural narratives may be, sound contextualization shows people how the plotlines of the stories of their lives can only find a happy ending in Christ.⁶

So contextualization has to do with culture, but what exactly is culture? Effective contextualization addresses culture in the broadest sense of the word, along the maximum surface area. Culture is popularly conceived narrowly — as language, music and art, food and folk customs — but properly understood, it touches every aspect of how we live in the world. Culture takes the raw materials of nature and creates an environment. When we take the raw material of the earth to build a building or use sounds and rhythms to compose a song or fashion our personal experiences into a story, we are creating an environment we call a culture. We do all this, however, with a goal: to bring the natural order into the service of particular “commanding truths,” core beliefs, and assumptions about reality and the world we live in.

Missionary G. Linwood Barney speaks of culture as resembling an onion. The inmost core is a worldview — a set of normative beliefs about the world, cosmology, and human nature. Growing immediately out of that layer is a set of values — what is considered good, true, and beautiful. The third layer is a set of human institutions that carry on jurisprudence, education, family life, and governance on the basis of the values and worldview. Finally comes the most observable part of culture — human customs and behavior, material products, the built environment, and so on.⁷ Some have rightly criticized this model — of an onion or a ladder — as not sufficient to show how much all these “layers” interact with and shape one another.⁸ For example, institutions can produce something new like the United States interstate highway system, which created “car culture” behavior, which has in turn undermined older forms of communities and therefore many institutions. So the interactions are neither linear nor one-way.

But the main point here is that contextualizing the gospel in a culture must account for all these aspects. It does not mean merely changing someone’s behavior, but someone’s worldview. It does not mean adapting superficially — for example, in music and clothing. Culture affects every part of human life. It determines how decisions are made, how emotions are expressed, what is considered private and public, how the individual relates to the group, how social power is used, and how relationships, particularly between genders, generations, classes, and races, are conducted. Our culture gives distinct understandings of time, conflict resolution, problem solving, and even the way in which we reason. All these factors must be addressed when we seek to do gospel ministry. David Wells writes, “Contextualization is not merely a practical application of biblical doctrine but a translation of that doctrine into a conceptuality that meshes with the reality of the social structures and patterns of life dominant in our contemporary life.”⁹

Skill in contextualization is one of the keys to effective ministry today. In particular, churches in urban and cultural centers must be exceptionally sensitive to issues of contextualization, because it is largely there that a society’s culture is being forged and is taking new directions. It is also a place where multiple human cultures live together in uneasy tension, so cultural compounds are more complex and blended there.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE TERM

The term contextualization may have first been used in 1972 by Shoki Coe, a Taiwanese-born man who was one of the key figures in the formation of the World Council of Churches.¹⁰ Coe questioned the adequacy of the older “indigenous church movement” model identified with Henry Venn and Rufus Anderson. Venn and Anderson directed Western missionaries to plant churches in new cultures that were “self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating.” Older missionaries had planted churches in foreign cultures and maintained control of them indefinitely, using native Christians only in assisting roles. They also explicitly directed national Christians to adopt Western ways wholesale. The indigenous church movement, however, called missionaries to see themselves as temporary workers whose job was to do initial evangelism and then, as quickly as possible, to turn the churches over to indigenous, national leadership so the Christian churches could worship and minister in native languages, music, and culture.

This was a good and important step forward in our understanding of how Christian mission is conducted. But Coe, who served as principal of Tainan Theological College, argued that something more than just empowering national leaders was needed. He observed that the missionaries still gave national leaders forms of church ministry — ways of expressing and formulating the gospel and structuring churches — that were unalterably Western. National Christians were not being encouraged to think creatively about how to communicate the gospel message to their own culture.¹¹

The Theological Education Fund of the World Council of Churches was the first agency to use this new term and pursue it within its mission. The earliest work under this name, however, caused grave concerns. Following the existential theological thinking of Rudolf Bultmann, who was still highly influential in the 1970s, and Ernst Käsemann, theologians connected to the WCC insisted that the New Testament was itself largely adapted to a Hellenistic worldview that did not have abiding validity. Therefore, it was argued, Christians were free to determine in whatever way that fit their particular culture the “inner thrust of Christian [biblical] revelation” and discard or adapt the rest.¹²

This approach to contextualization assumes that both the text (Bible) and context (culture) are relative and equally authoritative. Through a dialectical process in which the two are brought into relationship to one another, we search for the particular form of Christian truth (with a small t) that fits a culture for the time being. Virtually any part of the Christian faith, then — the deity of Christ, the triunity of God, the gracious basis of the gospel — can be jettisoned or filled with radical...