Stripped

What would our faith look like if we stripped away all "Christianese"? What if we made a rule that you cannot attempt to explain something spiritual that happened in your life UNLESS IT REALLY HAPPENED? What am I trying to say? I just sometimes wish we could strip away all the talk. All the church talk. All the lingo. All the verbage. All the church talk that you learned to talk growing up in church.

Now don't get mad at me. I'm not trying to say it's invalid. After all, explaining supernatural spiritual things is not easy. We do our best to explain God and the ways of God. We conjure up phrases and deep thoughts and traditional statements and prayers and meaningful allegories. But I think much damage has been done by people speaking Christianese.

It does two things: First, it masks reality between believers. When using church talk, you're not REALLY telling brother Bob how you're doing. I don't think we really open up with each other. I don't think we are real with one another. This type of talk inadvertently puts a wall between reality and the conversation.

2nd, it further confuses non-believers. (And no, I'm not a proponent of "dumbing down Scripture" or minimizing God to something generic.) Why does our voice change when speaking about a prayer request? Why did we just use that particular phrase when talking about 1 Corinthians? Shouldn't our talk about these things be ordinary talk? Shouldn't we be the same person? The only thing that should change is our passion. Perhaps it should be hard to contain our excitement when talking about such things.

I wish we could just strip down to the basics sometimes. Let's just try accomplishing loving God and loving others first. Let's just try being real with one another and real with our unbelieving friends. Let's strip away all the talk and let's call for action.