Avoiding Comfortable Syncretism by Doing Critical Contextualization

The purpose of this article is to clarify some of the issues involved in the contextualization/ syncretism discussion, to sharpen Adventist focus on the problems of under-contextualization, as well as over-contextualization, and then to suggest a balanced approach to contextualization, to highlight the ongoing challenges to contextualization within Adventism, and to list safeguards for the Seventh-day Adventist Church as it approaches the task of mission contextualization. Perhaps it is good to remind each other at the beginning of this paper that the only reason why we would ever put our church through the challenges of doing contextualization is that every person in God’s creation has the right to hear a clear gospel presentation that is unencumbered by syncretistic cultural baggage. Much of the syncretism that we observe in our world is caused by poor contextualization, not over-contextualization, so it is important that we learn to do contextualization right.