Most of the training material that Assemblies of God educators use in Latin America was originally written in English. Almost without exception nationals or missionaries translated the approved theology texts from English. While everyone contextualizes, the gospel message will not ever be completely at home in the Yucatan until the pastors think in theological categories that differ from what the first missionaries delivered to them. This study attempted to understand how the YAG pastors contextualized their reading of passages in John 2-4 and from those findings describe the process of theological contextualization as practiced by the pastors. Those findings were to be used to develop a theory that explains how theological contextualization takes place. Yucatan Assemblies of God (YAG) sermons, sermons written by Augustine, and my own study of the Gospel of John provided the raw material for this dissertation. I used Grounded Theory to analyze the pastors' sermons, whom I then invited to a focus group interview about their sermons. Their comments were video recorded and transcribed. The first step was to analyze the pastoral sermons. The focus group uncovered a major finding of this study. Multiple interpreters provide the corrective for what this study calls unfaithful readings and for over-contextualization. The wider the circle of interpretive perspectives the more likely the reading will avoid interpretive bias. This topic will be described at length in Chapters 6 and 7. This study's analyses included local sermons, then historical sermons, and finally I prepared the exegetical and narrative analysis of the same text. Eventually, I compared the observations from the YAG sermons with the sermons preached by Augustine looking for clues to how he contextualized. Finally, I produced an exegetical study of the same portions of the Gospel of John, trying to identify the Gospel author's method of contextualizing his materials. This dissertation identified several components leading towards a theory of the process of theological contextualization. The resulting conclusion of this study is that contextualization is unavoidable, and over-contextualization will be the result of a lack of culturally diverse interpreters. Problems arise because the "etic" (outsider) person is often blind to the meaning of differences identified or unidentified in the alien culture and the "emic" (insider) person's blindness creates the illusion that all cultures view the text in the same way. Interpretative communities and intercultural reading provide the correction to over-contextualization to help eliminate bias. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]