Philosophies of church

I've been hearing about the Acts 29 network for some time now. Basically it's a network of pastors and church planters that exists to ... well ... plant churches.

I particularly like this philosophy:
We won’t water down our theology to reach more people and we won’t attack the culture in the name of Christianity. We are planting churches that are missionaries in their respective communities sent by Christ with the gospel (John 20:21).

Contextualisation is an important process. It is where we weed out the cultural aspects of our message to make the timeless Gospel appropriate for a specific situation. It is not watering down the message to make it more palatable, but removing cultural baggage to make it understandable. When we do not properly contextualize, we introduce unnecessary additions to belief, and fail to address cultural issues that need to be transformed.

Back at college, I met a person who had been teaching in a theological college in a different culture. He drew a line down the middle of the board, and had the students think about what parts of the gospel message were biblical, and what parts were "white man's culture". One student found it particularly difficult to grasp that using a toothbrush was not essential to being a Christian!

That is an example of a lack of contextualization: the notion that to be a Christian is equivalent to being a middle class white person. While this is an extreme example, there are lots of ways in which we might unintentionally add in cultural requirements to our evangelism - even within our own culture. Like sitting still for 45 minutes to hear a monologue. For many parts even of our Australian culture, the notion of sitting for that long listening to one person speak is rather alien. Sure, people will happily sit in front of a television for hours on end, but that involves a bombardment of visual and auditory stimuli, multiple camera angles and regular advertisement breaks. Where else can these monologues be found in our society today? Well, unless you are a member of parliament, the most likely place this is found is in university lecture theatres. So the question is: do we add the expectation of a tertiary-education-level ability to our gospel message?

I'm not bagging out the sermon here, by the way. It is still an important part of teaching. But I'm just thinking about the way in which it is delivered, and whether there is a more culturally appropriate way of doing things. What do you think?