“According to missional authors, in order for worship to be authentic for believers and understandable for unbelievers, churches must evaluate their cultural context and contextualize worship to that culture. Since the West is post-Christendom culturally, churches must avoid allowing their worship to be shaped by forms nurtured during Christendom and instead shape their worship according to the cultural expressions most dominant in their target culture.”

How shall we sing the Lord’s song
in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand forget its skill!
Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy!
Psalm 137:46

Christians today live in a strange land, just like Israel in captivity. Christians today wrestle with how they should relate to the culture of unbelievers around them, just like the Hebrews did. And Christians today often fail to worship God according to his Word in the name of “contextualizing” to their surroundings, similarly to Israel’s persistent syncretism.

I have presented what I believe is the most biblical approach to the current cultural condition by analyzing the philosophy and practice of worship that has become perhaps most influential in evangelicalism, the conservative evangelical missional church movement. Although the movement has contributed positively to evangelicalism in many ways, including its strong emphasis upon fervent evangelism and its recognition of cultural shifts in the West, I have nevertheless argued that deficiencies in its understanding of the nature of culture, the posture of contextualization, and the relationship between worship and mission leaves the missional philosophy of worship without clear biblical and theological support and, ironically, renders it less able to accomplish God’s mission for the church. I have insisted, rather, that God’s mission is to create worshipers for his own glory; he accomplishes this mission through redemption, and he has tasked the church with making disciples who will worship him acceptably. This requires that churches communicate God’s truth to both believers and unbelievers using cultural expressions that fittingly shape the content in similar ways that the Bible itself does. Only with this understanding will churches accomplish the mission God has given them for his glory.

In this concluding chapter, I’d like to briefly summarize my argument and then offer some practical applications and conclusions from the discussion.

The overarching principles of the missional church movement—missionary imperative, twenty-first-century western postmodernism as missionary context, and the incarnational mode of mission—shape the movement’s philosophy and practice of worship. Since everything about the church’s existence falls under the category of “mission,” even public worship serves mission. Missional church advocates are critical of both the “attractional” worship model of the church growth movement as well as the “Inside & Out” model in which worship serves to motivate individual Christians to evangelize outside the church’s walls. Rather, missional authors typically advocate for a model of worship that aims for it to be both an authentic expression of believers and a culturally relevant and “comprehensible” presentation for unbelievers.

According to missional authors, in order for worship to be authentic for believers and understandable for unbelievers, churches must evaluate their cultural context and contextualize worship to that culture. Since the West is post-Christendom culturally, churches must avoid allowing their worship to be shaped by forms nurtured during Christendom and instead shape their worship according to the cultural expressions most dominant in their target culture. This particular posture of contextualization is driven by the principle of incarnation, which suggests that as the Son of God became incarnate in order to redeem the world, so churches must become incarnate in their cultures in order to reach those cultures, and this includes their worship forms.

The missional philosophy of worship is rooted in specific understandings of culture and contextualization. As I have shown, the current missional/evangelical definitions of culture find their substance in anthropological discourse, and thus the implications and applications that naturally flow from secular anthropology also find their way into the thinking and practice of missional evangelicals. This is particularly true with the anthropological understanding of culture as neutral and the related issue of religious beliefs being but one component of the broader idea of culture. I have shown how missional advocates accept these principles since the concept of culture comes through the discipline of anthropology in the first place.

I have also sought to place missional ideas of contextualization in a standard historical framework. After showing that, like culture, contextualization is a relatively novel idea developed in recent liberal-leaning missions conversations, the chapter explained how conservative evangelicals—including those of the missional bent—adopted the idea with reference to cultural form while nevertheless protecting the authority of Scripture by insisting that truth must never change regardless of culture. The chapter then surveyed the historic approaches toward culture that various Christian groups have articulated and demonstrated that the missional approach fits perfectly within the transformationalist framework.

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