BCM/D Annual

This blog is co-authored by Lauren Rodriguez (@room1012) and Earl Grey (@earl52). Earl Grey is the Minister of Connections at the Church at Severn Run.

The other day, a friend sent out this message: “The ERC of NAMB will be highly important to GPS 2010! Churches get involved…NOW!”

What’s his message? Who’s his audience? And how effectively does he communicate his message to his audience? I work in Southern Baptist life everyday, I’m surrounded by the language (nomenclature, if you will). I know the meaning behind every one of those anagrams, and I still have difficulty reading that statement. His heart was in the right place, but insider language muddled the message and hampered the connection. My friend ended up excluding the very audience he was trying to communicate with.

Buzzwords can be common among Christians, but they ultimately prevent us from connecting with those we’re trying to reach. Take the word “lost” for example. Christians call those who don’t have a personal relationship with Jesus, “lost.” But tell a non-Christian they are “lost” and they’ll look at you like you’re crazy, and may get offended. The message is lost and there is no connection.

My point: to connect with the world, we need to speak in terms that everyone and anyone can understand. Otherwise, we might as well be talking to ourselves.

Let’s consider Jesus. He created the universe and yet when he came here, he used simple language. He didn’t use words that we can’t understand, words that we can’t figure out. Why do you think he did that? If anyone, Jesus, the creator of the world, could have talked circles around the most philosophical of professors. But he didn’t. He could have spoken at a level that was indecipherable by the most educated of theologians, but he didn’t. He could have closed himself up writing dissertations on the science of black holes and quantum mechanics but he didn’t.

Instead, he spoke in terms even my 7 year-old daughter can understand. “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to God the Father, but through me.”

When Jesus spoke, his words were CONNECTIVE. He made a conscious choice to tell us what we needed to know in a way that allows us to hear it, understand it, and apply it in our own lives.

Why? Because Jesus valued connecting with us. Us! He purposely communicated with us in a way that showed how much he values us. So, I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say there’s no place for insider speak among followers of Christ.

When we value what we have to say and how we want to say it more than we value communicating in a way that invites connection we are no longer communicating like Christ. The more buzzwords we use, the greater chance we have of being DISCONNECTED from the life conversations going on around us, everyday.

And yes, it makes us look arrogant and condescending to those left on the outside looking in.

You might say there’s a time and place for the use of insider terminology. It’s faster, convenient, and/or more comfortable. But are speed, convenience, and comfort words we would use to describe how Jesus communicated?

You might say discussion of popular buzzwords (think of the modern/post-modern debate) facilitates higher-level conversations and the discernment of deeper truths. But what good is uncovering these “deeper truths” if we can’t communicate them to the people who need to hear it in terms they will understand?

And as we become more immersed in the “language” of buzzwords we create more barriers to understanding. Let’s take a look at my friend’s note one more time:

“The ERC of NAMB will be highly important to GPS 2010! Churches get involved…NOW!”

Here’s a Christian trying to communicate with other Christians, but buzzwords had become so much a part of his vocabulary and his way of thinking, that he could no longer communicate without them. His message full of insider terms doesn’t make sense unless you’re a church who already knows what GPS, ERC, and NAMB are, but he was trying to reach churches who didn’t know about ERC (which by the way, stands for the Evangelical Response Center, an 800 number persons can call to get a listing of Southern Baptist churches in their area).

Truthfully, avoiding insider language is a struggle. Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Do you know what this means? If we aren’t purposeful about communicating in a connective way, then we’ll find that we’re only talking to ourselves, kind of like my friend.

So here’s our challenge: In our conversations today, let’s be purposeful about speaking in terms that are CONNECTIVE to everyone, not just our insider group.