incorporate the needs, aspirations, and desires of contemporary national believers into set biblical and church traditions.5 This paralleled the WCC’s steady drift toward focusing less on missions and evangelism and more on experimental theologies, gender issues, and social justice. In other words, contextualization began as an effort to ground theological education and the church closer to contemporary society while deemphasizing the Scriptures. Evangelicals, however, harnessed the term to describe how the