Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Christian Words
Internet Monk posted a great essay yesterday about the changing vocabulary of Christianity.
I have complained and complained about the modern culturalization of the church. Particularly in that place long ago, far away, and never read. Here I complained about the personality cults that develop in modern worship forms. In this post I complained about substituting entertainment for worship. Finally, here I argued that it is not about church growth anyway, that it is about disciple growth.
Attracting people to church is easy. Even getting them to say "Yes" to Jesus is relatively easy. But getting them to grow to maturity, now that is hard. The challenge facing the church today is not attracting people, it is changing people. As IM points out, vocabulary is a big part of that.
The forms of Christianity are not arbitrary, they are the work of centuries of effort to be God's people in a broken world. We abandon them at our risk.
It occurs to me that it is no longer any news that Christians have abandoned the distinctive vocabulary of faith. I am not making a shocking announcement to say that in our attempt to become acceptable to the larger culture, we have surrendered the words that define our faith. Today, illustrations about squirrels, beavers and geese are expected to be our communication with the world. Christian music has adopted the vocabulary of romance. God is my girlfriend, faith is falling in love, the Bible a love letter and so forth. Preaching has adopted the vocabulary of modern psychology and the self-help industry. Sin is a lack of self-esteem. Christ came to give us meaning and purpose in life. The church is a support group, preaching a motivational talk. Oprah and Dr. Phil, not Paul and Moses, provide our new vocabulary.I could not agree more with his sentiments about youth ministry. I too did much of what he did, but I fought the trend. Once kids said yes to Jesus, I tried to move them forward to deeper things. Maybe that is why I did not last very long in this type of ministry.
When the history of modern evangelicalism is written, I predict that the abandonment of the vocabulary of faith will loom large as an explanation for the demise of Christianity in American culture. Despite what the Willow Creek-ologists tell us, "seeker sensitive" Christianity is not a surging cultural force, but a movement leading masses of Christians into retreat and cultural surrender. Islam is surging in America, and you will not come across many "seeker-sensitive" mosques. Cultures and sub-cultures that retain their distinctive vocabularies retain their distinctive identities. Just ask rap musicians, who don't feel the need to talk like everyone else to sell their music. If you don't get it, you're going to have to ask. Meanwhile, the slogan of American evangelicalism might be "Prepare to be assimilated."
What I find stunning is the inability of the advocates of vocabulary abandonment to see that there is a genuine difference between a church that proclaims a message of sin, justification and redemption and a church that seeks to produce the feeling of "a big hug from God." I learned this lesson as a youth ministry specialist, one of those people with the job of keeping the kids interested in church by running a program that resembled church as little as possible. It is no surprise to me that so many of today's adults despise anything that looks traditional or classical in Christian worship. We fed them a diet of pizza, trips to the beach, concerts, games and the appropriate musical soundtrack and kept them far away from what was going on upstairs. We endured Sunday morning with the promise of "youth stuff" the rest of the week. While most of us never abandoned the Bible, many did, and we did practice the principles of communication that the seeker sensitive movement holds sacred. So if you are looking for someone to blame that adults now want to applaud at Holy Communion, blame me. (But they paid us to do it.)
I have complained and complained about the modern culturalization of the church. Particularly in that place long ago, far away, and never read. Here I complained about the personality cults that develop in modern worship forms. In this post I complained about substituting entertainment for worship. Finally, here I argued that it is not about church growth anyway, that it is about disciple growth.
Attracting people to church is easy. Even getting them to say "Yes" to Jesus is relatively easy. But getting them to grow to maturity, now that is hard. The challenge facing the church today is not attracting people, it is changing people. As IM points out, vocabulary is a big part of that.
The forms of Christianity are not arbitrary, they are the work of centuries of effort to be God's people in a broken world. We abandon them at our risk.
