by David Melton
I was in the auto repair shop the other day and noticed a weird tool on the ground. I asked Jimmy, my mechanic, what that “thingy” was. Wrong move. My native New England mechanic would only roll his eyes and smirk. He knew he couldn’t have a meaningful auto repair conversation with me. Tools aren’t “thingies” (it was some kind of calibrating-something-or-other).
Good reminder. For serious business, you really need a meaningful vocabulary. Come to Boston and ask where Fenway Stadium is — the retort you get won’t be pretty!
I watched a football game last night. Every time there was a penalty, the entire crowd quieted itself to hear an official use vocabulary. There was no ambiguity. Never once did I hear one of those striped-shirts say, “Sort of sketchy pushing and shoving” or, “Kind of standing in the wrong place.” Nope — it’s offsides, and it matters!
Nobody wants a physician who uses a thing-a-ma-bob or a do-hickey. Right? Christianity is just as dependent on vocabulary. Recent studies like that by the Pew Research Center have shown that our country is increasingly and dramatically illiterate on matters religious and particularly with biblical terminology. That is a tension. We need to speak to our audience, but we also have a significant conversation to be had. And a conversation demands vocabulary. Anything less is a flailing debacle of miscommunication. It might look cool on witness-wear to say “God Rocks,” but that won’t carry the conversation to where it needs to go.
I cringed to my core recently when I heard someone say, “Jesus is my homeboy” — not because it was some predicable publicity-grabber, but because it was someone who seemed to care about Jesus!
So here’s for a renaissance of healthy spiritual vocabulary. Who talks much about virtue anymore? There’s a term to recycle. One of my favorites is piety…my students here know how much I like that one. I don’t know how you talk about the gospel without repentance and damnation. You can’t adequately replace that with change and less-than-desirable consequences.
I wish we could presume a working vocabulary on all things biblical, but we can’t. What we also must not do — especially in ministry education — is cripple our capacity for conversation by abandoning the vocabulary that empowers it. So let’s learn some new words if we need to, and teach some old words because they need to be known. In Boston, we won’t insult our future leaders by pretending they can’t meet and exceed those who have gone before. Instead we want them to build on that foundation…we are determined to educate the most competent church leaders any generation has even seen! Times are too hard, spiritual needs are too vast, for “thingy” church leaders.
“Thingies” aren’t even good enough to fix a fan belt. I learned that from Jimmy.