Reverse Contextualization: A Mission Frontier

Ralph Winter’s 12 “Frontiers of Perspective” represent major shifts in his thinking that “profoundly modified and molded his perception of the mission task”:

(1) Unreached Peoples

(2) The Great Commission and Abraham

(3) From the Unfinished Task to the Finishable Task

(4) Failure with the Large Groups and the Off-setting Trend to “Radical Contextualization”

(5) Reverse Contextualization, the Recontextualization of Our Own Tradition

(6) The Reclaiming of the Gospel of the Kingdom

(7) Beyond Christianity

(8) A Different Type of Recruitment

(9) A Trojan Horse

(10) Needed: a Revolution in Pastoral Training

(11) The Religion of Science

(12) The Challenge of the Evil One

When I first came across a collection of Lesslie Newbigin’s writings, published in 2003 after his death, I asked the question: Which came first: Newbigin’s or Ralph Winter’s thinking? This was the book, Signs Amid the Rubble: The Purposes of God in Human History. Winter’s emphasis on God’s missionary purposes in history, the theme of the World Christian Foundations curriculum, resonates with the themes of Newbigin’s book.

Now I’ve come across an earlier book by Newbigin in Ralph Winter’s library, that was surely an influence on Winter’s thinking about the need to re-contextualize our own tradition. 

Newbigin, Lesslie. 1986. 

Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

In morning meetings Dr. Winter used to mention the “frog in the kettle” syndrome: we need to recognize the cultural environment we are immersed in to avoid negative consequences, namely spreading our Western culture instead of the Gospel.

Here’s what Newbigin says along these lines:

Page 2: "[Missionaries] have become more aware of the fact that in their presentation of the gospel they have often confused culturally conditioned perceptions with the substance of the gospel, and thus wrongfully claimed divine authority for the relativities of one culture.”

p. 20

Newbigin quotes W.E. Gladstone: “We are travelling back again from the region to which the Gospel brought us, towards that in which it found us.” Newbigin then commented: “The result is not, as we once imagined, a secular society. It is a pagan society, and its paganism, having been born out of the rejection of Christianity, is far more resistant to the gospel than the pre-Christian paganism with which cross-cultural missions have been familiar. Here, surely, is the most challenging missionary frontier of our time.”

Occasionally toward the end of his life, Ralph Winter would refer to Europe as being in need of re-evangelization. 

In a 1999 article, "The Role of Western Missions in the 21st Century," Winter wrote: 

"The West today needs the help of the Third World Churches and missions, especially if they are willing to follow faith and not form." (Frontiers in Mission, p. 115).