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A Comment Sent to Art Boulet about Contextualization

Last week Art Boulet wrote a post called “conform to church and convert to christ” the post was interesting and it got several comments, including this one from me:
Here is the problem, if you are ministering in an area over like say 10k people, you are limiting who you are reaching by embracing one culture over the other, and many people would rather have everyone feel a bit uncomfortable and a bit relaxed, than have a certain group love it and a certain group hate it. So they figure its better to also be a different culture rather than alienate some group.

On this side of contextualization I can really relate. Im not sure how Barnabus and Paul contextualized at Antioch, but when we get to Acts 13 and read of the leaders in the church we see this amazing multicultural church. I feel like the question is how do you speak to many cultures, both on their own and together.

Do parts of the world have a meta-culture?

Art responded to many including mine in a post that he put up a few days ago:
I don’t believe that there is something as a “meta-culture.” I think there are similarities in cultures that we can all embrace, but I think a search for a meta-culture is as empty as the modernist’s search for a “metalanguage.”

I wanted to clarify what I was thinking, and so I started to write a response to Art in his new post, but when I saw that the comment was very long I thought it might be better to publish my understanding here and simply say thanks Art for getting me to write down my thoughts on this subject, and wrestle with my opinion.

Below you will find the “comment” that I was going to send to Art:

Well let me better define what I mean by meta-culture. In biological examination we see classifications that show how close one animal is to another, so there is a species of fruit fly that is unique, but as we examine the biological classifications We see that fruit flies fit into a larger group called animalia which includes every type of animal on the planet.

Similarly, in sociology we see that one ethnic group might be made up of numerous smaller tribes, which might have a rich and distinct culture,yet they all share common aspects that can been seen throughout.

In examining cultures isn’t it possible to find threads that run through many if not all cultures. Things that are part of the human soul, that find their expression in slightly different ways, yet share a common goal. Like emotions such as a desire to belong, which created numerous shame based cultures, but reveals itself in much of America not through shame but through a perpetual desire to be better than everyone else, through consumerism.

Watch cribs, or home and Garden TV, or walk the streets of the poorest part of the city, and from most groups, there is a high value put on technology.

I guess that is what I was taking a shot at explaining.

The ministry challenges seems to come in deciding whether your goal is to reach the social species, or the social genus, or even the social family of cultures.

I don’t think you can argue that contextualization is a biblical pattern, so to me the great question is how broad of a group do we contextualize for? Of course no church can reach every group of people, but I’m not convinced that it is impossible for one church to speak to many different groups.
Are we to seeking to a be a church contextualized for all of upstate New York(an illustration Art used), or are we going to contextualize our church to “rental car agency shuttle bus drivers”
These are of course the two ends of the spectrum, millions of people over hundreds of miles, or a few hundred people in a few locations. But where did Paul fall in this spectrum? As I mentioned before Antioch could be seen as a social-genus type of church, but is that the pattern which Paul lays down for us?