Language

I seem to find myself with a few more minutes than I expected this night due to not being able to sleep which is due to the back problems I have. I'm a little worried that you might think that I am expecting you to respond to every theological aspect of Mennonitism that I post on. I don't expect that at all although I welcome any responses or comments or ideas that you have about anything I post about.

Part of what attracted me to your posts where we met, is that you see things or express things very differently in many ways than I would - yet I know you are my true sister in Christ. I watched you turn the other cheek many times and bite your tongue when people wanted to put the worst interpretation possible on something you wrote. I wanted to understand what you were saying. I guessed that some of the things you were saying weren't necessarily things I would disagree with - what sometimes made it seem like disagreement was our different use of words and a cultural gap. And unlike so many, you, dearest Hearth, were willing to explain as best as you could without leaping to the conclusion that I was being deliberately obtuse or worse still, rude.

It isn't just our American/Canadian differences - it is also that you use 'church words' as I would refer to them, something that a lot of church-going evangelicals or Pentecostals in particular use here too, and if you haven't been brought up in that culture, you don't have a clue what they are talking about.

I think that the church-goers who use the church words think of their words as an expression of faith. I think they are religious cultural constructs. I don't doubt their faith at all but I think sometimes they confuse knowing the 'right' words with the faith. And to me, and others like me, raised outside the church-word vocabulary, we don't know what such people are talking about at all, as Paul says to the Corinthians about tongues:

Now, brethren, if I come unto you speaking with tongues, what shall I profit you, except I shall speak to you either by revelation, or by knowledge, or by prophesying, or by doctrine? And even things without life giving sound, whether pipe or harp, except they give a distinction in the sounds, how shall it be known what is piped or harped?

Too many Christians don't realise, that even if they are not speaking in tongues of angels, but using church language, the very people they want most to reach don't have a clue what they are talking about. I don't think I have that problem in so far as I have not been in a church for so long, that, like current secular slang terms (did you know that something being the shit means good and the shits is still bad??? Who came up with that, for Pete's sake?!), I don't know church language.

And I would just like to thank you for your patience with me.

Layla