“Planting a Church in the Local Culture”

Missionaries have been on mission since Jesus sent his disciples two-by-two, constantly learning and refining their efforts. Today the questions many missionaries grapple with include topics like contextualizing the Christian faith, working with the indigenous church, and empowering local leaders. In today’s landscape of missiology, practitioners aim to hand over the baton of leadership to the nationals as smoothly as possible. Over the past several decades, anthropologists have wrestled over the definition of the indigenous church to aid cross-cultural workers who need a target to aim at as they work to establish a stable church in the local context. This paper will investigate questions of indigenization. How does a church get planted in a new context and grow in such a way to feel natural? When missionaries, sent from one culture to another, arrive in a new place, they will aim to create a church that stands rooted on the teachings of Jesus and expresses itself dynamically within its context. This paper will define the indigenous church with its cultural necessity and Biblical merits while discussing how cross cultural workers partner with, empower and hinder the local church from taking proper form.