Abstract: Ronnie Jones encourages missionaries not simply to know the religions and cultures where they serve but to get to know individuals with whom they share the gospel. Since not all who belong to a particular religion or culture share the same beliefs and worldview, missionaries should try to understand the beliefs of individuals, which often requires asking questions and clarifying terms. Contextualizing to the individual involves knowing the gospel, knowing the person, and knowing that God is already at work in the lives of those with whom we interact.
We sat in the kitchenette of a small driving school in Central Asia, sharing the gospel with four new friends. As we started talking about the Old Testament, one of them stopped us: “Just so you know,” he said, “even though each of our identity cards says our religion is Islam, I’m a materialist, he’s a nationalist, she’s a secularist, and he’s an alcohol-ist (a hedonist who finds his pleasure in alcohol). So, we’re all hearing your words differently.”
This friend exposed one of the challenges of contextualization. Missionaries might know the characteristics of a certain religion, and they might be able to make some general assumptions about individuals from a given culture or people group. But those generalizations only go so far. What one person believes can be vastly different from what his neighbor believes, even if the two share the same language, ethnicity, religion, nation, or even family.
Just because you live in a “majority Muslim” country doesn’t mean everyone there sees the world through the same lens—just like living in a “Christian nation” doesn’t mean all people live with the same beliefs, values, and assumptions. This means missionaries, like all Christians who share the gospel, must contextualize their approach to the individual.
Contextualizing to the Individual
To be clear, it’s vital that as missionaries we study the culture around us, and learning the language is key to understanding culture. On our teams we say we want to “go deep in language and culture.” But part of going deep is recognizing that this, too, can only take you so far. Whether you study a culture and its religion from books or from observation or from both, and even if you survey hundreds of people, each conversation about the gospel is going to be at least somewhat unique.
This is what the great twentieth century missiologist, J. H. Bavinck, was getting at in his monumental work, An Introduction to the Science of Missions:
In practice I am never concerned with Buddhism, but with a living person and his Buddhism. I am never in contact with Islam but with a Moslem and his Mohammedanism. If I seek to take a man by storm with general rules and norms derived from books, it is possible that I may miss the mark, and what I say may go over his head, because what he himself finds in his own religion, and the way in which he lives it, is something entirely different from what I had originally thought.11 . J.H. Bavinck, An Introduction to the Science of Missions (P&R Publishing, 1993), 240–41.
Our understanding of religion and culture can be an initial filter, but it shouldn’t drive the conversation. And that’s what it must be: a conversation. So how do we make sure we are engaging the individual—his Buddhism, his Hinduism, his secularism, his animism, or his Islam—and not the Wikipedia definition?
Know the Gospel
First, we must know the gospel. We should know the depths and richness of the gospel so well that we can naturally weave those truths into everyday conversations. Memorized gospel presentations, while potentially helpful—particularly while learning a new language—are limited in their usefulness. Outlines like “God, Man, Christ, Response: repentance and faith” or approaches like “Three-Circles” can be helpful frameworks or starting points for sharing the good news. But we must resist the temptation to “finish the presentation.”
Instead, we must work to press the timeless truths of the gospel into that person’s questions and worldview, even as we pray that the Spirit does the same work in their heart. We aim to show them that the gospel relates to the ultimate questions that they are, or should be, asking. To do so, we must be fluent in the gospel.
Know the Person
To accurately apply the gospel, we must also know the person sitting across from us. “Knowing the person” doesn’t mean missionaries, or any disciple of Christ, should exclusively practice relational evangelism. We should be ready in season or out of season—in the taxi, at the market, on the street, with church visitors, new neighbors, and strangers—to bear witness in the moment. It also doesn’t mean we have to know them for a long time or “win a hearing” with them.
But it does mean we should ask questions. We ask questions not to corner people into the typical cultural responses, but to understand their heart, motivations, impulses, and reactions. This kind of curiosity doesn’t usually take an inordinate amount of time. But it’s crucial for gauging a person’s understanding of key biblical concepts. For instance, sin is defined differently by various world religions—as simple disobedience, ignorance, culturally unacceptable behavior, minor mistakes, or something else. We must take the time to ask the person what they mean by the words they use, as well as how they are hearing and understanding the theological concepts we use.
When we merely engage the textbook version of a religion and not this man’s religion, we risk assuming his understanding of the gospel, and we may risk him rejecting something that isn’t the gospel as a result. Or worse, he may accept something that isn’t the gospel and become inoculated to the truth. We also risk completely sidestepping the actual questions people are wrestling with and, on a human level, a potential avenue to their understanding of the gospel.
I remember a conversation with a young man who I assumed was an orthodox Muslim. After spending a few minutes contrasting Islam and Christianity, he stopped me and said, “Listen, I hate Islam more than you do. Why would I exchange a religion I hate for the same thing with a different name?” I assumed he was a Muslim because he’d talked about spending the Muslim holiday with his family, but he only did that to appease his mother. Had I simply asked him a few simple questions, I might have been able to talk about the truths of the gospel in a way that addressed his heart. Instead, I may have set him up to reject Christianity before he even heard its message. I should have been patient and tried to understand him first.
Know God Is Working
Finally, we can be patient in evangelism because we know God is at work. In fact, there’s a sense in which God has already been working in everyone we see. Even if that person is currently discarding the truth or exchanging God for some other idol, God is at work. Bavinck is again on point here:
[W]hen a missionary or some other person comes into contact with a non-Christian and speaks to him about the gospel, he can be sure that God has concerned Himself with this person long before. That person had dealings more than once with God before God touched him, and he himself experienced the two fatal reactions—suppression and substitution (Romans 1). Now he hears the gospel for the first time. As I have said elsewhere, “we do not open the discussion, but we need only make it clear that the God who has revealed His eternal power and Godhead to them, now addresses them in a new way, through our words.”22 . J.H. Bavinck, The Church Between Temple and Mosque (Westminster Seminary Press, 2023), 122.
Daniel Strange further explains what Bavinck pointed out from Romans 1, that all people everywhere share the same basic questions about the world and the same basic sinful responses to God (suppression and substitution).33 . Dan Strange, “Five Inescapable Questions,” Desiring God, April 4, 2024, https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/five-inescapable-questions. God, in his providence, seems to have set the world up this way. The role of the missionary, then, is to enter the discussion to find where that individual resides and then to make it clear how God in Christ is addressing his needs and questions, not merely those of the surrounding culture. We do this not because the gospel is primarily addressing a person’s emotional, physical, financial, or psychological needs, but because all questions and felt needs lead back to the same root problem, namely, our separation from a holy God because of our sinful rebellion.
Conclusion
Back to where we started. How could I have approached the situation with the Muslim materialist, nationalist, secularist, and alcohol-ist? I could have remembered that the gospel is simple and clear. I could have asked questions to engage those particular individuals and the ways in which each of them understood and lived out their respective religions. Lastly, I could have trusted that God was already at work in their lives and tried to help them see truths that they had already been exposed to. Regardless of where you share the gospel, this is a critical component of contextualization.
