🎥 Video 7B: What Not to Do: Reducing Identity to One Label

Hi, I am Haley, a Christian Leaders Institute presenter.

A woman named Brianna came to a church mentor and said, “I think I am just broken.”

The mentor loved her, but answered too quickly.

“No, you are not broken. You are a child of God. Just stop saying that.”

The sentence was true, but the timing was poor.

Brianna was trying to describe years of rejection, body shame, family conflict, depression, and confusion about calling. She needed biblical truth. But she also needed someone to understand why the word “broken” felt so real.

Identity conversations become harmful when leaders reduce people to one label.

Culture often reduces identity to one category:

I am my feelings.
I am my trauma.
I am my sexuality.
I am my political group.
I am my diagnosis.
I am my social location.
I am my freedom to choose.

Churches can also reduce identity:

You are only your sin.
You are only your role.
You are only your usefulness.
You are only your testimony.

PhilMinistry Skills teaches a better way.

The Christian leader must neither absolutize a label nor mock the person who uses one. The leader listens for what the label is carrying: pain, shame, protest, confusion, fear, belonging, or a cry to be seen.

But listening does not mean surrendering truth.

This is especially important with gender and embodiment. Male and female are not merely words, power arrangements, inner feelings, or social performances. They are created design realities. Postmodern thinking often confuses the lingual aspect, social aspect, or sensitive aspect with created design itself.

Christian leaders should not make that confusion.

At the same time, leaders should not weaponize truth. A person wrestling with identity needs truth carried with patience, compassion, and courage.

Roy Clouser’s question helps: What is being treated as ultimate?

If a label becomes the final word, it is too heavy for a created thing to carry.

Dooyeweerd’s aspects help too. A label may involve language, emotion, community, justice, body, history, and faith. But no aspect should be absolutized against God’s created reality.

Second Corinthians 5:17 says, “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old things have passed away. Behold, all things have become new.”

What helps?

Ask: “What does that word mean to you, and what pain is it carrying?”

What harms?

Either affirming every label as truth or rejecting a person before listening.

The takeaway is this:

A person may use a label, but no label should become lord. Christ alone has the final word over identity and his design of organic male or female is a gift. 


Modifié le: mardi 2 juin 2026, 08:36