To Be Continued… with Tim Keller is a captivating podcast inspired by the wisdom of beloved pastor and theologian, Dr. Tim Keller. The premiere episode features a conversation with Tim Keller. Subsequent episodes seamlessly blend archived Keller teachings with fresh dialogues featuring Christian leaders from across the globe. Through these conversations, "To Be Continued…" paints a hopeful picture of the global church, bridging the gap between timeless truths and contemporary challenges.
In partnership with Redeemer City to City, each episode showcases a dynamic exchange between two global leaders deeply shaped by the gospel-centered approach infused throughout Keller's work, delving into topics central to city ministry, but accessible to all.
Listen and discover that the best conversations don’t end… they continue.
Please note that this episode was recorded with Tim Keller in March 2023. All subsequent episodes were recorded following his passing.
Tim Keller:I think the desire for contextualization should be, I really want people to fall in love with Jesus.
Laura Sauriat:Let's face it. Cities are complex. In cities, you find more skeptics, more religions, more suffering. You also find more diversity in background, worldview, and ideology. Cities are centers of much of the world's wealth, power, art, and innovation, all of which eventually shapes and informs non urban lifestyles. It could be said that the future of the world is forged in cities.
Laura Sauriat:This is to be continued with and without Tim Keller. And on this podcast, I'll be joined by dynamic city to city leaders. These city leaders have been shaped by the work of the late doctor Tim Keller and have much to share about how the gospel can bring shalom and hope to our cities, our work, and our relationships. So wherever it is in the world that you find yourself, we invite you to listen in on our conversation.
Laura Sauriat:One that we hope will spark new ideas, curiosities, and questions, because the best conversations don't end, they continue. Today, our City to City guest is Luiz Santana. He's the program manager at the London project, an initiative that connects churches and networks to see healthy gospel churches planted and impacting in London. At the time of our recording, Luiz was in his native Brazil, where he was visiting family while on holiday with his wife and children. Luiz is joining us today for a conversation about gospel contextualization.
Laura Sauriat:He's a walking example of contextualization. Brazilian born, he met his wife, who's from Poland, at a training conference in Germany. Since they both knew English, London seemed like the ideal city to begin their new life together.
Luiz Santana:We are an international family in a very, very international city. At first, I had my cultural shock as a very warm Latin American who opens up very quickly. I felt dismissed and offended by British culture a lot. I went to do this pastoral internship in West London, and it was like immersing myself in the British culture because everything around was diverse, but the church was British majority, white, middle class. And I was the Brazilian intern.
Luiz Santana:And it took me a while to understand them. Now, a few years later, I became a little bit British now. And I think everyone who is around me after a while becomes a bit Brazilian because I insist that hugging is a very good way of showing love and kindness.
Laura Sauriat:Getting to know Luiz is the perfect introduction to contextualization and its importance to Christians. And from here on out, we can simply refer to Dr. Tim Keller as Tim. Luiz confirmed it, and for that, we're grateful.
Luiz Santana:If I may ask, Dr. Tim Keller, how should I call you? Doctor Keller, doctor Tim?
Tim Keller:Luis, I'd like to contextualize. Yeah. If you are culturally comfortable with calling me Tim, please do it. Yeah. If you can't, you can call me Dr. Keller.
Tim Keller:But give me Tim, if you can.
Luiz Santana:Yeah. That's a good example of contextualization.
Tim Keller:It is. It is, actually.
Laura Sauriat:Contextualization is something Tim has spoken about at length in past sermons. Here's a clip from a talk recorded as part of the City to City DNA 3.0 project in 2022.
Tim Keller:Why did Jesus Christ become a human being? God was contextualizing to us. He says so, he says, Lord became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory. Wait a minute, wait a minute.
Tim Keller:I thought God said, you can't see my glory and and live. And the answer is, he contextualizes glory. In other words, God goes to the hard work, and was it hard work? Of course it was. Look at what he had to do in order to contextualize to us.
