One of the challenges of talking about culture is that it's so much a part of who we are that it's functionally invisible to us. We typically only notice a small part of what makes up our culture - much of our context only becomes apparent in contrast with another context, where the differences illustrate our own cultural patterns. A case in point that Hall discusses is the way in which many of us in western cultures approach time. The notion of time is completely contextual - even trying to define "time" is extraordinarily difficult. We can only grapple with its meaning by assigning context to it through the use of units and measurements. But even these are somewhat arbitrary, and the importance we place on those segmentations is a matter of context. Most of us in western cultures are used to dealing with time in a linear fashion. Each moment is perishable and unique - once it is past, it is unrecoverable. Consequently, we value our delineations of time and place a high priority on adhering to schedules and being mindful of days, hours, minutes, etc. But other cultures may not approach time in this same way - time might be viewed as cyclical rather than linear, and units of time as arbitrary. In some cultures, schedules carry far less weight than they do in mine - I have difficulty grappling with the implications of that, but it enlightens me to an aspect of my own culture which otherwise would be invisible.

Now, to get back to the question of meaning and its relation to context, let's consider this from a different angle that Hall also touches on: space. Spatial relationships and orientation is also a contextual concern - the use of space carries particular meanings in some contexts that it does not carry in others. The best way that I can think of to approach this is by way of example. A few years ago, a friend and I were discussing the arrangement of the worship gathering at our church with the pastor and another member of the church. At the time, we were meeting in a high school auditorium. The pastor was expressing concern that the worship team led from the stage, while he preached the sermon from the floor in front of the stage. Here is the significant point - the meaning that he assigned to the spatial location of worship and preaching was that we were demonstrating that we valued worship over scripture. I argued the opposite - by locating himself closer to the people, we were conveying that we valued scripture, and in particular that we valued it as a community.

In both arguments, the meaning that we assigned to the location of the preacher and the worship team was limited by our context. For the pastor, the meaning was a function of an unstated understanding that elevation conveys significance. For me, the understanding was different - proximity conveys significance. Now, bear in mind that neither meaning is inherently correct - both are contextual projections onto spatial arrangements. The question, though, that must be answered is this: which meaning is in play?

The pastor's decision was to move the preaching to the platform and to teach the reasons that we were doing so, to instill an understanding in the community that we were demonstrating significance through elevation. Here's the problem - the community didn't share that underlying assumption. The range of meanings that could be assigned to the spatial orientation was limited by context, and that meaning simply wasn't available. No amount of communicating would change this - instead, what happened was that a disconnect was created between what was said and what was done, with competing messages coming from word and deed. By distancing himself spatially from the people, he instead created a relational distancing as well - a very slight one, to be sure, but it was present nonetheless and exacerbated other concerns related to his exercise of authority.

The implications for this are huge. If we approach a context with forms already established, we risk actually damaging the message. This is why, on some level, describing the emerging church as concerned with "coffee, candles, and couches" is simultaneously both accurate and dead wrong. Forms in and of themselves are absolutely unimportant - that's why they are critically important. In other words, what is important about form is not the form itself, but what the form communicates, specifically in a given context. Forms should be seen as fluid and ad-hoc, able to change at need to convey the desired meaning in a given context.

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