Lancasterization

I have been listening to the CD's from the Emerging Church forum at Westminster Seminary back in October and last night I listened to one by Dr. John Leonard called Missionological Trajectories of the Emerging Church.

In that lecture he used a term I had never heard before - "Lancasterization."  He spoke of the Lancasterization of evangelicals.

My best translation of what he is getting at goes like this.  Evangelicals really talk only to other evangelicals and not to the broader world.  I don't think he said this, but I would add that we talk "at" the broader world.  In talking to ourselves though, we assume that we are talking to the world around us and that they hear us and understand us the way we understand ourselves.

However, what we don't realize is this - we seem to the world around us as the Amish of Lancaster, PA seem like to us.

This is not to cast aspersion on the Amish, it is a comment on our self-perception and our perception of the way the rest of the world perceives us.  We are as odd to the world outside of evangelicalism as the Amish are to us.

Now, my own thoughts.  This is ok if you are Amish, which is not an evangelical faith.  The Amish don't really care to convert anyone to their way of life, they mainly want to be left in freedom to live their way of life.

By definition though, evangelicals have a missiological mandate.  We want to see people embrace our faith.

We use the same words as the people around us, but speak a different language.  What we mean is not what they hear. Much of our language is simply not intelligible to those outside the evangelical world.

No one thinks it odd that Hudson Taylor would make appropriate adaptations to Chinese culture to win Chinese people.  Yet, we still operate under the Christendom illusion where we think that the people around us are all basically English like us, or basically Amish like us.

Yet the truth is we are like the English in China, or the Amish among the English.  Hudson Taylor didn't just learn the language, he adopted the culture of the Chinese,  while holding on to the distinctives of the faith.

Again, this only matters if we have a missional perspective - if so we need to consider whether Dr. Leonard's theory is correct and how we might address the issues it raises.

For an excellent summary of Dr. Leonard's lecture which includes a helpful and irenic critique of the emerging church see finitum non capax infiniti.

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