Much the same idea was expressed in 1938 when the Madras...

Much the same idea was expressed in 1938 when the Madras Conference defined indigenization as follows: An indigenous church, young or old, in the East or in the West, is a church, rooted in obedience to Christ, spontaneously uses forms of thought and modes of action natural and familiar in its own environment.1 However, it should be quite clear that such a native church will remain very much an inseparable part of the universal church.

Indigenization, in fact, includes three things: “(1) relatedness to the soil-ability to make elements of local churches captive to Christ; (2) possession of an ade­quately trained ministry, a ministry adapted to local requirements; (3) an inner spiritual life, nurturing the Christian community, witness­ing to the unevangelized.”2 Contextualization includes, in sum, all that is implied in indigeni­zation and a bit more.

It is, in fact, an activity to engage in constructing or developing a national theology or making Christianity relevant to a provided group of people. Kato remarks: We understand the term to mean making concepts or ideals relevant in a given situation....

Since the Gospel message is inspired but the mode of its expression is not, contextualization of the modes of expression is not only right but necessary.3 In “Contextualization: Theory, Tradition and Method”, Buswell proposes to break down the term into three categories: “contextualization of the Witness, contextualization of the church and its leadership and contextualization of the Word”.4 Contextualization of the Witness, Buswell explains, is a kind of inculturation, that is “to make the Gospel message intelligible in the idiom of the language and culture of the receivers”.5 Buswell finds no significant difference between contextuali­zation and indigenization.

To contextualize the church and its leadership means to indigenize both. Contextualization of the Word, according to Buswell, implies translation of the Logos and doing an ethno theology in the context of this or that ethnic group. Buswell further adduces his point of view by quoting Flonde Efefe. To Africanize Christianity cannot be an occasion for prefabricating a new theology.