Contextualized Post-Modern Movements

In January 2006, I attended the New Staff on the Field Training in San Antonio for the Red River Region. During this time we helped the local team try to launch movements on campuses around the city. Within this, my team was assigned to launch an IMPACT movement.

At the end of the week we were to give a presentation about what we had experienced, learned, and what information we had collected. This was to help spread the wealth of our different experinces throughout the week and also for us to make suggestions about what we thought the local team should do from there.

I began to try to understand the verbage: "contextualized ministry".

I looked through the staff resources and found a paper written by Charles Gilmer dealing with this: https://staff.campuscrusadeforchrist.com/cms/content/2876.doc

Here is a portion:

Another term we need to understand is contextualization. Contextualization is a missiological term for taking the gospel and expressing it within the context of a particular culture. It's an approach that clarifies the goal of evangelism and discipleship for a cross-cultural mission or missionary. It involves going beyond simple translations from one culture to another, such as translating a hymn from English to Spanish. It seeks to see expressions of Christianity develop that are culturally relevant or authentic, thereby entering the world or culture of that people group. And this is essential if we want those in that culture to hear and be exposed to a clear, relevant presentation of the gospel.

When WSN, or any mission, operates overseas contextualization is one of the unspoken goals. The implied objective is to see the ministry manned by nationals in a country. When ministry is being pioneered by US staff, English speakers are the target. The ministry reaches a different state of maturity when you have leaders who are able to minister with fluency in the language of that particular culture. That is a step in the process of contextualization.
What we are doing is applying the same principle [of contextualization] to ministry in this country; it means speaking the language, if you will, of students with whom we would not connect otherwise. We are not willing to limit ourselves to being effective only with those who can speak the “white Christian” language or have assimilated into the white culture.

After reading this paper I understood two things:

1. Campus Crusade for Christ had always been contexualized...in that it has always sought to reach the members of a segment of the population or sub-culture in a relelvent way. The Campus ministry is contextualized itself in that it seeks to reach college students. We are specialist versus generalist.

2. I had been trying to overhaul all of the modern campus ministry in order to try to reach a contextualized slice of the population : post modern college students. Our current ministry does not effectively reach them in a relevant way...but what needed to happen...at least at first would not be to discard current models....but to simply start fresh movements to effectively reach a large portion of the students population in the west and most likely Europe.