words

Church people have fallen into some bad habits.  One of them is using words that normal people do not understand.  By normal, I am referring to random people that you find out in life that have little or no church background.

When we say words like "spiritual formation" normal people have no idea what we are talking about.  We take it for granted that they do, since we think we know what it means, but try to define it sometime.  Non-church folks do not talk like this.  And since we are trying to win them, maybe we should learn to talk their language.

Another word that we use that doesn't really fit in modern society is "transformation."  Now, I think everyone knows what transformation means, but people generally don't talk about it in the same ways that church folk do.  For non-church folks what that word means and their first thought is likely to move towards the movie Transformers, which is a show about robots.

My point of all of this is that we church folks need to learn to talk in ways that are relevant to unchurched folk.  If they are our target audience, it doesn't matter if we are comfortable with the words, it matters only if they are comfortable.

Take a look at your speech sometime.  Do your unchurched friends, family and coworkers get what you are saying or do we sound like people from the 1950's?  There is a reason that church attendance is down, let's not add to the problem. There are perfectly good ways to talk about our life journey with God without sounding like we just left seminary.  How do your words fall upon the ears of the non-churched?

It's a beautiful day in God's world, be sure to see the good.