Tim Keller:And therefore, we should not be insisting that the receptor do all the hard work, that we're going to talk about the gospel, we're going to sing about it, we're going to teach about it, exactly the way we did a 100 years ago, exactly what we did in the old culture, and you're going to have to make all the effort to understand it. No, no, we make the effort. We contextualize. We incarnate. We come in.
Laura Sauriat:Without further ado, my conversation with Tim Keller and Luis Santana. I have been so looking forward to speaking with Luiz Santana from the London Project and Tim Keller from City to City about contextualization and wanted to know if, Tim, you could give us a definition to start us off.
Tim Keller:Well, I would say contextualization is giving a message to somebody in the most understandable and persuasive way without compromising or changing the message itself. Which basically means to be culturally aware, very culturally aware, to learn how a culture works and what its what its logics are and its narratives and its stories and its underlying beliefs about reality.
Laura Sauriat:Why is contextualization a key DNA point for City to City?
Tim Keller:So we start here in New York City, and the the Chinese come and say, help us start churches in big cities, and the Dutch. That's how it started in 1991. Both the Dutch and the Chinese originally were the ones that came and said, help us start churches in your city. Immediately, we had to do contextualization just to say, okay, now how does the gospel work in the Netherlands and in China? But inside the cities, you got multiple cultures too.
Tim Keller:So unlike many places in the world where most of the people you're preaching to or speaking to are of the same culture, you need to understand contextualization right there because you're gonna have to know about 5 or 6 cultures just just to be a pastor of your church. So contextualization was crucial because if you're working in cities, you've really gotta be culturally aware.
Luiz Santana:Yeah. I used to say to people in my church is, we need to stop talk about helping the poor or reaching the immigrants. We need to start naming them. Let's help this colleague, this neighbor. Because as soon as you see a human, you will try to contextualize.
Laura Sauriat:So why should Christians care about contextualization?
Tim Keller:Well, the main reason is culture tends to be invisible to us. And, there's a lot of things that we tend to do that we think of as just the way it's done. And we don't recognize the fact that the way we do it is culturally particular. So, a good example of this was, my first my first real African American friend was trying to confront me a little bit about my cultural blindness. And he says, when you go into a black church and you see people expressing themselves emotionally more than you're used to, or they might dance in the aisles and all.
Tim Keller:You say, isn't that interesting? That's a black way to worship. But when you go into your church, you don't think of it as the white way to worship. You think of it as just the right way to worship. You don't think of your own service as actually cultural at all.
Tim Keller:In fact, you're not going to until you actually get out in the world and see how many different ways there are. Then you begin to say, wait a minute. This isn't just a kind of culturally neutral way of worship. There is no culturally neutral way of worship. So one way to put it would be, if you don't contextualize well, you will still be contextualizing, but you'll be contextualizing poorly.
Laura Sauriat:Could you give us an example of contextualizing poorly and what the converse well would be?
Tim Keller:Yeah. Well, right. If I'm talking to a a young person today, as they say in western culture, I'm old enough to remember that when the main questions, non Christian had had to do with science, this is early 19 seventies, And, you know, why Christianity was true. All the questions were we can't believe in miracles. Science has disproven miracles.
Tim Keller:And you can't prove God. Where is your proofs for God? It was all rational. Okay? And see, if I contextualize to that, if I keep on assuming whenever I present the gospel to non Christian on a college campus, I need to give them all the proofs of God.
Tim Keller:There's the cosmological proof of God and the teleological proof of God and the ontological proof of God. And if I do that for the average college student today, they're gonna, you know, Cathy calls amigo. You know what amigo is? M e g o, my eyes glaze over. They're just sitting there bored to death because that's not what they care about.
Tim Keller:They very often will care about moral issues. How does the gospel speak to issues of justice? And they will ask about meaning issues. What does my life really mean? In the seventies, that that wasn't the case.
Tim Keller:There's so many cultural changes that if you assume that non Christians, for example, have the same set of questions in their mind as they did 40, 50 years ago, you're doing back contextualization.
