In class the other day we talked about how, when sharing the gospel, it is important to communicate the gospel itself, not our culture. This means that we share Jesus with people without trying to also impose our culture on them. To be a Christian doesn’t mean that we worship on Sunday morning, dress a specific way, or listen to only to church-approved music. Those things are cultural, and not necessary to be a Christian. So instead of saying to people, “you’re a Christian now, you should listen to this, wear this and use these words,” we do not hold people to those cultural things but are excited about how their culture will express their Christian walk.
In Padilla’s chapter on Contextualization, he quotes Eugene Ahner that “our understanding of the Gospel will not be complete until people from every nation and every culture give expression to that faith” (90). Not only is this an awesome quote, but it shows how important it is to preach the gospel in a way that allows the message to be understood within the culture of the group that you are trying to reach. The way that their culture understands God contributes something unique to the way that all believers can understand God. This means that if people do not come to understand God within the context of their own culture, then all believers miss out. It’s kind of like the story of the blind people who went to go see the elephant. They each felt a different part of the elephant (one its legs, one its tusks, one its trunk, one its tail, and one its ears) and each got a different picture of what the elephant was really like. When they put their understandings together, they got a fuller picture of what the elephant was like, a much more complete understanding than they could have accomplished on their own. In a similar way, Padilla is saying that the way that each culture of Christians understands God can contribute to the collective knowledge of what God is like.
BL