Whenever someone tells me he’s “church shopping,” he usually gives an apologetic grin. He knows it makes finding a church sound like buying a mattress. But how else do you say, “I like you, and I’m not just passing through town, but I’m also seeing other churches and trying to figure out whom to settle down with?”
I’ve sat on both sides of this exchange, so I’m sympathetic. And I’ve noticed that church shopping often comes with an unspoken question: Why do churches have such different personalities? Sometimes the answer is plain: theology, leadership, size dynamics. But sometimes it’s harder to explain. Churches with nearly identical theology can be as different as sisters.
I want to introduce two factors that shapes a church’s personality. Most church shoppers aren’t thinking about them—and sometimes pastors aren’t either. But whether consciously or not, they have shaped every local church since Pentecost.
First Christian Fight
When the gospel outgrew Jerusalem, the nascent revolution could no longer be classified as a Jewish sect. The term “Christian” was born in Antioch to name this new movement and became de rigueur within a few years (Acts 11:26; 26:28).
Church shopping often comes with an unspoken question: Why do churches have such different personalities?
But the emergence of Christianity also provoked prickly questions: What is essential to Christianity that must be believed, taught, and practiced by all churches everywhere? What can be adapted to local culture?
So long as the church was mostly Jewish, nobody even thought to ask. Jewish customs mapped easily onto messianic worship. Those first disciples cherished them all the more, for Christ had taken the Jewish rituals and fulfilled them. But did Gentile converts need to learn all this too? To many Jewish believers, the answer was obviously yes. Some even came to Antioch and waged a pressure campaign that insisted on adopting Mosaic customs—right down to the knife of circumcision. Paul and Barnabas resisted them, and a great debate was born (15:1–2).
The Antiochian believers called a council with the apostles and elders in Jerusalem to settle the matter. The conclave needed to thread a needle. On the one hand, they had to allow for cultural flexibility. This wasn’t just a matter of being nice to the Gentiles. If nonessential requirements were added for salvation, it would become “another gospel” (Gal. 1:8). On the other hand, they couldn’t lop off anything that would change the gospel or the essence of discipleship. Some things should be the same across all churches, and some things could be different. But what should go in each bucket?
The Jerusalem council’s answer was Spirit-wrought wisdom. They censured certain practices tied to idolatry and sexual immorality that were common in Gentile culture. Discipleship to Jesus required putting these practices death; to tolerate them would be a departure from the faith. The council also advised sensitivity to Jewish scruples, since Jews and Gentiles often fellowshiped in the same body. But they didn’t cave to the Judaizing pressure group (vv. 1–29). The gospel was free to stand on its own.
Contend and Contextualize
The Jerusalem council unleashed the multicultural movement that has become global Christianity. Every church since has had to flesh out the same questions: What’s essential that we cannot change? How do we adapt our mission to be fruitful in our local culture?
These questions can be summarized in two words: contending and contextualizing.
“Contextualizing” is how the church adapts her mission to the people she’s trying reach. Paul models contextual flexibility in 1 Corinthians 9:
To the Jews, I became as a Jew in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though not myself being under the law) that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law. (vv. 20–21)
When Paul is with Jews, he takes up Jewish customs, and vice versa among Gentiles. But what he says in parentheses is just as important. Paul is willing to observe Mosaic customs but only while insisting they’re not required for salvation. And he’s willing to adapt to Gentile customs but not to the point of sin. Paul the contextualizer is also contending for gospel clarity.
In Jude’s letter, we see why this is important:
Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once and for all delivered to the saints. For certain people have crept in unnoticed . . . who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ. (Jude 3–4, emphasis added)
“The faith” (with the definite article) always refers to the content of Christianity—the teaching. The faith is a fixed thing, delivered by Jesus to the apostles and through them to the church. It can’t be updated or modernized, lest we worship a different “Jesus.” But by the time Jude was writing—around 30 years after the resurrection—some people were already trying to change it.
How a Church Gets Its Personality
All churches flesh out a relationship between contending and contextualizing, for better or worse. Consider the most extreme cases.
