The Art of Language

This came up on my RSS reader - made me think of a discussion we had in our Lab team meeting last night about language.

Last night, we were talking specifically about financial giving, but this idea of language is something that I've been talking about for a while to the couple of people who'd listen. I encountered the concept first in one of Dan Kimball's books about the Emerging Church.

Kimball talked about how our language of church will go on to define our attitudes towards church, and so as church leaders the way we speak about church will go a long way to determine how our congregation views it. So, if we consistantly talk about church as a thing that happens, if we talk about services which people come to enjoy and consume - then this attitude will spill over into the attitudes of our church members. On the other hand, if we talk about church as a community, as something we are all a part of and contribute to, as a network of relationships rather than in terms of service provision, then that positive attitude to church should spill over into our congregations (or I should really say church communities).

Perhaps this explains a little about the place Willow Creek now find themselves in - church as a programme of activities rather than a community.

In terms of the Lab, I think that our change in language has been at least part of the reason for our increased sense of belonging and community. I won't get all philosophical and psychological, but language is really the "verbal filter" or "verbal lens" through which we experience the world - surely the language we surround ourselves with must affect our worldview and our perceptions.

So our challenge with the Lab is now to let our "community language" settle and to consolidate it, and now to really think about bringing giving into our vocabulary - especially in the language of our worship. We need to bring giving out from the locked filing cabinet where we keep all the utility bills and other things we don't especially like and reconnect it with our worship vocabulary.

So if you hear us talking about giving a lot at the Lab this term then you know the reasoning behind it ;-) We need to bring it back from just a way of paying the bills to its rightful place in the context of our worship as a community and as a church. Hope that made sense.