As a child, I learned Christian concepts like salvation, repentance, and righteousness. It was easy then (or so I thought) to use context clues to find their meaning. As we all do, when I’d figured them out, I put them in a box, closed it, and then put it away, marking it resolved. The problem is that, when I came back from my (exceptionally) long absence, I realized I hadn’t really understood them at all… or at least meaningfully.
As I’ve gone back to revisit them a few things have come up that I wanted to share.
Sometimes words use their meaning by virtue of overuse:
This happens often. Words evolve, they change meanings, or they get so overused they lose their own weight by virtue of overuse.”Love” is arguably the biggest word… but yet we equally “love our parents,” “love this new song,” and “love this candy.” In that way, the depth of a word can lose it’s power. I’ll talk about this later… but salvation is such a word for me. It is arguably one of the biggest, most profound, most practical yet most amazing concepts in Christianity, and yet… tell a 15-year-old they have been saved, and most will go… “cool.”
Sometimes, imagining that everyone understands these words (instead of speaking to what they represent) can make them more of a barrier than a gateway:
This explanation is not meant to offend anyone, and I hope it doesn’t, but I feel since coming back that some key words and concepts can have the effect of making people who DON’T fully understand them feel like they’re on the outside.
Imagine being a non-business person, walking into a business meeting, where you desperately want to fit in. And immediately, the meeting begins talking about how “the SLC wants to identify the KPIs, ROA, CPC and CPM of the SEM in order to optimize the top line MRR so that the…” you get the picture. If you’re not of the initiated… you’re the outsider. And that’s a bummer… especially when I think of how many aspiring Christians may have potentially walked away because a message didn’t land… and that it didn’t land because they simply didn’t have enough backstory to do so.
I’m not saying:
What I’m not saying is that the church is wrong for using these words. They are, after all, God’s words; driven by the Holy Spirit, so maybe it’s just me who needed these words and concepts delivered in alternative format. But I did… and I do… and now, (as I continue to learn about them) I feel called to help hand these words over in common English for others, even if it helps only one.
Who is this for then?
- This series is for my atheist and agnostic friends who have heard these concepts and think it’s all a bit wishy-washy
- For non-Christians who’ve been close to Christians who didn’t act like it… and have negative associations with these concepts, and are curious what all the fuss is about.
- For those ex-Christians who have been church-hurt… who’ve walked away from the religion. For whom these words echo in their past, but are now disassociated with what they “use” to mean.
- This is for long-term, lukewarm Christians who’ve been in it so long, that the words are constant, but their roots may have slipped away over the years.
- Oh, and this series is for me; to open up my own long-closed boxes containing concepts I’d long since considered settled, but which need a little agitation to see what pops up the second time around.
I’ll try to keep the word list updated below:
- Sin
- Righteousness
- Repentance (coming soon)
- Faith (coming soon)
- Sanctification (coming soon)
Any others you want to see here? Email me.