I am working among an unreached Islamic people group, with one Christian in the whole ethnic group.
However, in a small city of the region there are a half dozen churches, and except for local language and dress, it look, feels, and is organized like a typical western church. It's sad to see this repeated all over the world with little thought. What about the great diversity they can bring to God in worship? This is what I like to refer to as the "Default". This is why church becomes when we do not do the harder work of contextualizing.
"Allen and Michael...... traveled around the world in order to dig out some of the more innovative missional expressions of the church. The itinerary included the US, the UK, Italy, France, Israel, New Zealand, and South Africa. One of our lasting impressions of the churches in all those contacts is that, by and large, in spite of language differences, they tended to be in terribly dull and rather predictable. They had a disturbing propensity to look, feel, and act in basically the same way. They sang the same basic songs and follow the same basic order of service in their corporate worship. The sheer predictability of it all was quite shocking and deeply disturbing. It sometimes seems as if there is some form of 'template' at work in Evangelical churches all over the world, regardless of language and culture.......
When the church has embraced an alternative approach, it has been marginalized and is often so underground it's hard to find. All this, we believe, amounts to nothing less than the triumph of technique over substance - the death of the art of ministry and mission.
We would love to know who, or what, exactly is responsible for this malaise of the Spirit, this absence of creativity. Who can tell us where this stifling 'template' came from in the first place? And why do we seem to follow it so on questioningly in almost every setting in the Western church?
(The Shape Of Things To Come. Michael Frost & Alan Hirsch. Hendrickson, 2003, pg 182-183)
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