Some might raise the objection that contextualization is unavoidable. They’d argue that everyone is a product of his or her own culture. They’d say that no one is unaffected by their own culture, and it is arrogant to think anyone can “transcend” his own culture. To a degree, I’ll concede this point. It is true that no one can transcend his own culture, everyone is shaped by his own culture, and every Christian message is contextualized to that culture. Nevertheless, pressing this point too far leads to cultural relativism.

The Trojan Horse of Leftist Propaganda
I have been in full-time ministry for over twenty years. I spent the first five in collegiate ministry with CRU, which seemed to be on the cutting edge of evangelistic innovation. This is where I first learned about “contextualization,” the art of adapting the gospel message to a specific audience. I spent the next fifteen years planting and pastoring a new church in Cincinnati, OH. During this time, I learned the concept of “incarnational ministry,” where you immerse yourself in your target culture to “become Jesus” to them, learning their stories and speaking their language to communicate the gospel more effectively to them.
I planted my church in 2010, right at the crest of the “missional church planting” movement. Being partnered with the Southern Baptist Convention and Acts 29, I can attest that a whole generation of church planters and pastors were trained this way. And now, twenty years in, enough time has passed to evaluate the movement. As I’ll demonstrate below, my assessment is this. Contextualization, as it is commonly practiced, is a trojan horse for worldly propaganda that threatens the future vitality of the church.
Contextualization has changed the way modern Christians talk. Modern Christians don’t sound like the Bible when they talk. Our worship gatherings resemble evangelistic crusades where unbelievers are the primary audience. We speak in code, like the underground church in China worried that the CCP is waiting in ambush when they hear Christians talking like Christians. When preachers soften the Bible’s words to appeal to non-Christians, their churches follow suit. We use spiritual baby talk. And when baby talk is all you hear, baby talk is all you speak. This is how you contextualize the word of God right out of the church.
The Importance of Words 
Words are important because God speaks to us in words. God created the universe with words. The 10 Commandments were revealed with words. Jesus Christ is himself called “The Word.” John’s gospel begins, “In the beginning was the Word. And the word was with God, and the word was God” (John 1:1). Salvation is communicated with words. The Bible’s use of the word “word” isn’t incidental. God’s words have power to create reality. Humans think with words. Words are the building blocks of theology. Therefore, manipulating words to distort truth is a serious issue because it’s an attempt to tinker with reality.
Paul spoke about this in 2 Corinthians. It says, “We have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word. But by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God.” This verse has a negative statement and a positive statement. Negatively, Paul says he’s “renounced” any tactic of salesmanship, verbal manipulation, or deceit to try to win converts. He refused to “tamper with God’s word” in any way. Positively, Paul’s was simply committed to an “open statement of the truth.” Paul refused to employ spiritually manipulative salesmanship tactics because he was an ambassador for the truth, not a peddler of propaganda.
Propaganda in the Modern World 
Propagandists specialize in these underhanded techniques, and no one does it better than the ideologues of the modern left. Their chief weapon is the manipulation of language. Just as God created the universe with words and rules his people by his word, leftists manipulate words to rule people in the reality they create. In other words, they are playing God. Saul Alinsky, a hero of the left, famously said, “he who controls the language controls the masses.” What are they trying to control? Everything. They want to control how we think, what we value, the ethics we live by, and how we are governed. Through the manipulation of language, leftist ideologues are trying to re-create society in their image according to their moral vision.
Scripture says it is evil to redefine ethics by manipulating words. Isaiah 5:20 says, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.” God forbids the use of words to upend moral norms. Doug Wilson says the fight of our day is a battle for the dictionary. In the late 1960s, Jacques Ellul, a French Christian writer, called it “Propaganda.”
The Tactics of Propaganda 
In his book, Ellul did an intensive study of the use of propaganda in many countries, notably Germany, the USSR, and the USA during WWII. His insights are still relevant because these tactics are still effectively deployed to deceive people in our day. Here are some of the most common tactics.
Borrow Social Capital 
Propagandists attach their message to a positive, agreed-upon social narrative. Ellul wrote, “Propaganda cannot create something out of nothing… It must attach itself to a feeling, an idea, it must build on a foundation already present in the individual.” The Civil Rights movement provides such a narrative for modern propaganda. LGBTQ activists have seized upon Martin Luther King, Jr.’s heroic martyr status and cast themselves in his image as the oppressed “sexual minorities” who are “fighting for justice and equality.” They steal the legitimacy of the civil rights narrative and twist it to support their cause. People fall before it because it feels righteous to support things like “justice” and “equality.” People who no longer believe in a transcendent God to give life meaning will find some semblance of meaning in supporting what they believe to be a righteous cause.
