Newbiggin and Bosch Prophets for our times

I've enjoyed reading Richard Lyall and Richard Sudsworth's recent posts about the emerging church and emerging leadership. (Thanks Richard Johnson for the tip offs. What's with everyone being called Richard now days?) I figured I might pitch into the discussion. It strikes me that a lot of what we're talking about and trying to engage with has already been given quite a lot of airtime using different terminology. Bosch and Newbiggin wrote lots about the difference between enculturation and acculturation.

The problem for many missionaries in history was that they limited the gospel to theological and moral concerns, and those concerns were expressed through their own cultural understanding of the gospel and of the people to whom they ministered.

So Bosch writes:-

The West has often domesticated the gospel in its own culture while making it unnecessarily foreign to every culture. It will always be a sign of contradiction. But when it is in conflict with a particular culture, for instance of the Third World, it is important to establish whether the tension stems from the gospel itself or from the circumstance that the gospel has been too closely associated with the culture through which the missionary message was mediated at this point in time.

Bosch believes that:-

The problem was that the advocates of mission were blind to their own ethnocentrism. They confused middle-class ideals and values with the tenets of Christianity. Their views about morality, respectability, order, efficiency, individualism, professionalism, work and technological progress, having been baptized long before, were without compunction exported to the ends of the earth. They were therefore predisposed not to appreciate the cultures of the people to whom they went-the unity of living and learning; the interdependence between individual, community, culture and industry; the profundity of folk wisdom; the proprieties of traditional societies-all these were swept aside by a mentality shaped by the Enlightenment which tended to turn people into objects, reshaping the entire world into the image of the West, separating humans from nature and from one another, and “developing” them according to Western standards and suppositions.

The gospel is about good news that leads to the transformation of individual lives and communities. However the challenge for any person taking that good news to those communities is whether they can present the gospel without presenting their own cultural expectations.

I think Bosch would have agreed with Frost/Hirsch's incarnational model emphasis (this comes out more in their book than it did on the blah day I attended in London).
I believe that the leadership style we need to model is one of facilitator who can help individuals reach their potential and look for and encourage the signs of the Kingdom of God in communities. Problem is that all sounds great in theory, it's a darn site harder in practice.

Just a few random thoughts.....