A church that contextualizes without contending might feel friendly. But they’ll adjust the faith at points of cultural resistance until it becomes something other than Christianity. Result: They don’t convert anyone to the actual Jesus. Overcontextualization often happens in the name of “reaching people.”
All churches flesh out a relationship between contending and contextualizing––for better or worse.
A church that contends but doesn’t contextualize will preserve the original faith. But they make outsiders do all the work of crossing cultural boundaries to get to the goods on offer. This cultural distance proves too vast for most, and the church doesn’t make many disciples. This often happens in the name of “faithfulness.”
Faithful and fruitful churches live between these two ditches. They work out their ministry approach through contending and contextualizing questions, such as these:
- What is the gospel that cannot be changed? What doctrines buttress the gospel and can’t be changed without knocking down the house?
- What local customs can be adapted to connect and communicate the gospel?
- What cultural stories can serve as entry points to the gospel? How do we not let the gospel become captive to them?
- What needs can the gospel and the body of Christ meet? How do we meet these needs without reducing the faith to a solution to “felt needs?”
- Where does our culture resist the gospel? How does this resistance affect both Christians and non-Christians? How do we reinforce the faith at those points?
- Whom does our culture despise? How do we help our culture see their own sin and not just the sin of others?
- Where does our culture believe an inaccurate or lopsided stereotype of Christianity?
- How do we make disciples who live out their faith in the culture, not just inside the church?
Case Study: Evangelicalism in Urban Denver?
When I started ministry in Denver 20 years ago, I listened for the stories people told about their faith. One theme surfaced again and again: frustration with “the evangelicals.”
I heard it from Christians and non-Christians alike. Millennials were coming of age, and they carried a prevailing suspicion of “evangelicalism,” often based on experience in the church. Denver seemed to be a meetup of evangelical refugees from the Midwest and Bible Belt who liked to ski, drink IPAs, and play Ultimate Frisbee.
Putting on my “contextualize” glasses, I could see that evangelicalism is its own subculture, full of products and intramural debates that aren’t essential to the faith. Global Christianity does fine in places without American evangelicalism, so I figured we could safely discard it without doing any damage.
But I was also tempted to use aggravation with evangelicalism as an “entry point” to rally people to our little church plant that desperately needed people. Some churches were doing just that, and I studied them as we grew. That’s when I started to have concerns from the “contending” side of the ledger.
First, while evangelicalism has plenty of disposable culture, it also houses beliefs essential to the faith. Playing to frustration with evangelicalism made it more difficult to teach and persuade on these matters. People too easily dismissed them as “just what those evangelicals believe.” Second, my host culture—which skewed more progressive—had its own wrongheaded ideologies, and we didn’t want to accidentally import them. People who focused on the blind spots of “the evangelicals” were often unaware of their own. Last, many of the evangelical despisers carried stubborn, settled anger. It’s hard to hear the gospel of grace for yourself when you’re removing specks from other eyes.
All this gave me pause. If we overplayed anti-evangelical sentiment, we’d wind up with a church weak on the faith where our culture is most resistant, vulnerable to idolatrous ideologies, and full of angry people fixated on others’ sins.
So we carved a more conscientious path: to be theologically evangelical––preaching the original evangel and abiding the authority of Scripture—without uncritically reproducing evangelical culture. This meant tempering the angst and not swinging into wholesale rejection. Evangelicalism produces many fine teachers, resources, and ministries, and we’ve gladly partnered with them when it helps make disciples in Denver.
But on points of cultural pressure—where contending for the faith is necessary—we knew we couldn’t rely on stock evangelical talking points. Most of our city was already vaccinated against them. We’d need to develop our own explanations, drawn from the riches of Scripture and Christian history. This is essential work in helping people who think they’ve “heard it all before” encounter the gospel for themselves.
This is what gives church its personality. And I’ve discovered that many churches are approaching ministry the same way, fleshing out the unchanging faith in a way that fits their context. Next time you’re visiting a church, look under the hood and ask, How are they contending and contextualizing? You might just love the body of Christ, and the gospel, even more.
