I am preparing for a free webinar titled: Finding Your Voice.
As part of my preparation I pulled out one of my favorite books, “The Christ of the Indian Road” by E. Stanley Jones missionary to India. It is a book about contextualizing your message. He was a devote evangelical leader but he felt we had set the Gospel in singular context that ruled out other cultures than the western modernistic approach to religious experience and truth.
He exhorted Christ was the fulfillment of all religions and philosophies. He believed that if someone were honest in any context they would run right into Christ and His claims. For those who don’t understand contextualization he could sound universalistic. But he’s not.
Jones got guidance from Ghandi how he could more exactly present Christ. They were close friends.
And Ghandi told him his message was too western to be heard. As an interest note he encouraged Jones to not waffle on the message but be as bold as he could be with the message of Christ as redeemer of all mankind.
Finding your voice means befriending and understanding your context. I am suggesting what I feel is the Emergent church’s slide over the line to universalism. But I am saying pre-packaged ways of doing Gospel don’t work well today in our post-modern culture. We must deconstruct our presentation to its essence. And then re-present the Gospel in the way it can be understood and experienced.
