Living in Tanzania
One of our recent grads, Marc Ostlie-Olson, has taken his family to Tanzania for a year to live, work and preach. He’s started a blog — which at the moment is password-protected, or I’d point to it — and this morning one of his reflections caught my ear:
“Suffice to say now, as I embark on a year of sustained reflection on the joy, responsibility, and agony of the preaching life, I suspect that integrity in proclamation of God’s Word has as much to do with care and attention to the realities of people and place and moment as it does with theological adroitness, orthodoxy, and putative correctness. The particular scandal of the incarnation, so powerfully underscored by the peculiar obscenity of the cross seem to not only allow this observation, but demand it.”
If only every student who came out of our place could “catch” that! We talk and talk and talk and talk about contextualization, but I rarely feel like anyone’s “getting” it.
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1 Comment
catrina ciccone commented on 19 September 2007:Mary,
I hear your lament, but I can't help wondering how much of it is the seminary's own "fault," to a certain extent.
Many of the students come from a suburban church background. Many of the students do their teaching parish experience in a suburban Twin Cities church setting. Many of the students do their internships in a suburban/exurban Twin Cities church setting.
Though there is a cross-cultural requirement, there are several options offered to do this within the Twin Cities, living of the comfort of your own home while you go through an allegedly "ism"-shattering experience.
My point being, it is entirely possible to get through 4 years of seminary without ever being stretched or placed outside your comfort zone. If you're always working within the same context, and culturally speaking, it's a context that favors cookie-cutter solutions and calculatable results to begin with, there's not a lot of incentive or push to be thinking about or living out the contextualization of the gospel.
Tanzania is a long way from Minnesota. So is Central Pennsylvania. Mark and I both wrestle with issues of contextualization, not simply because we're two of your favorite students :), but because we _have_ to, because the methods of proclaiming and the ways of being pastor and being church that worked in urban Twin Cities and urban NW Washington, simply don't work in our current context.
So you're right, you can talk and talk and talk and talk and talk about contextualization, but until a student is forced to go outside their comfort zone and actually find their own footing in a different context than what they are used to, I don't think they're ever really going to "get it."
Peace,
Catrina