Mentor's Manual

64 For the Nex t Generat i on: The Urban Mi n i s t r y I ns t i tute ’ s Mentor Manua l

The key to contextualization is understanding that while the gospel (Matt. 24.14; Rom. 1.16; 1 Cor. 15.1-2) and the “deposit of faith” (cf. 2 Tim. 1.14, Jude 1.3) are authoritative, timeless truth for all people, the implications and applications of that truth will be expressed differently from culture to culture and context to context. We have deliberately designed our approach to distance education to include a person (the Mentor) who can guide students through the learning experience. As a Mentor, you are in face-to-face contact with a particular group of people that make up the class you are leading. You can, and should, discuss their ministry responsibilities and context, discern the ethnic and cultural make-up of their church and community, and understand what they hope to learn from the class. Your responsibility is to make sure that the lesson content is understood and applied in the context of those unique circumstances. The burden to contextualize the truth to the situations in the life and ministry of our students is the Mentor’s chief intellectual responsibility. By facilitating constant correlation of the truth to their situation the Mentor protects the student from merely listening to ideas without reflecting on the ramifications of those ideas for their lives. As Mentor, you must pay attention to the distance between the truths of Scripture and the life choices and environments of the students. Helping them integrate the truth into their lives is more of an art than a science, and you will get better at this fundamental teaching skill if you engage your students’ contexts in the heart of your lesson discussions. If you as a Mentor come from, or have some life experience in, the cultural context of the students you are teaching, this is a wonderful asset. It means that your own theological and ministry experience will be particularly helpful to your students. Even when this is not the case, however, you as a Mentor can contextualize by deliberately surfacing the questions that students bring to the material, by having students discuss their ministry situations and the challenges that they face, and by having students critically evaluate what the gospel means for the people, congregations, and the neighborhoods in which they minister. The core content of each lesson will be delivered by the national TUMI faculty member who develops the course. In responding to this audio or video teaching, the Mentor must seek to draw out

Contextualization

The Mentor and Cultural