Laura Sauriat:Luis, I was wondering what thoughts you had on this and your experience with it being of a different generation from Tim and coming from Brazil and your experience at The London Project?
Luiz Santana:Yeah. So the first thing that comes to mind, I remember one lecture I was having on seminary. I remember the teacher saying, some of you guys here already preaching in your churches. So you craft your sermons, and if you present that in the class here to us, you have the highest grade because you write it very well, and you have your illustrations that fit very well, what you're doing here. But then you go back to your churches, and then you preach to a to an audience, not to your congregation.
Luiz Santana:You preach to an audience that is from 17th century. Because you quote so many things, and you say so many things that no one is really thinking about, or they're so abstract that they make no sense. We have this tendency of returning to type, and the type is the things that we studied, the things that we read, and we don't see our people, our congregation as real people. And I think bad contextualization is not seeing the humans in front of you, understanding that they have their journeys, they have their walks of life, they they are real people. And this would be under contextualization.
Luiz Santana:And I think the over is basically what some churches do of not really preaching the scriptures. So they need to be trained. They need to speak what society is saying. They need to share stories and illustrations that by the end of the sermon, it sounds more like self help than the gospel or emphasizing only one point of the the gospel, not the whole. So that's that's what I experienced.
Luiz Santana:Do you have any stories of sermons or things that you did or you experienced that, could illustrate this under or over contextualization?
Tim Keller:Let's be subtle. I'd like to give you some subtle examples. We we have in the West now what's called a therapeutic culture in which the fundamental idea is you belong to yourself. And what's important is to express yourself and to have other people see how great you are and affirm you and recognize you. Now the most fundamental difference between that approach and the gospel is that in the gospel, your acceptance is you don't have to perform in order to get recognition.
Tim Keller:Because when you believe in Jesus Christ, then the only person in the universe whose opinion really counts, which is God the father, now sees you as perfect in Christ and loves you unconditionally and forever. What that does is it silences the ego's need to be constantly getting affirmed and constantly, expressing itself and saying, look how great I am. Look how great I am. But I do see places where people over contextualize and basically turn God and Jesus into one more source of self esteem. And the reason I know that it doesn't really change people's lives is their lives aren't changed.
Tim Keller:I don't see them becoming less anxious. I don't see them becoming less self referential. So that's over contextualization. I'd say under contextualization is when you are frankly offensive and and opaque, unnecessarily because you just hold on to terms and words. That's the way we've always preached it.
Tim Keller:So you're not willing to explain your terms, not willing to to change your illustrations. That's that's under contextualization.
Laura Sauriat:Opaque and offensive. That brings to mind Michael Scott from the TV series, The Office. Take this clip where we hear CEO Michael Scott leaving the sales floor of Dunder Mifflin and heading down to visit his coworkers in the warehouse where he completely disregards the rules and protocol of the environment.
Tim Keller:Hey. You're gonna you're gonna hurt yourself. Mike. Staying clear.
Luiz Santana:Mike, get off of the left, please. Come on now.
Tim Keller:I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine.
Luiz Santana:Would you
Tim Keller:look. Get out of here. Oh. Oh. We'll get somebody to clean that up.
Luiz Santana:We're the ones that gotta clean that up.
Laura Sauriat:A A little contextualization to understand the different cultures between the workers in the warehouse and the workers on the sales floor would have gone a long way for Michael Scott.
Luiz Santana:This morning, we are saying goodbye to friends here in Brazil. We're going back to London, and we visited a friend. And as soon as you enter a Brazilian house, you're probably gonna be offered some food, and it's very, very offensive to refuse. Refusing food from a Brazilian, almost like, well, I cannot speak for our Brazilians, but from the culture I learned, it's almost like rejecting them. So you reject the food or the drink or you're rejecting them.
Luiz Santana:So even the way you accept hospitality could hinder your message to their hearts. Do you have any any experience with in in the sense in New York?
