“Why would two young men who are complete strangers ever think a woman at home by herself with her one year old would ever let them in the door?”
Jill made that comment to me yesterday after two Mormon missionaries knocked on our door and asked to chat. Jill fobbed them off and they asked if there was a better time when they could come back, to which Jill quipped “Sure, when my kids have grown up and moved away”. Actually she didn’t say that, but I bet she wishes she did. After describing them to me (surely all Mormon Missionaries are clones?! – Ed) I realised they were the same two blokes who had been in the queue behind me at Woolies supermarket the day before talking about how you just can’t get quality holy underwear these days and how they planned to marry a whole heap of wives in heaven, or words to that effect. So – we have competition in Swan View in the missionary stakes. I’ve got some tyre-letting-down to get on with.
Anyway Jill and I got to talking about how Mormons are the least contextual missionaries we have met in the past twenty years. They seem to have little regard for cultural differences or appropriate social cues such as turning up on your doorstep unannounced. They are very polite, obviously, as they generally come from the Midwest or southern states of the US where “ma’am” and “sir” are the order of the day. But the clothes, the bikes, the accents – it all reeks of non-contextualisation. Now if they could only get their contextual act together. I know a few books that could help.
What it has made me realise however is that context ISN’T everything. These guys could contextualise to a Swan View style and approach and over time be very successful. Successful that is at leading people astray with a false gospel. And, it has to be noted, so could we. It is dangerous to focus on context to the exclusion of content. That’s why in the coming months with The Local I have decided that the primary focus of our teaching has to be the gospel. We are going to study Galatians as a group and get what is the gospel and what is not the gospel so embedded in our hearts that we will not pump legalism/moralism/semi-pelagianism down anyone’s throat – inside or outside the group.
Initially I wanted us to study Daniel first, because it’s a great exile text, then I thought about Acts, because it’s a great missionary text. But funnily enough the two things that we have in common with our Mormon friends is the realisation that we are exiles (in that we don’t fit the prevailing paradigm) and that we are missionaries (we have a message to bring to people). The one crucial difference however is what really separates us. We have the all-powerful Holy Spirit-given message of a crucified, resurrected, ascended, seated and returning Messiah – the one promised in the Old Testament and testified to in the New Testament – who by that same Holy Spirit is transforming us until the day he ushers in a new creation in which God will be glorified by everyone and everything. They do not.
And that makes all the difference.
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