Thoughts Along The Journey

Our World Team Ministry Framework highlights the ‘guiding principles’ by which we live and minister as a global community.  One of the ‘guiding principles’ that is a new addition from our previous list of ‘values’ is: incarnational.

The descriptor for this guiding principle is as follows: “As cross-cultural workers, we intentionally surrender our rights to our home culture, language, and ways and embrace those of the host culture. By this, we seek to model Christ, who emptied Himself of the privileges and powers of divinity, taking on human form, in order to carry out His mission.”

Many voices were raised in favor of adding this guiding principle to our list.  The more I have mulled over it, the more I have come to understand why Ray and others kept putting it in front of us as so important.

Living incarnationally pushes us back to the example of Christ (Philippians 2).  Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, chose to take on cultural forms, language and habits.  He expressed himself with words that others could understand, in cultural forms that made sense to the people he was addressing.  He made the effort to ‘be like us’ and to accept this world as his ‘home’.  Yes, his ultimate ‘home’ was not here. Yet, he did not make others around him feel that he was keeping himself a stranger to the world in which he found himself.

The word that I find the hardest in this descriptor is: surrender. Not many of us like the sound of that word because it strikes at our feeling of entitlement.  We have seemingly ‘sacrificed’ a lot to go cross culturally, and believe there should be some small return as a result.  However, God asks us to lay it all down.  In the process of that surrender, we will experience blessings and benedictions we would not have shared otherwise.

One blessing that surely stands out is the experience of deep friendship in Christ across cultural boundaries; discovering that God has truly broken down the barriers that separate us from one another.

Filed under: Crossing cultures, Guiding Principles, Incarnational living |