Reverse Contextualisation

I was interested by a comment someone made today about Ambientwonder. We'd been at a Diocese run event today where we were asked to give a taster of one of our events. In itself a bit surreal given that our events are a bit like noticing the tip of an iceberg of all that goes behind it - relationships, how we create stuff, our values.

The comment I referred to was along the lines of AmbientWonder is trying to contextualise faith into a contemporary culture with no experience of church or the Christian Story. Our event today was trying to take our outworking of that into a place whose only experience is of formally expressed Christianity.

So how do you translate backwards without it having the same effect as putting a phrase into one of those internet translation sites, then doing it again and seeing how different the final phrase is from the one you first put in!

I suppose another question is does it matter? I think it does. It's hard to have a dialogue from two positions without something in common. The person doing differently has the capacity to imagine and articulate, perhaps, both positions. And why is a dialogue important? I think dialogue enriches both perspectives. I've been reflecting on this post from Pete Rollins which gives a clue to where I'm coming from.