“It took Jesus about two seconds to become a human. It took him around 30 years to become a Galilean.”
I was at a fundraising banquet for a non-profit where I serve on the board (New Hope Community Ministries. Check it out: http://www.newhopecmnj.org) when the guest speaker dropped the bomb quoted above. I've been processing it for the past week.
When I arrived in North Jersey and at Restore, I had a lot of thoughts about church planting that turned out to be mostly wrong. It's not that they were incorrect, per se, it's just that they didn't fit the context that I was planting in.
North Jersey isn't like the other contexts that I've been in. It's faster-paced than Miami, but much more community-centric than upstate New York and the capital region. It's a delightful blend of fast-paced-cut-your-throat-to-get-ahead New York City and old-timey New England, where if we don't know you and you didn't grow up in this here town, we don't trust you. It's not exactly either of those things, but it has elements of both. It's regional, but it's not. We commute to work, then come home, park our cars, and walk to the park. My town is better than yours. Welcome to North Jersey.
I remember hearing about a dude who was planting a church in New York City and for the first year, when people asked him what he was doing, he said something to the effect of, "learning the people." He may as well have said, "becoming a New Yorker". That's what he was doing, and he was right for doing it.
At the time the comment struck me as somewhat silly–again, not because he was wrong–but because it seemed like a waste of time. It seemed to me like a better approach would have been to take a person who was already a New Yorker and have them plant a church in New York. At least it would have been more efficient. Of course, raising up indigenous leaders is (or should be) the long term goal of every church planter in New York and elsewhere. But unless that is happening already, or until it does, a church planter is going to need to take some time to learn the context if we are going to preach the Gospel well.
The good news about the good news is that it doesn't stop being good, no matter what context you are in. But, if you want to make sure that the people you are preaching to hear it as good news, you better learn to express it in a language that they can understand, addressing the real needs that they already know that they have, or setting them free from the real bondage they already experience. And that requires becoming one of them. Like Jesus became a Galilean.