Revamping the C-Spectrum for Contextualization

EMQ » July – Oct 2024 » Volume 60 Issue 3

Contextualization

Summary: The C-Spectrum introduced more than 20 years ago provided a tool to categorize different types of Christ-centered communities among Muslims. The Foreignness-Spectrum, or F-Spectrum, focuses on foreignness as the point of reference in appropriate contextualization. It gives needed correction to the C-Spectrum while also building on the C-Spectrum’s foundation.

By Harley Talman

More than two decades ago, EMQ introduced the mission community to the C1–6 Spectrum.^[i] John Travis’s descriptive model enabled the mission community to differentiate key features of six kinds of Christ-centered communities (denoted by C) among Muslims. However, due to their need for practical guidance in contextualization, missionaries have frequently used it as a template for believing communities to follow in expressing their faith in daily life and worship in their local contexts.

Unfortunately, it is backward (and ethnocentric) when used for this purpose, for it gauges degrees of difference from the missionary’s culture. To correct this, T. Wayne Dye and Harley Talman published an article entitled the “Foreignness Spectrum: Toward a Local Believer’s View of Contextualization” as a restorative tool that views the issue from the receptor’s perspective.^[ii] The base point of the Foreignness Spectrum (F-Spectrum) is the local community’s perception of the level of foreignness of the Christ-followers in their midst.

The F-Spectrum asserts that local believers should not be concerned with how far they can depart from our Christian culture and customs. Instead, they should be asking, “In displaying our new life in Christ in our local context, how much do we need to change in order to be faithful to Christ and Scripture?” The F-Spectrum is a tool that provides an indigenous assessment of this question. It also removes discontinuity in the C6 category (“secret believers”). Most importantly, it provides four missiological principles to guide believers in contextualizing.