Back in the late 1900s, Gailyn Van Rheenen published a regular missiology newsletter. In one edition, he recounted the experience of walking into a church in the Philippines only to be confronted with an unsettling reality: it looked just like his church at home. Nearly forty years later, we are still confronting that same unwelcome reality.
*Photo credit: the author – an incomplete church in Ghana funded by Western money
At a recent annual gathering of the Evangelical Missiological Society, Jean Johnson made a poignant observation: “The two greatest barriers to the gospel around the world [are] alien cultural forms (including church) and perceived threats to their way of life, social belonging, and security.”
If we are going to talk seriously about culturally appropriate expressions of church, then we must shift the conversation from contextualization of the church—because, if we’re honest, it isn’t always working—to adaptive ecclesiology.
Too often, contextual ecclesiology is reductionistic. It reduces the church to a contextualization project: taking what we do in the West and inserting it into the mission field. We give the Western church indigenous garb, while preserving foreign forms that are burdensome or unsustainable for local cultures. We’ve all seen it.
I recall sitting on a carpet-covered dirt floor in a village in Nepal, where young musicians played electric guitar, pounded a drum set, and sang through amplified speakers before a pastor stepped onto a raised platform to preach to a congregation of 20–25 people. While we can appreciate their enthusiasm, this imitation of Western forms reinforces the impression that Christianity is a Western religion—and, worse, a destroyer of culture.
As Philip Jenkins observes, throughout Christian history such foreign forms of church have often become targets of violence. We see the same today.
By contrast, adaptive ecclesiology asks where God is already at work in a culture, shaping indigenous patterns of community, gathering, teaching, caregiving, and shared meals—patterns that can be recognized as legitimate, missiologically parallel expressions of ekklēsia.
This is not merely a speculative idea; it is both biblically and archaeologically supported. The pattern of the New Testament church—and even of the synagogue—closely mirrors that of the philosophical schools of antiquity. Beginning with Pythagoras in the sixth century BC and continuing through the Socratics, we see communal living, shared meals, mutual care, and the study of teachings. This is remarkably parallel to the life of the early church in Acts 2:42–47 and 4:32–35.
In this sense, adaptive ecclesiology is inherently movemental, as Wes Watkins describes in his recent EMS paper.
Moreover, the biblical and archaeological records testify to the church’s fundamentally adaptive nature. Early Christians gathered in households (oikos) and houses (oikia)—a meaningful distinction. They met in trade guilds (cf. 1 Corinthians 8 and 11), in Christian-owned businesses (evidenced by the widespread Christogram graffiti in Ephesos), in adapted Jewish gathering spaces like those in Sardis and Priene, and even in pagan temples. Christians even utilized public theaters, such as the 8,000-seat example in Laodicea, for large gatherings—a testimony to a once-complacent church that had become vibrant. As Randy Hacker notes in his excellent study of Polish house churches, “…the [NT] church…met wherever it could.”
What we are courageously confronting today is a missiology that begins with ecclesiology, allowing monolithic church structures to dictate missionary strategy—with the expectation that Jesus will build our church forms. But the corrective here must go deeper. This is not just about renouncing a colonial mentality long presumed buried but still very much alive. It is about a theological and missiological reorientation.
We must affirm not only that God is omnipotent and omniscient, but that He is omnipresent and, as I propose, omnioperatio—always at work, always moving missionally toward people.
If we believe this, then we must also believe that God is already drawing people to Himself in ways we should be able to see—if only we have the eyes. His work manifests in communities where people care for one another, in meals shared under trees or in public houses, in those drawn together by shared concern for justice. These are spaces where image-bearers long for relationship.
A friend shares the story about his father, a respected physician, who would return home and lock himself in his study to read medical journals. As a child, he would slip his tiny fingers under the door—wiggling them—just to get his father’s attention.
May I take the liberty to paraphrase Revelation 3:20? Perhaps the Head of the Church is saying to our complacent missiology:
“Behold, I sit at the door and wiggle my fingers. If anyone sees them and follows My leading, I will show him forms of My ekklēsia that you can adapt.”
Few did listen to Van Rheenen all those years ago.
Will more listen today?
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