Tim Keller:Oh, yes. Actually, Louis, I'm really glad you brought that up because we've been talking about almost like we've been actually talking about preaching pretty much, Like, how you actually communicate. Contextualization really means thinking about every part of your life. So, for example and by the way, not only if listen to everybody, though. If a Brazilian does offer you food, you'd be stupid not to eat it because it's great, and there'll be 3 kinds of meat.
Tim Keller:Amen.
Luiz Santana:Amen to that.
Tim Keller:But, no, I may give you a quick example. I'm a northern kid, suburban, college educated. So northern part of America. I moved into the South into a very blue collar church, my first church. I'm in my mid twenties and, avid and small church in a in a, you know, kind of a mill town where the people are not all that college educated.
Tim Keller:I quickly found that in where I came from, if I was a pastor, I wanna go see somebody, I would call them up or I would this is by the way, sorry. I'm so old. This is before cell phones and texting. I'd call them up and say, I'd like to come over Tuesday night. You know, could I do that?
Tim Keller:What time would be good for you? And I found that this was offensive very quickly. This is how blue collar people in the south thought. So, wow, it sounds like me. I'm gonna have to dress up and probably make the person a cake or something.
Tim Keller:They saw it as being high and mighty. They said it means you're not just folks, in which you can kinda tell what that means. You're not just folks. They say, no. No.
Tim Keller:What you do is you just show up. If there's nobody there, then you leave a card and say I was there. But if you just show up, then that shows that you just think of yourself as the same as everybody else. You're gonna get them dressed however they dress and eating whatever they eat. And I discovered that it was actually quite offensive, and it seemed it looked like, I was an elitist to make appointments.
Tim Keller:Just one example. And I'll tell you the other example very, very briefly is I found that in a place like New York City, people didn't trust you to talk with you pastorally unless they thought you were a competent preacher. In other words, my preaching set up my pastoring in a white collar city. If people thought, hey, here's a person that I really learned from, then they say I'd like to come and talk to you about my problem. In Hopewell, Virginia, the blue collar town was the other way around.
Tim Keller:Your pastoring sets up your preaching. And there is a million of these things, a million of these things. Some parts of South Korea, for a younger person to look an older person directly in the eye shows disrespect. And yet here in America, for a younger person to not look at older person directly, an eye shows disrespect. And you gotta know about those things.
Tim Keller:You can't just say, oh, that's that's a stupid. I mean, both of those are symbols, but they symbolize different things in different cultures. And what what's wrong with adapting to that? There's nothing wrong with adapting to that. But that's what theologians over the years have called adiaphora.
Tim Keller:Adiaphora means things indifferent. These are cultural differences that are just there. And we don't try to say everything is good or bad. Some of you know for example, in Germany, when do you apologize for being late? As some people would say, one minute.
Tim Keller:If you're a minute late, you apologize. So in Brazil, how late do you have to be, Luis, to apologize for being late?
Luiz Santana:Never.
Tim Keller:You never apologize.
Luiz Santana:Don't worry about that. If I if I say I'll come at 7, it's 7:38, 8:30. It doesn't really matter.
Tim Keller:Yeah. Right. And you don't have to apologize. But there's places in Europe that if you come 15 minutes late, you apologize. But you have to be sensitive to those things.
Tim Keller:So it's really all of life. It's really not just a matter of communication.
Luiz Santana:Yeah. One one more example I think now it came to mind. When I first moved to London 5 years ago, I wanted to meet my pastor. And we schedule a a coffee, and I wanted to to know about him and ask him personal questions. And he was talking about his studies, seminary, church, basically his credentials.
Luiz Santana:And I was like, wow. This this guy is very impersonal. He is a bit weird. Now after 5 years, I really like him. But in the beginning, I found it weird because the way you build trust in a warm culture is the way you said before.
Luiz Santana:You visit. You talk about life. You open up about personal stuff. And then only later, you share credentials as it were. And and that's how it works.
Luiz Santana:It's not right or wrong. It's just the the order of things in culture, I would say.
