Evotional.com - Mark Batterson

Here is an excerpt from an article I did recently on cultural exegesis. It longer than most of my blogs posts, but it could have been longer :)

The Lost Art of Cultural Exegesis

I love field trips. Always have and always will.

I remember next to nothing from my Elementary school education. All my classroom memories have long since faded like an old photograph, but I still have vivid memories of our field trips. I remember the bus ride to the Octagon House in Watertown, Wisconsin. I remember the smell of the sauerkraut factory downtown Milwaukee. And how could I forget our class trip to Great America. I learned so much that day. What an education!

But field trips aren't just fun. No education would be complete without them. Field trips bring theory to life. It is one thing to read about something in a book. It is another thing to experience it. A field trip turns secondhand knowledge into firsthand experience.

I live in the field trip capital of the world, Washington, DC. And sometimes I have to laugh at the fact that my kids are studying politics and history in a school that is within walking distance of the Smithsonian Institute, all of the major monuments and memorials, and all three branches of government. Why not just take a field trip?

Isn't that what Jesus did two thousand years ago? Think of the incarnation as a thirty-three year field trip that started in Bethlehem and ended a half mile outside Jerusalem when Jesus headed back to heaven sans bus.

Jesus could have just dictated a theological textbook to be studied in the temple. It would have been so much easier and so much safer. But the Son of God became the Son of Man so that He could relate to us and we could relate to Him.

The Omniscient One had to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. The Omnipresent One downsized to the confines of Mary's womb. And the Omnipotent One became a helpless baby that had to be nursed, burped, and changed like the rest of us. But the end result was a High Priest who understands our weaknesses. He understands what goes through our heads and our hearts because He's been in our skin. The incarnation made Jesus omni relevant.

Jesus was a friend of sinners. He wasn't afraid of talking with Samarians; befriending prostitutes; or partying with tax collectors. He modeled what it means to be in the world but not of the world.

And we're called to follow in his incarnational footsteps.

Street Smarts

In Matthew 10, Jesus briefed his disciples before they embarked on their inaugural mission. He told them where to go. He told them what to pack. And then he gave them a word of warning: "I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves."[i]

Unfortunately, too many of us are dyslexic when it comes to this passage: we're shrewd as doves and innocent as snakes!

I think innocent as doves speaks to our motivation for ministry. In God's economy, if you do the right thing for the wrong reason you don't get credit. And I'll be the first one to admit that it is virtually impossible to totally eliminate selfish ambition from the equation of our lives. We all have mixed motives. There will always be trace elements of pride and jealousy. But sanctification tips the motivational scales so that we do what we do to glorify God. And we've got to continually check our motives and make sure we're doing the right things for the right reasons.

But that motivational purity must be coupled with street smarts. If we are going to fulfill our divine mission we have to be shrewd as snakes. I certainly wouldn't trade my book smarts. My undergraduate and graduate education laid a foundation for what God has called me to do, but there is no education like actually planting a church. It is baptism by immersion. It is learning by doing. And that is how you develop street smarts.

I recently read a fascinating business school study. The study found that the book smart graduates of this particular business school were outperformed by their street smart competitors. And the primary conclusion of the study was this: The book smart business people were taught how to solve problems not recognize opportunities.[ii]

According to Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence and Primal Leadership, IQ factors only account for between four to ten percent of career success.[iii] In other words, book smarts must be supplemented with street smarts if we're going to be successful in our callings.

Being shrewd as snakes means outsmarting our enemy. And that is no easy task. According to Genesis 3:1, "The serpent was the shrewdest of all the creatures the Lord God had made." What a fascinating juxtaposition. We've got to be shrewder than the shrewdest of all creatures--Satan himself.

The word shrewd comes from the Greek root phren, as in phrenology, the study of the mind. In this context, the word literally means a sensitive mind.

Contextual Intelligence

In their book, In Their Time: The Greatest Business Leaders of the Twentieth Century, Anthony Mayo and Nitin Nohria profile the greatest leaders of the 20th century. They lived in different eras, worked in different industries and faced different challenges, but the authors found one common denominator amongst all successful leaders: contextual intelligence. And it is the differentiator between success and failure. "They possessed acute sensitivity to the social, political, technological, and demographic contexts that came to define their eras." Contextual intelligence is the ability to read the times and seize opportunities. It is keeping a pulse on the issues and ideas influencing culture. Leaders with contextual intelligence not only spot trends; they are trend setters.

Let me put it in biblical terms.

I Chronicles 12:32 references the men of Issachar. It says they "understood the times and knew what Israel should do." The men of Issachar possessed contextual intelligence. And they weren't just theoreticians. They were practitioners.

Permission to speak frankly? Too many pastors get As in Biblical exegesis and Ds in cultural exegesis. We know Scripture, but we're out of touch with the times. The end result is a gap between theology and reality called irrelevance. We're out of touch with who we're trying to reach--the unchurched and dechurched. And the way to close the irrelevance gap is by exegeting our culture. That's what incarnation is all about.

Too often we are too suspicious of churches that are doing ministry in relevant ways. It is assumed in some circles that they are dumbing-down or watering-down the message. And there are certainly examples of churches that distort the message or turn the gospel into a gimmick. But those abuses don't excuse irrelevance. We've got to follow in the footsteps of Jesus. We'll get criticized by the Pharirazzi just like him, but we've got to walk the tightrope between biblical authenticity and cultural relevancy.

[i] Matthew 10:16
[ii] Roger von Oech, A Whack on the Side of the Head, 31.
[iii] Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind, 58.