During church services, my mind often wanders to the question of whether visitors understand the message due to the words being used.
Organizations, industries, and cultures adopt terms and words that the group understands – often shortcuts to more complex ideas – but that others outside of the group don’t readily use or understand. In addition to facilitating communication, using this jargon helps people feel like they belong, that they are part of the group. The Church is no different. We’ve adopted words and developed phrases to express Biblical truths and meanings that are often gibberish to the community around us. I call this Church Speak or Biblish. I’m as guilty as anyone in using Biblish.
Years ago, this wasn’t such an issue as it was fairly safe to assume that in America, most people had a church background and were “schooled” in the use of Church Speak. Today, this is a fairly poor assumption as a large percentage of the population is un-churched. In his book “Evangelism That Works”, George Barna reports that in one study, only one-third of those questioned knew what the phrase “The Gospel” meant – and that’s one I would think most people would know. What about other words and phrases such as “washed in the blood”, “lamb of God”, “hedge of protection”, “testimony”, “Great Commission”, “born again”, “in the flesh”, “witness”, or even “sin”.
Should we care?
I believe we should be a missional church (that’s probably another example of Church Speak). By missional, I like Tim Keller’s definition of, “adapting and reformulating absolutely everything it did in worship, discipleship, community, and service--so as to be engaged with the non-Christian society around it.” Keller says a couple of things regarding communication and being missional:
“The missional church avoids 'tribal' language, stylized prayer language, unnecessary
evangelical pious 'jargon', and archaic language that seeks to set a 'spritual tone.'”; and
“The missional church avoids ever talking as if non-believing people are not present. If you
speak and discourse as if your whole neighborhood is present (not just scattered Christians),
eventually more and more of your neighborhood will find their way in or be invited.”
We are seeing more and more new people from our surrounding community attending services Sundays and Wednesday evenings. Many of these people don’t have a church background. We need to be intentional about the language we use so that they can understand and feel part of the church.
Organizations, industries, and cultures adopt terms and words that the group understands – often shortcuts to more complex ideas – but that others outside of the group don’t readily use or understand. In addition to facilitating communication, using this jargon helps people feel like they belong, that they are part of the group. The Church is no different. We’ve adopted words and developed phrases to express Biblical truths and meanings that are often gibberish to the community around us. I call this Church Speak or Biblish. I’m as guilty as anyone in using Biblish.
Years ago, this wasn’t such an issue as it was fairly safe to assume that in America, most people had a church background and were “schooled” in the use of Church Speak. Today, this is a fairly poor assumption as a large percentage of the population is un-churched. In his book “Evangelism That Works”, George Barna reports that in one study, only one-third of those questioned knew what the phrase “The Gospel” meant – and that’s one I would think most people would know. What about other words and phrases such as “washed in the blood”, “lamb of God”, “hedge of protection”, “testimony”, “Great Commission”, “born again”, “in the flesh”, “witness”, or even “sin”.
Should we care?
I believe we should be a missional church (that’s probably another example of Church Speak). By missional, I like Tim Keller’s definition of, “adapting and reformulating absolutely everything it did in worship, discipleship, community, and service--so as to be engaged with the non-Christian society around it.” Keller says a couple of things regarding communication and being missional:
“The missional church avoids 'tribal' language, stylized prayer language, unnecessary
evangelical pious 'jargon', and archaic language that seeks to set a 'spritual tone.'”; and
“The missional church avoids ever talking as if non-believing people are not present. If you
speak and discourse as if your whole neighborhood is present (not just scattered Christians),
eventually more and more of your neighborhood will find their way in or be invited.”
We are seeing more and more new people from our surrounding community attending services Sundays and Wednesday evenings. Many of these people don’t have a church background. We need to be intentional about the language we use so that they can understand and feel part of the church.
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