Laura Sauriat:Yes. I'm glad you gave us an example of your experience in London, Luis. Tim, it strikes me that contextualization is a is actually a kind of hospitality that we're extending. It's a way of practicing hospitality.
Tim Keller:That's a good way.
Laura Sauriat:Yeah. And I really loved what you had to say about the incarnation, and I wondered if you could talk about that relating the incarnation to contextualization.
Tim Keller:Oh, certainly. Here's the simplest example. If I'm speaking to a group of people, let's just say, German immigrants to America. If I was gonna preach to people who could understand English but not very well, and yet they spoke German. Now there's 2 ways to do this.
Tim Keller:I could say, look, I'm gonna preach to you in English, and you have to do all the work. You're gonna have to do all the work of kind of really listening and and translating that. Or I could go out and learn German and preach to you in German. And then I'm doing all the work. But you see, when whenever you're coming across a culture, somebody's gonna do the work, the communicator or the communicated to.
Tim Keller:And that's why it's hospitality for me to learn their culture, to learn their language, and for me to do the work rather than to make them do all that work. It's it's very hard work to try to understand a message that's actually enculturated in a culture that's not yours. And so that's I think I love your term hospitality. It's a perfect example of that. If you say, look, I'm gonna preach in English because that's my that's my language.
Tim Keller:And anybody who wants to listen to me, you're just gonna have to learn English or you're gonna have to kind of try to figure it out. That's not hospitality, and that's not the incarnation. Jesus did not say, you know, all those of you who could ascend the ladder up to heaven, well, you're welcome. Instead, he came down. That's the whole idea.
Tim Keller:He came to us. So that's radical hospitality. He became like us so that we could become like him. And in a sense, that's what you do in contextualization.
Luiz Santana:I love that example, Tim, because I I think I had to learn English twice. I learned English with the Americans. And when I moved to London, I had to relearn.
Tim Keller:And also, by the way, generations is generations inside Brazil, inside Africa, they are somewhat culturally different from each other. And that's another place where you have to to deal with. That's the reason why they hire youth pastors. Because even if everybody in the church looks like, oh, we're all Nigerian, racially looks the same, culture looks the same. But let me tell you, the young Nigerians that are on social media are not like their grandparents.
Tim Keller:And so there's a need for contextualization even generationally, even if you don't have other differences.
Luiz Santana:Basically, we're saying that contextualizing is very, very difficult, requires a lot of intentionality. And if we are to do like Paul did, to the Corinthians, as it says in 1 Corinthians 9, we need to become like those we're trying to reach, and that will require a lot of us. We don't turn into them, but we we let go of our personal preferences or ways of behaving so that they would understand the gospel, understand that we love them, understand the message we're trying to to share, and the love we're trying to share.
Laura Sauriat:I wanted to get to the question of marriage and how, Luis, your wife is Polish, and you live in London. Wondering how you talk about contextualization and how that might work, if there's something you could let us in on.
Luiz Santana:Yeah. Well, I I have heard and learned about contextualization from books in the seminary, from teachings and stuff. But I think I really started to understand when I met my now wife. And being a Brazilian, growing up in a more working class type of culture, I'm the guy from, city like Sao Paulo, and she, Polish from the north surrounded by green and lakes. If you have cultural differences within families from the same culture, you might imagine how that is difficult in an international or intercultural marriage.
Luiz Santana:And I started understanding what contextualizing means. Being kind can be very different in different cultures. And it took me a while to really understand what she was saying, what she was doing, and for us to really not hold on to our own ways of expressing our love and our commitment to each other. If I cannot this do this to my own wife And sometimes even talking about the bible or spiritual disciplines that we have different views on, how how much more can I express that love to someone who is not a family, my neighbor, my my peers in in work, my colleagues, my neighbors in in the community? So I became very interested in contextualization for these reasons.
Tim Keller:So helpful. So helpful. I agree with you.
Laura Sauriat:Luis, I wonder if you have any questions of your own for Tim about gospel contextualization.
