As we come to the Muslim world, we have to be careful that what we teach and preach is not simply a reproduction of our own culture. Our faith and lifestyle has often become so overlaid with the customs and traditions of our contemporary society that it bears little resemblance to what a first century believer or a believer from another century might have deemed as ‘Christian’.

John Stott notes: “We have to divest our gospel of the cultural clothing in which we have received it and sometimes even of the precise cultural garb in which Scripture presents it. We also have to reclothe it in cultural terms appropriate to the people to whom we proclaim it.”

Michael Nazir-Ali contends: “It is imperative for missionaries to identify with the local culture and its values, where these do not clash with the principles of the Christian faith. Their minds, in short, must be transformed, and they must ‘incarnate’ their life and witness into their host culture. The Willowbank Report on Gospel and Culture speaks of the incarnation of Christ as the most spectacular instance of cultural identification in history.”

This paper attempts to apply some of this to the question of public prayer and worship.  There are some important principles to remember:

1) Commenting on the cases in the New Testament when Jesus (Jn.4.1-26.) Peter (Acts.10) and Paul (Acts.17.16-24) encountered those of other faiths, Ida Glasser points out that they all find positive things in the other faith and in the people’s attempts to relate to God and that they build on these positive things.

2) Anne Cooper suggests that “any activity of reaching out to others should be expected to deepen our own spiritual understanding.”  The end does not justify the means. Efforts to find points of contact between Christian and Islamic worship styles is not simply ‘play-acting’ but an attempt to deepen one’s own relationship with God.

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