Andrew Ryland on Driscoll and Keller on Missional Churches 1

Andrew Ryland, ‘Gospel, Church and Culture: The Vision for Missional Churches being Modelled by Driscoll and Keller and Their Networks’ (2007).

This is a helpful paper summarising the thinking and practice of Mark Driscoll and Tim Keller on issues surrounding the contextualisation of the gospel in today’s world.

According to Ryland, both Driscoll and Keller assume that Christendom has passed; gone is the time when it could be assumed that everyone’s mindset was shaped in some measure by the Christian worldview… and in the post-Christendom context, evangelism and discipleship need to change… but in the right way, in line with faithfulness to Scripture and the gospel.

With a nod to Calvin’s two types of knowledge (of God and ourselves) and John Stott’s ‘double listening’ (to the Word and the world), Ryland comes at Driscoll and Keller via a brief discussion of John Frame on three dimensions of knowledge – of God, ourselves, and the world:

‘Human knowledge can be understood in three ways: as knowledge of God’s norm, as knowledge of the situation, and as knowledge of ourselves. None can be achieved adequately without the others. Each, therefore, is a perspective on the whole of human knowledge’ (John Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God [Phillipsburg: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1987], 75).

These three perspectives translate into three arenas:

1. How we relate to and know God (revealed in the gospel)
2. How we relate to and know our world (experienced as culture)
3. How we relate to and know ourselves as people called into God’s family (embodied as church)

In short – gospel, culture, and church.

More on this in a second post…