A new church plant’s survival is largely based on it’s ability to engage the culture it finds itself in. For instance, Griffith and Easum explain in Ten Most Common Mistakes Made by New Church Starts, that many churches fail to survive due to a fantasy vision that fails to exegete the culture of the community it is planted in. Instead, the culture and community (the harvest itself) should be informing the expression of the church.¹  Yet, just as important as becoming culturally relevant, or perhaps more important, is staying biblically grounded. The church can easily lose its influence in the world by focusing on culture. Here, I list some principles for contextualizing, yet not compromising the gospel.

1. Kingdom Culture Transforms the Cultures of the World

Cultures tend to have negative, neutral, and positive aspects. In one example, someone may tend to have terrible outbursts of anger all his life. A good friend of this person may chalk it up to, “well, that’s just Nick.” We can easily fall into the same problem of coddling the bad characteristics of cultures. Moreover, we can emphasize one culture over another, as though one were more righteous. Instead, the differences can really be about preference. A congregation with cold climate ethnicities going to church with warm climate ethnicities may be appalled at how late people arrive to service. It may seem like applying the gospel to this situation would be to expect service to start promptly at 8am. A cultural exegesis, however, may suggest that you have a 9am service and a 12pm service.

Ultimately, the gospel of the Kingdom speaks of a King who will come to reign over the earth. It is intrusive and confronting by nature – yet it has no favoritism and is given to all the nations of the earth. When it comes to planting churches, it is important to understand that no matter what qualities or cultures a people group has, the Kingdom culture is what everyone in Christ and in the church is being called to align with. Ed Stetzer writes, in Planting Missional Churches, that “the church must never become too comfortable with any culture.² Sometimes this may mean confronting and going against a culture’s norms, other times it may mean compromising between cultural preferences so that the gospel may not be hindered.

• The Gospel is Forward Moving

A quote of C.S. Lewis goes, ““No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.”³ I find this to be especially true in ministry.  Take tradition, for instance. Much of the issues that arose between Jesus and the Pharisees had to do with traditions taking a higher place than what God was actively doing. Many church movements and denominations were formed around a revival only to fade out and become culturally irrelevant down the road. We may easily conclude that God is always doing a new thing in the earth and cannot be put in the boxes of our models, thinking that they will produce something new. We should be careful to learn from the moves of the Spirit and the church, but to always stay in step with the Spirit and never, ever settle (just like Israel who followed God through the wilderness to the Promised Land). An example of this that Stetzer writes of is how the Protestant movement over corrected itself and failed to emphasize missions when they became obsessed with getting rid of apostolic succession. It is ironic that the Catholic church was effective in reaching the ends of the earth. ⁴ I believe that this forward moving motion can take place in any denomination, church tradition, or history but it is something that must be done intentionally. Otherwise, anything, even our denomination or tradition can become a culture that resists the new things God is doing among his people and among the nations. Part of this must have to do with exegeting culture like some of the older generations did when navigating the Hippie Movement that turned into the Jesus Movement.

• The Church Must Say Yes to Life

The church is in a relationship with the world. At first, that sentence may sound heretical. Yet, Ephesians 4:11-13 tells the church to “. . . have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them.” Thus, a major life vein in the church is not only resisting the world but exposing the world as well. Throughout church history, we can see heavy engagement in the church with strangers, synagogues, families, cities, prison guards, emperors, kings, . . . and the list goes on.  A church may easily become culturally relevant to the point that they have effectively forget their calling to transform the world around them.Instead, the church should always have a posture of relating to the world with truth. Ed Stetzer writes, “. . . a church or church planter who is missional is focused on God’s mission (missio Dei) being aware of what God is doing in the culture and joining him in his work.”⁵ A missional church is, therefore, one that engages the world around it. This naturally helps the church become contextualized to its harvest field. In the words of Bonhoeffer, quoted by Eric Metaxas in his book Bonhoeffer, “If you want to find eternity, you must serve the times . . . Our marriage must be a ‘yes’ to God’s earth. It must strengthen our resolve to do and accomplish something on earth . . . human beings were taken from the earth and don’t just consist of thin air and thoughts.”⁶

Earlier I wrote, “A new church plant’s survival is largely based on it’s ability to engage the culture it finds itself in.” Do you feel that this statement is true? What about convents of nuns and monks who have separated themselves from the world or live in silence? What about the Desert Fathers and Mothers? Is there something more to be said of not being culturally relevant at all, but just going deeper into a church’s own culture?   

1. Griffith, J. and B. Easum, Ten Most Common Mistakes Made by New Church Starts, (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2008), 23.
2. Ed Stetzer, Planting Missional Churches, (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2006) 23.
3. C.S. Lewis, from Mere Christianity.
4. Ed Stetzer, 28-29.
5. Ed Stetzer, 20.
6. Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer, (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2020), 81.