Steward of a Sacred Trust Day 4

Translation as Cultural Formation and Transformation The gospel witness is not just any narrative or story: it is reporting of happenings that are of life-changing significance, news that everyone needs to know. It is not the text which saves, nor the ideas, metaphors, and images conveyed by the text, but Jesus, his story and his message, as witnessed to both by the scriptural record and the confessing tradition of the missionary church.

Translation is therefore not just a question of retelling a narrative as literally as possible in another language. It is the challenge, which the Spirit empowers Christian witnesses to meet, to report the history of Christ and present him as the present Lord and Savior, calling people to faith, hope, and love in a new life.

Reductionism “The risk of translatability is that sinful humans are its agents. The witnesses are always very ambiguous saints. They (we) never divorce themselves from the desire to bring this powerful and radical gospel under control. That means that in the process of translation, complex form of reduction also take place.”

The gospel of God’s mission in Jesus Christ, forming a missional community as its witness, and moving out to the ends of the earth to demonstrate the truth of the inbreaking kingdom, has been reduced to a pallid set of values which may not be publicly linked with the name of Christ without offending many. The reductionism is complete.

The Continuing Conversion of the Church The continual conversion of the church happens as the congregation hears, responds to, and obeys the gospel of Jesus Christ in ever new and more comprehensive ways. If evangelism is the heart of mission, then evangelization must be the heart of ministry.

Those groups that practice aggressive evangelism are, upon closer examination, also proclaiming a very reductionistic gospel. While they claim to be opposing the secularzing and diluting tendencies of modern humanistic skepticism, they too often define the gospel in terms of happiness and evangelize for success, counting upon their mastery of method to produce results.

Evangelization as the heart of ministry means that the gospel-centered community continually encounters and celebrates Christ. This is the purpose and witness of public worship. Evangelization as the heart of ministry happens as Christ commissions the community to be his witnesses, to do his witness, and to say his witness. Continuing conversion is to Christ’s salvation and thus to his mission.

The Holy Spirit shapes God’s people for mission through the continuous encounter with the Scripture. Continuing conversion happens as the community “indwells” Scripture. “It can do so through the witness of a community which, in unbroken continuity with the biblical acts and witnesses, indwells the story the Bible tells. The imporant thing in the use of the Bible is nto to understand the text but to understand the world through the test…What is required is that one lives in the text and from that position tries to understand what is happening in the world now.” Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 97, 98, 99.

Christ gives the ministry of the Word to the community to equip it for its mission through the encounter with the biblical witness (Eph. 4:7, 11f) We must here remember that whatever authority and dignity the Spirit in Scripture accords to either priests or prophets, or apostles, or successors of apostles, it is wholly given not to the men personally, but tot eh ministry o which they have been appointed: or (to speak more briefly) to the Word, whose ministry is entrusted to them.” John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, IV, viii, 2.

Christ converts the community by confronting its conformities. Evangelism as the heart of ministry grapples with gospel reductionism.