Week 1--Bevans, Chapter 1 (Missional Language)

Bevans writes about the need for the church to use different languages to talk to different cultures in the same way that God used different languages to talk to the ancient Hebrews and Hellenistic Jews. His point can’t be exaggerated or mentioned enough, but there is still the huge obstacle of the language barrier. A real danger in our missional approach today is to misuse or misunderstand the languages of particular cultures in our attempts to communicate the Gospel. For all the seeker-sensitivity and concerns about relevance in the Church today, the Church on the whole still converses awkwardly with the culture at large. The solution, I think, is to allow God to fully incarnate in the culture to which we are ministering. This happens through us by our diligent learning of, as well as our immersion in, the culture in question. Inherent in properly learning and immersing is an assumption of the culture’s goodness and value. This includes religious stances other than our own. After all, how can we truly be the incarnate Christ in the most particular way in that culture if we are adversarial towards them?