The Principle of Identification: Essential to Identify with the people We serve- But do not loose our Identity or Authenticity!

This may give some balance to some modern contextualization issues.

“And this principle of `identification with out loss of Identity’ is the model for all evangelism, especially cross-cultural evangelism.

Some of us refuse to identify with the people we claim to be serving. We remain ourselves, and do not become like them. We stay aloof. We hold on desperately to our own cultural inheritance in the mistaken notion that it is an indispensable part of our identity We are unwilling to let it go. Not only do we maintain our own cultural practices with fierce tenacity, but we treat the cultural inheritance of the land of our adoption without the respect it deserves. We thus practice a double kind of cultural imperialism, imposing our own culture on others and despising theirs. But this was not the way of Christ, who emptied himself of his glory and humbled himself to serve.

Other cross-cultural messengers of the gospel make the opposite mistake. So determined are they to identify with the people to whom they go that they surrender even their Christian standards and values. But again this was not Christ’s way, since in becoming human he remained truly divine. The Lausanne Covenant expressed the principle in these words: “Christ’s evangelists must humbly seek to empty themselves of all but their personal authenticity in order to be come the servants of others” (paragraph 10).”

(“The Bible in World Evangelization,” John Stott, Perspectives on the world Christian Movement, 1999, William Carey Library, Pasadena California Pg24)