Words To Throw Away

by Dean Denby
I find myself reading a lot of church literature including blogs, books about church growth and leadership, and church websites or religious websites. I also find myself reading a lot of non-church literature and realizing that church literature is actually getting on my nerves.
First, all church literature uses the same language and colloquialisms rather frequently and annoyingly. Why does every church website have to say stuff like, “for the glory of the kingdom,” and, “to reach the lost?” There are many more that I read and hear in, to coin a term my pastor uses, churchianity. At what point did non-churchgoers need a Church-English dictionary to understand just what we’re talking about. I’m sure you could find some express instances on this very blog to bolster my own point. Its the most time-honored and indoctrinated habit brought about through our induction into churchianity. When you are in the church long enough you begin to speak, pray, and ultimately act like them. Its somewhat inevitable but in my opinion kinda creepy.
So from now on I’m going to try and keep myself clear of heavily church-centric jargon in favor of a much more unchurched-friendly linguistic tradition.
Second, its much more prevalent in the actual church services where this church jargon is so thick half of the things that are said hardly have any outside meaning. The problem is that the language that our grandparents spoke is still being used in the church and what we speak at home is totally absent at church. Its slowly creeping its way in but sort of unintentionally and by sheer happenstance. We need to make it a priority to drop the 1950s church lingo in favor of more modern and dare I say more meaningful rhetoric. Now some thing will be unavoidable and I understand that but we need to remember that if we are patterning our churches in such a way as to create a church that people who don’t go to church would want to go to that church(which my church is) we need to remember that there are going to be people in our audience who have no clue what we are talking about. We have guests in our house. Lets be welcoming and inviting to them and keep the inside jokes to ourselves. Church is much more fun when it includes everyone and not just those of us who have been going to church our whole lives. I’m looking forward to the day where our church is filled with people don’t care about churchianity but only care about God.