Class Reflection 1

Church in Mission

Reflections on Class, Sept. 28, 2009

I especially appreciated the professor’s comments about the importance of Church meeting people in the context of their home culture. However, my observations have been that churches have responded to the call for cultural relevance in the extreme – either by rejecting the call, and becoming even more stalwart in their ways (typical of many fundamentalist evangelical churches), or by trying to be so relevant that they lose the prophetic nature of the Gospel – in some extreme cases, they lose the inability to articulate the Gospel altogether. Lesslie Newbigin in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society discusses what it takes for a Church to remain faithful to the Gospel of the Bible, and therefore be both pastor and prophet to culture. I am interested to see how class will unfold with regard to this topic.