Luiz Santana:Yeah. I'll I'll share a quick quick reflection and ask for, team's wisdom. We have, for example, my wife and I, we have a couple of Muslim friends from Afghanistan. And one day, we had lunch. And just before lunch they know we're Christians.
Luiz Santana:Just before lunch, I was like, oh, do you mind if I pray? Because usually pray. And she's like, no. No. No.
Luiz Santana:It's fine. Then I prayed. And then afterwards, she was smiling. It's like, oh, that's funny because usually we pray after her meals. I don't know if that's true for every Islamic, tradition, but in her case, she would pray afterwards.
Luiz Santana:And so next time she went there, I would pray, but I would pray afterwards. As a way of showing, you know, we're welcoming this place, and we are gonna pray to to the father in the name of Jesus, but I just changed the order. And I know, for example, they don't drink alcohol. It's very common for people to bring wine or some sort of drink in London as a gift and and flowers, for example. So I would not offer alcoholic drinks.
Luiz Santana:And if I think a bit further, if they convert, become Christians, I would refrain from offering wine in the communion. Some people criticize me for even saying that, but as as long as I don't know that this is not gonna be a hindrance for them, I would like to to avoid that, such as it's done in many places. How can we discern when we are we are really contextualizing or we are selling out or watering down, sugarcoating the gospel?
Tim Keller:Over contextualization tends to be driven by fear, I think. The over contextualizers are afraid of being rejected. They're afraid people are gonna get mad at them or upset or offended. Okay? I think the under contextualizers are also afraid.
Tim Keller:They're afraid of traditional Christians who say you're compromising. They're also afraid. They're afraid of being rejected by more traditional people. And I do think the gospel should take away that fear. You're accepted in Christ.
Tim Keller:You are gonna mess up. Sometimes you're gonna do things wrong. But you're a sinner saved by grace, and God's not gonna abandon you. And that should take away the fear that makes you over or under contextualize. That's why I think empathy alone wouldn't be enough.
Tim Keller:There has to be that that that security, the love and security that you get in the gospel.
Laura Sauriat:So what should our ultimate motivation be for adopting a practice of contextualization? And how would we avoid using it only as a strategy?
Tim Keller:Well, I think motivation is always an extremely important question. Contextualization is, I think, Christ centered in that you're saying, I want people to love him. I don't want I don't want people to think I'm great this way or people who think I'm great this way. I want people to believe. I I don't want them to just walk away.
Tim Keller:I tell them the truth. Repent. You know, or the wrath of God will fall on you. And they walk away. Well, I told them the truth.
Tim Keller:I hate that when they walk away. I want to see them love Jesus. I don't wanna say I did my job. Well, that that's all about you. And so I do think that both under and over contextualization tends to be driven by a self centeredness.
Tim Keller:And desire for contextualization should be, I really want people to fall in love with Jesus. I want them to see his beauty. I want them I want them to believe in him. And I think that should be your motivation. And if it's if it isn't, then you probably will be an under or over contextualizer.
Luiz Santana:Could you summarize the same? If you wanna be right or if you wanna be liked, then maybe you're not contextualizing well.
Tim Keller:Oh, that's good. Oh, that's good, Luis. The the trouble is the right like rhymes in English, but you gotta have to work it out in Portuguese.
Luiz Santana:Wow.
Tim Keller:Okay.
Luiz Santana:That would be a tougher, tougher task.
Laura Sauriat:This is to be continued with Tim Keller. I'm your host, Laura Soria. Thank you so much for listening. We hope today's episode inspires you to continue the conversation, which you can do by sharing this podcast within your own circles. City to city is a nonprofit whose vision is to see the gospel of Jesus Christ transform lives and impact cities.
Laura Sauriat:To learn more, visit redeemer city to city.com. Follow us on social media at redeemer ctc. All of the above can be found in our show notes. To be continued is produced in partnership with Redeemer City to City. Our producers are Stephanie Cunningham and Rebekah Sebastian.
.:Stand clear of the closing doors, please.