As we translate the words and concepts of Scripture, we must make sure that the target words and expressions faithfully capture the original meaning and sense of Scripture, rejecting the notion of cultural neutrality, and seeking always to reshape our lives and language according to Scripture, not the other way around.

It seems most Christians today assume that Christians have always “contextualized” the gospel, but this is simply not the case.

Like the idea of culture itself, the term “contextualization” is a relatively recent development. David Hesselgrave and Edward Rommen provide a helpful survey of contextualization’s history in Contextualization: Meanings, Methods, and Models.1

The idea of contextualization is rooted in the missions debates of the Division on World Missions and Evangelism (DWME) of the World Council of Churches (WCC). Influenced by a secularist, anthropological understanding of culture and thus concerned that each civilization develop its own theology and method of church ministry in its own cultural context, the DWME began to condemn the “theological imperialism” of the church in the West. Its 1972–73 Bangkok Conference argued that non-Western churches should develop their own ideas “in a theology, a liturgy, a praxis, a form of community, rooted in their own culture.”² This desire for each church to be indigenized within its culture, clearly influenced by a belief in cultural neutrality, became known as “contextualization.” Hesselgrave and Rommen explain how this new concept differed from previous ways of thinking:

Contextualization is a new word—a technical neologism. It may also signal a new (or renewed) sensitivity to the need for adaptation to cultural context. To its originators it involved a new point of departure and a new approach to theologizing and to theological education: namely, praxis or involvement in the struggle for justice within the existential situation in which men and women find themselves today. As such it goes well beyond the concept of indigenization which Henry Venn, Rufus Anderson, and their successors defined in terms of an autonomous (self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating) church.³

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