Oh dear, I feel a peeve coming on…..

I’m taking a brief break from my Life, Death & Healing series to have a minor rant about something that really peeves me….

Standing on the Word

One of those things I find irritating is the verbiage commonly adopted by many Christians, because when speaking to others that are not part of, or involved with any institutional church, these expressions basically make little sense. I understand that any group of people regularly spending time together for whatever reason will develop a vocabulary specific to that group, and that it’s usually for the sake of economy in communication. But too often the terms Christians are using just make no sense at all.

Take, for example, the expression ‘standing on the word’. Amongst a group of bible-believing souls that expression might be understood to mean that you are holding fast to specific promises found in the bible in order to sustain yourself emotionally through hardship or difficulties. But if you’ve never studied or even read the bible, then for all you know it might mean you put the bible on the ground and literally stand on top of it like it’s some kind of magical ritual. And don’t even get me started on ‘pleading the blood’……

Look, it might be fine to use some expressions amongst believing friends and many of the people we fellowship with regularly, because hopefully they will already understand the deeper concept embodied by it, and know what we mean when we say it. But maybe it’s better not to assume that people will automatically understand what we have said. People who are new to Christianity or the church scene (and sometimes even people who’ve been there for years) may feel like they are meant to know what expressions like that mean, and might feel embarrassed to admit they don’t know. They can recognise those kinds of expressions as insider language, and might feel that not knowing what something means could cause them to look foolish or be rejected. So they either avoid interaction with that group, or pretend that they do know even when they don’t, just so they can feel like they belong. Before you know it, you could have a room full of people pretending, just because they want to belong. So perhaps we could exercise the courtesy of speaking plainly, or explaining what we mean in everyday language. Or better yet, try to avoid using any Christian-isms at all.

All I’m asking is that we don’t forget how to talk like a normal person. Let’s not fill our speech with so many Christian-isms that the average person will have no idea what we are really saying. If our job as believers is to be ministers of reconciliation, then we need to be sure we are speaking in a way that can be easily understood by anyone, and particularly those we are desiring to see reconciled with God, and then adjust our speech accordingly.