People around the world are fascinated by stories. In every culture stories help define worldview. Stories develop vision, build values and can also be powerful agents for change. Theologians have noted God's interest in using stories to convey his message; approximately seventy five percent of the scriptures were written in the narrative genre (Moreau 2000:909). Jesus was a master storyteller and people flocked to hear him. The Bible can be called God's sacred Storybook.

Contextualization has been a controversial term in missiological circles since its inception nearly thirty years ago (Moreau 2000:225). While the concept of taking the best of culture and using it for the communication of the gospel was widely attractive it did not come without opposition. Today most opponents of contextualization are not from the west but are from so-called third-world churches where Christian leaders, trained in western styles of worship, leadership, evangelism and theology, are reacting to what may seem a betrayal of all that has been sacrificed over the years for the cause of Christ. They find it difficult to use their own cultural forms which they feel are un-Christian because they are not "western" or even satanic.

In those rare places of the world where efforts have been made to be critically "contextual" few reports exist from the cultural perspective of the people themselves. These non-western voices will not be found in volumes of systematic theology nor in literature produced by professional missiologists. They are stories. These stories are being repeated over and over among the people themselves in their own mother tongues and remain inaccessible and unintelligible to those most in need of them: the churches in the west.

Here is a small collection of ten such stories. They do not form a comprehensive volume on contextualization, but they begin to paint one part of a picture of what can be done when contextualization is critically and prayerfully put into practice. These are the voices of two Asian leaders who have spent their careers devoted to the contextualized communication of the good news of Jesus Christ to a people in a land traditionally opposed to western Christianity: Thailand. These are some of their lessons learned, heartaches felts and visions shared. Their humor and their hope shine throughout.

These stories describe how God is working from another perspective one from which we in the west have much to learn. They stimulate, provoke and challenge us as we seek to understand our own role as a western church in a post-modern and increasingly anti-Christian environment. While much of Christianity remains very western around the world, in those places where attempts have been made to actively engage in the redemption and application of culture in order to communicate Christ to the world there is fresh insight to be gained. These stories represent the working out of what it means to be a follower of Jesus living in a non-Christian society. This is not a systematic theology but a narrative theology. It is a developing understanding of what it means to be the people of God where this is viewed in a negative way.

The following contributions are some of the stories of two master storytellers from Asia on the theme of critical contextualization. These two men, Rev. Tongpan Phrommedda and Rev. Banpote Wechkama both of the Institute for Applied Church Ministries in Udon Thani, Thailand are gifted Biblical theologians, evangelists and church planters, teachers, speakers and writers. Between them they have over seventy years of ministry experience doing church planting and church enablement in Thailand.

Above and beyond all these accomplishments they have been my personal mentors and friends. I am deeply indebted to them for the blessings and lessons learned over the period of our fourteen-year friendship. Perhaps nothing more could be said than that they have been able to honestly love, discipline and show God's grace to me and many others as spiritual fathers. May God continue to bless them with good health for many more years of service for the cause of Christ in Thailand and the world. I believe they symbolize what Lesslie Newbigin meant when he wrote,

"The real power of Asian and African Christianity …lies in the very heart of the Christian life and practices of peoples who naturally live out their Christian faith in the idiom of their own culture and who continue to win their own people to Christ's service through this witness" (Newbigin 1978:152)

May this word of witness further the cause of the missio dei.