Contextualization: When the Method Becomes Part of the Message

Contextualization is one of the persistent challenges of cross-cultural ministry, and the question is deceptively simple: How do we communicate a message faithfully when the people receiving it do not think, learn, or communicate the way we do?

That question was at the center of our most recent class at Henderson Training Institute in Nicaragua. A visiting teacher taught our students on contextualization, with particular attention to orality and Bible storying. The instructor brought extensive experience working among oral cultures in the Amazon, making this far more than an abstract discussion of missiology.

At first glance, contextualization can sound like a missionary technique, a question of adapting illustrations, vocabulary, music, or teaching methods to a local setting. But the issue goes considerably deeper. Contextualization forces us to examine the relationship between message, culture, cognition, and communication.

Literacy Is More Than the Ability to Read

One of the helpful arguments developed in Making Disciples of Oral Learners is that we should not think of literacy and orality as a simple binary. A person may technically know how to read and yet rely principally on oral and relational means for learning, remembering, making decisions, and transmitting important information. Oral cultures commonly preserve knowledge through stories, proverbs, songs, poetry, ceremonies, and other communal forms rather than through outlines and written propositions.

That distinction has significant consequences for theological education and missions. Those of us formed in highly literate educational environments tend to organize information analytically. We outline and categorize–we define terms and construct propositions–we arrange them sequentially into arguments. Then we sometimes assume this is simply how serious learning takes place.

But that assumption can confuse our preferred method of transmitting truth with truth itself.

The Lausanne paper makes a particularly important observation–merely speaking material originally designed for literate learners does not transform it into oral communication. An audio recording of a lecture may be audible while remaining thoroughly literate in its structure. Genuine oral communication involves different patterns of memory, interaction, narrative, relationship, and participation–an important distinction. And it raises an uncomfortable question for anyone engaged in cross-cultural theological education.

How often do we measure someone’s ability to understand Scripture by their ability to learn the way we learned?

Contextualization Is Not Dilution

There is sometimes understandable nervousness around the word contextualization. If Christian theology is too readily adapted to culture, the result can be syncretism, where Christian beliefs are combined with assumptions fundamentally incompatible with them. But avoiding contextualization doesn’t solve that problem–in fact, it can contribute to it.

Making Disciples of Oral Learners argues that communication must engage a person’s worldview, not merely supply new religious vocabulary. The document describes worldview in terms of the fundamental stories through which people understand reality: Who are we? What kind of world do we inhabit? What has gone wrong? What can be done about it? That makes narrative extraordinarily important.

A person can learn Christian terminology while interpreting those terms through an essentially unchanged worldview. It is therefore possible to produce something that looks recognizably Christian on the surface while the underlying assumptions remain largely untouched.

The paper consequently argues that effective contextualization requires understanding both the bridges and barriers within a culture’s worldview. Some existing concepts provide points of connection with biblical revelation. Others must be challenged by it. Biblical stories allow people to encounter Scripture within the narrative framework where worldview itself is often formed. This gives us an important definition.

Good contextualization does not change Scripture to fit the culture. It communicates Scripture in forms capable of addressing the culture at the level where meaning is actually made.

Why Bible Storying Matters for Contextualization

This is where Bible storying becomes considerably more interesting than simply using stories to keep an audience’s attention. Narrative isn’t merely an illustration attached to the “real” theological content–narrative carries theology. The biblical canon itself should make that obvious. Much of Scripture comes to us as narrative, poetry, prophecy, wisdom, dialogue, and testimony rather than as systematic theological propositions.

The Lausanne paper draws on N. T. Wright’s observation that stories operate near the center of worldview. Stories tell us what reality is like and where we belong within it. Consequently, one of the ways a worldview is challenged is by encountering a more compelling account of reality. This helps explain the importance of chronological Bible storying. Instead of extracting isolated propositions from Scripture and arranging them according to an outside theological framework, the learner encounters biblical truth within the developing story of Scripture itself.

Creation establishes something about God, humanity, and the world. The fall tells us something about what has gone wrong. The patriarchs, Israel, covenant, kingdom, exile, Christ, cross, resurrection, church, and new creation progressively locate the hearer inside the Bible’s account of reality. The objective isn’t simply that someone can repeat a doctrinal answer. It is that they increasingly learn to inhabit the biblical story.

Reproducibility Changes the Question

Perhaps the aspect of orality that most interests me is reproducibility. Educational models often ask–did the student understand the material? An oral discipleship model adds another question–can the student now transmit it faithfully to someone else? That change is significant.

The paper repeatedly emphasizes reproducibility because oral methods allow people to hear a biblical story, learn it, retell it, discuss it, and transmit it through existing relational networks. The method does not require every participant to possess the teacher’s books, academic vocabulary, educational background, or training infrastructure.

That has implications well beyond so-called “illiterate” populations. The paper discusses secondary orality, people who possess literacy skills but increasingly receive and process information through oral, visual, relational, and electronic media. The observation was made more than twenty years ago, before smartphones and contemporary social media reached their present dominance. Its basic insight now feels remarkably contemporary: literacy does not necessarily mean that print remains a person’s dominant mode of learning.

So perhaps orality shouldn’t be viewed as a specialized missionary technique for remote populations. It may expose weaknesses in how we think about communication everywhere.

And Then the Classroom Demonstrated the Principle

This became especially interesting during the week at HTI. Fifteen students participated, many serving churches in rural Nicaraguan settings where oral communication is already a natural part of community life. But another dimension emerged when experienced missionaries joined the class.

They are Latin American missionaries with cross-cultural experience among Muslims in the Middle East and have also served in Albania. Their presence intersected unexpectedly with something our leadership has articulated as part of HTI’s larger vision: HTI should not exist simply to prepare pastors for Nicaraguan churches. It should also help identify and equip Nicaraguans who may themselves be called into cross-cultural mission. Suddenly contextualization was no longer merely the subject being taught.

It was sitting in the room. Nicaraguan pastors were studying how the gospel crosses cultural boundaries while interacting with Latin American missionaries who had actually crossed those boundaries. And that points toward something I think is particularly important about theological education in the Majority World. The objective cannot be to reproduce Western theological institutions in another language. Nor should the long-term objective of missions be churches that remain dependent upon foreign missionaries for theological thought, training, or missionary initiative.

Healthy contextualization should eventually produce local theological reflection, local leadership, local methods of discipleship, and ultimately local missionary sending. The recipient becomes a participant, and the learner becomes a teacher. The mission field becomes a sending church, perhaps that is one of the better tests of contextualization.

Not whether Christianity in Nicaragua looks like Christianity in the United States, but whether Nicaraguan believers are increasingly equipped to understand the Scriptures deeply, articulate biblical truth naturally within their own cultural world, transmit it faithfully to others, recognize where Scripture challenges their own culture, and eventually carry that same gospel across another cultural boundary.

That is a much larger vision than adapting a sermon illustration. It is learning to distinguish the universality of the message from the particularity of our methods. And for those of us involved with HTI, it means our task isn’t to teach Nicaraguan pastors how to think exactly like us. It is to give them good theological tools, take their context seriously, and increasingly ask a harder question:

What does faithful, reproducible, Nicaraguan theological formation look like when the people doing it no longer need us in the room?

That seems to me a question worth asking. And contextualization is one of the disciplines that forces us to ask it. Contextualization is more than adapting illustrations or translating theological vocabulary. It asks a more fundamental question: How do we communicate the unchanging truths of Scripture when the people receiving them do not think, learn, or communicate the way we do?