Speaking the Language of the "Lost"

After a long conversation this afternoon with a couple at our Farmer's Market about "community" and how we have lost a sense of wanting to be together, I am thinking a lot about contextualization... how to share the gospel in the "language" that lost people can understand.

It made me think about these words:

To contextualize with balance, we must both enter the culture sympathetically and respectfully... and confront the culture where it contradicts biblical truth...
It involves learning to express people's hopes, objections, fears, and beliefs so well that they feel as though they could not express them better themselves. (Timothy Keller, Center Church, pages 119 and 120) 

Somewhere in the same book, Dr. Keller essentially states that to connect with lost people and the lostness that we live in, we first need to find the cultural values that we have in common before we can speak authentically into the cultural values that we need to confront.

For instance, my new friends at the market have a high value of community and wanting deep friendships. That is something that I can affirm because our God is a God of relationships. In the conversation, it was obvious that people want "community" to a point, not not much further. Close relationships are hard and people run from them. People run from getting too close because it is in getting close that our sin and other's sin is more and more apparent. We can confront the sin of fear of close relationships by communicating that, in Jesus, we can get close to each other even with sin because Jesus gives us grace to forgive one another.

One way or another, I loved having the conversation this afternoon! It is so encouraging to see the Spirit give us new friends and also to open up the door to their heart to hear good news...in a language they understand.