Missional Literature Review - Part 8 - Common Practices of Missional Living - Cultural Analysis

Cultural Analysis
There is a belief in missional circles that God works within a culture to bring redemption, but does not destroy the culture (Fredrickson, 2007). The church, reflecting the mission of God, seeks to do the same by living in, with and against culture at the same time, seeking to bring it under the Lordship of Christ (Fredrickson, 2007; Hiebert, 1996). To bring culture under Christ, it is necessary for the church to develop “public theology” (Van Gelder, 1996, p. 43). Also called “local theology” (Edson, 2006, p. 27 ; Roxburgh and Boren, 2009, 100), or a “theological reading of sociology” (Van Gelder, 2007, p. 39), a public theology is a contextualized approach to understanding Scripture for and in a particular location. In order to develop a public theology, missional authors contend that the Christian community needs to live “between gospel and culture” (Hunsberger & Van Gelder, xvi) by knowing how it is shaped by culture and how the gospel will shape the culture.

There seem to be three components of public theology suggested in the literature: theology, cultural analysis, and mutual interpretation. As theology will be the topic of the next section, it is not included here. Though it is a major section of the GOCN effort to help congregations become missional, relatively little has been written about analyzing the culture apart from the broad pictures offered of the North American context. More research needs to be done to effectively help the church engage in specific, cultural analysis. Fredrickson (2006) offers some help, saying that the church should take note of demographic indicators and the ecclesial landscape of the context. Clearly, this is not near enough help, but the academic literature offers little more. Neither does the practitioner-oriented literature help much as it contains mainly anecdotes in different contexts.

Fortunately, the literature on mutual interpretation is not so sparse. Mutual interpretation “best explains the relationship between a missional congregation and the context as they coincide together in space and time” (Fredrickson, 2006, p. 49). Taken from the revised correlation theory of Tracy and Bronning, mutual interpretation envisions a complex dialogue between church and culture, with both sides asking questions and offering answers (Edson, 2006). The church dialogues with the Gospel in order to then represent the Gospel in dialogue with the culture. Hunsberger (1996) states the nature of the dialogue profoundly, saying, “The Gospel meets the culture first here in us. . . . Similarly, the culture meets the gospel first here in us who are the hermeneutical lens through which it may be perceived” (p. 297).

The missional literature reveals a growing, critical reflection about intentional engagement with culture. In fact, contextual interpretation, ministry, and theology appear to be three of the hallmarks of missional living. For missional living to remain grounded in God, though, it must be combined with thoroughly biblical theological reflection.