Appeal to Emotions 
Rather than focusing on logic, reasoning, and rational thought, propaganda focuses on emotions that can be subtly embedded in one’s unconscious mind. Bible-believing Christians who are committed to objective truth can naively assume that others do too. While we make appeals to texts of scripture, texts of law, rational arguments, and truth claims, the propagandists are telling stories. Stories have the power to shape our values and desires through narrative, symbol, and imagery. Hollywood knows this. They tell our nation’s stories, which is why the moral decline of Hollywood has always been about 20 years ahead of middle America.
Last March, Audrey Hale murdered six people at a Christian school in Nashville, TN. What are the facts of this incident? A woman who identified as a transgender man targeted Christian children for violence and murder. What is the narrative of this incident? When a talented and aspiring artist was victimized by the hatred of her conservative Christian parents who rejected her sexual identity, she became violent. Unfortunately, facts don’t win the day, emotions do. An emotionally moving story can provide a sympathetic “context” to justify any behavior.
About this point, Ellul wrote, “[A] distinction between propaganda and information is often made. Information is addressed to reason and experience. It furnishes facts. Propaganda is addressed to feelings and passions. It is irrational. To be effective, propaganda must constantly short circuit all thought and decision.” Ellul continued, “Propaganda… creates… compliance… thru imperceptible influences. It must operate on the individual at the level of the unconscious. He must not know that he is being shaped by outside forces. This is one of the conditions for the success of propaganda. But some central core in him must be reached in order to release the mechanism in the unconscious which will provide the appropriate action.” And that’s the ultimate goal. Action. Not truth.
Activism Above All 
There’s a reason why men like Jordan Peterson call them “Social Justice Warriors.” They really are warriors, fighting a holy war. Their battle is a cultural jihad, animated by religious zeal, waged through political activism. They believe in a Great Commission: “Go ye forth into the world and proclaim the gospel of diversity, equity and inclusion.” They have an eschatology: a humanist utopia governed by their perverted moral vision. They have a playbook: “Win at all costs.” They are not constrained by Western, Christian morality. Christian morality is not the code they live by, it’s the enemy they’re trying to defeat.
About this, Ellul wrote, “The skillful propagandist will seek to obtain action without demanding consistency, without fighting prejudice and images, by taking his stance deliberately on inconsistencies.” As far as public perception goes, consistency is overrated, because truth is not their goal. Leftists are not motivated by consistency, truth, or logical coherence. All that matters is achieving their pragmatic aims.
Through the words they say and the stories they tell, they’re trying to create a rival reality that removes the Christian God and replaces him with a deified state. This is the pool we’re all swimming in. This is the spirit of the age. Every day, we dine at the table of propaganda and we drink the wine of propaganda. Leftist propaganda is in our TV shows, movies, and music. It’s on the news, in our schools, and in our workplaces. It’s in our government, tech industries, big business, and social media. And, I’d argue, it’s in the church.
Gospel-Centered Contextualization 
Much propaganda has been smuggled into the church under the winsome guise of “reaching the lost.” If Christians are to become “all things to all men” to reach the modern world, it is assumed, then we must use their stories, symbols, and words to communicate with them effectively. Pastor Tim Keller is a well-known practitioner of contextualization, and we read about this in a 2001 article entitled, “The Missional Church.” This article has been massively influential for countless pastors and ministry leaders in the last 20 years.
Two parts of his contextualization strategy merit attention here. First, Keller says, we need to “speak in the vernacular” of the target audience, using their words and symbols to communicate the Christian message. Second, we need to “enter and retell the culture’s stories” to show how they are ultimately fulfilled in Christ.
For example, a common theme in our culture is the “American Dream.” To contextualize to Americans, therefore, an evangelist could “enter and retell” that story and point it towards Jesus. He could say, “Everyone wants the American Dream. Since we are created in God’s image, we are eternal beings, which means nothing in this world can truly satisfy us. We are only truly satisfied in a relationship with God.”
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If we are seeking to equip our children in kingdom service, then our children will need to be adequately equipped for the kinds of battles that they are going to be facing. We owe it to our children to take these matters seriously. We may be dead before the full weight of these shifts are felt culturally, but they will be the lived reality for our children and grandchildren. We owe it to our prodigy to speak up and to shout a warning. If not now, when; if not us, who?

We are not in an age of change, but a change of age.
We are amid a 500-year historical geo-political inflection point. The world as we have known it is changing, so profoundly that our histories going forward are going to be altered.
