Categories: uncategorized
Date: 03 February 2005 18:54:19
In my ongoing adventure about how to do church without doing my head in I have found that one key thing has been unlearning and unpacking the language or more specifically words and terms (which are so loaded in all directions it's just not funny).
I have realised that the language I'm unlearning is as loaded for secular / humanist heavyweight types as it is for many Christian heavyweight types and the middle path of working out meanings which don't just turn into dissing the traditional definitions and automatically taking on the secular meanings is really hard. It's partly because of the cultural padding that alot of these terms come with and the contexts they are associated with but I think it goes beyond this and relates to the opening of the mind to the fact that the same words terms can be used in different contexts or with meanings which have some elements of the common way they've been used (by those who see them as positive or negative) but can also be taken in slightly different directions.
So what are some examples (note I don't have any good new meanings for any of the following):
1) Revival - traditionally this has tended to translate as God is going to make loads of people Christians. My difficulty, everybody has free will and so chooses if they're going to live it or not (God won't make anybody or group of people become Christians because he's not into the puppet master thing).
2) Evangelical - has become the idea of people who are in to trying to "sell religion to others", but I'm into the idea of it being people who are into living by example, not to reel people in, but to show that another world is possible and that the world is linked to a spiritual being.
Sometimes it's just really difficult to find unloaded terms and so when things are said like God answered prayer it's not trying to suggest God only works for Christians, but rather hey I was really stuck and it worked out & I want to acknowledge the spiritual aspect of that.
If this sounds a bit heavy, don't worry it's kind of another empty the mind posting.
* Have gone in and changed it to the correct word, see Jacks comment in the comments section*