I don’t exactly know when my accent changed. All I know is that it has. I sound nothing like the lad that grew up in a wee Ayrshire village…in fact, I’m actually at the stage where speaking Ayrshire Scots, my original tongue, requires a conscious effort.
I know why my accent changed. On one hand, it was to be understood outside my culture. But secondly, it was to conform because, sadly, many generations of young Scots are told that they can’t speak Scots if they want to get on in the world, and so there is a pressure to speak English. This change of tongue changed my clear Scots to a stuttery English where I can’t always find the words for things in the heat of the moment.
The effect of ‘the world’ on the church is similar. On one hand, we know we need to speak in ways that people hear and understand. This is an acceptable and necessary missional adaptation. We don’t change the content, but the delivery. That is, until, we start to feel the pressure not only to change the language, but the content. We chisel off everything that seems unpalatable to the ears we are communicating with, and so the church stutters through the 21st century with little clue what to say. We step into the maze and get thoroughly lost.
Being a City of a Hill shifts the missional context just by a few degrees. The missional movement has been important and necessary, but I see tendencies for people to go off in a missional mindset with great skills in communicating the gospel into different groups of people…only to then find that it is only one step away from losing the integrity of the message altogether. Over-contextualisation is a thing…being so culturally sensitive that you lose your essence.
I have a sense I’m going to be doing more thinking on this, but I think there needs to be a new balance struck between being a City on a Hill and a church on mission. We need to go out with the gospel – yes! – but we need to remember that the collective church has a prophetic witness too. There is something vital about the gathered church which has something powerful to say to our world. Even more, there needs to be a counter-cultural sign that another way of living is indeed possible!
When I became a Christian, I was happy to step out of my own culture and go into a community steeped in the culture of the gospel. It was giving, healing, encouraging, and empowering. What I had come from was the opposite. So yes, the church needs to be that. Where we need to be careful (and this is the other side of the balance), is that the church culture doesn’t remove us from the world around us so much that we don’t know how to get back out and effectively do mission.
To put it succinctly: we don’t just go with a gospel message, we are out to establish gospel communities of the Kingdom that become bases for Christian life but springboards for Christian mission. A delicate balance, but a necessary one.
Andrew S M Clark 