We are not talking here about the accumulation of incremental changes, but the wholesale changes of assumptions, global actors, and personal experiences. We are facing a paradigm shift—the likes of the fall of Rome (475 AD), the collapse of Constantinople (1453 AD), and Luther at the Diet of Worms (1521 AD).
The issues facing the church are significantly deeper and longer lasting than the shift from a Neutral to a Negative World. We are shifting from a Negative World to an outright hostile world.
This hostility is not conscious or explicit but implicit, not personal but foundational, and not political but cultural. It is an invisible hostility that makes it even more dangerous. This makes the new social reality the church is facing far more significant than we have previously imagined.
The first step is to wake up to the depth of the situation facing the church and to get our diagnosis aligned to reality. In this process of diagnosis, you cannot trust the mainstream media or the normal purveyors of academic insight as the elite culture is complicit and sometimes even the source of the disease.
The Four Civilizational Shifts
There are four primary shifts that we are currently facing as believers: from Christian to post-Christian, from classical liberalism to Nietzschean nihilism, from Global West to Global East, and from Enlightenment rationalism to post-Enlightenment re-enchantment.
Shift One: Christian to Post-Christian. We are living in a world that is functionally divorced from any reference to the sacred. We have shifted from societies based on fate and faith to one based on fiction. Moreover, the foundational basis of society, namely traditional marriage, has been rejected. The fruit of marriage, namely the procreation of children, has also been rejected. Replacing these historic foundations to social life is an unchecked hedonism reinforced by a world without boundaries, that is unchecked license.
The late University of Pennsylvania sociologist Philip Rieff described our contemporary world in this manner: “No culture has ever preserved itself where it is not a registration of sacred order. There, cultures have not survived. This kind of society where the notion of a culture that persists independent of all sacred orders is unprecedented in human history.”
In the past cultural conflicts were between competing sacred symbolics. Not so today. What makes our contemporary culture war distinctive is that it is a negation against all sacred orders and the verticals in authority that mediate the sacred to society. This is an entirely new historical situation. What this means is that we cannot simply return to older approaches as they are no longer relevant to our cultural situation.
Shift Two: Classical Liberalism to Nietzschean Nihilism (Individual Rights to State Power). The assumptions of the Enlightenment which gave rise to the political ideology of classical liberalism have been rejected by the leadership class. There is a much-debated question whether a democratic society can survive when its underlying assumptions are no longer believed by those who are being governed by it. Social solidarity requires shared social beliefs. When these are abandoned, as is increasingly the case by the political elites, then politics naturally defaults and devolves to the will-to-power in a world where the leadership class believes in nothing.
This is the experiential definition of nihilism. We have today a competition between left wing and right-wing forms of nihilism. Classical liberalism is defunct. By elevating individualism and progress into guiding social values, liberalism destroys the traditions and norms that allow human beings to make sense of life and find their place in the world.
American Christianity is on the decline, small-town America is hollowed out, drug abuse rates are rising, suicide is an accept outlet for many, particularly men—all symptoms of a spiritual crisis brought on by liberalism’s philosophical assault on the sources of social stability.
This is the combined argument of Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed and University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter’s Democracy and Solidarity. No one has yet provided a meaningful future political solution to this problem apart from doubling down on past assumptions in an ongoing culture war between populism and elitism. What concerned analysts have agreed on is that there is no easy or quick fix. This reality is going to be with us for some time.
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Church historians tells us that John was “nearly kidnapped” or “almost abducted” or “forcibly taken”–which essentially means he was kidnapped, abducted, or taken, despite the adverbs. For 700 miles the case was made for why John ought to be the next pastor of the city church in Constantinople and when they arrived back in the city–the city welcomed John of Chrysostom, the most famous preacher of the era, with joy and celebration.

Is your congregation looking for a new pastor? It is a grueling process for some congregations. Pastors, students, and congregations alike find the process to be less than ideal.
Here’s one idea from the late 4th century that could streamline your search: 
In 397, the head pastor of the church in Constantinople (modern day Istanbul) died. His named was Nectarius. He was wildly popular and the city wondered if they could get another pastor of such skill and giftedness. 
Several names were recommended and people within the church began to struggle, politic, and conspire to get their particular candidate elected. One name that was dropped was John Chrysostom, the pastor of the church in Antioch (modern day Antakya), nearly 700 miles to the southeast.
The pastor in Antioch was so well-regarded that the people of Antioch threatened to riot if their pastor was taken away. As a result, the emperor sent troops to Antioch to quell any disruptive and riotous responses to a potential call to their pastor. 
Meanwhile back in Constantinople, the head of the search committee, Eutropius the Eunich (unfortunate name, if you ask me), devised a plan to get John to visit the city and, hopefully, become the next pastor. 
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