Dan Dick has another excellent post on the communication challenges and failures of the United Methodist Church. I’ve been thinking about communication recently, so his post caught my eye.
Ever since I left the pulpit, I’ve been trying to figure out how my lifelong interest in communication and words might be of service to the church. I’m not a very systematic thinker, so I’m still in search of a clear picture. But I can certainly offer some thoughts on this blog in the meantime.
Here’s a rule I try to remember: What you hear matters more than what I say.
This is a huge challenge for the church because we deal in so many words and ideas that people don’t use in day-to-day life. Even church people have a hard time with many of words – justification, salvation, grace, sin, predestination, atonement, sacrament, and inspiration, just to name a few.
As a result, people hear us talk but have no idea what we are trying to say.
I’ve read Will Willimon – channeling Karl Barth and maybe Stanley Hauerwas – argue that church is about teaching people new words and a new language and new ways to understand their own experience. I buy that in part, but it also seems like a good way to let ourselves off the hook for not making much sense to most people.
For me, the United Methodist mission statement is a brilliant, and sad, example.
The mission of the Church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.
Someone explain in plain terms what a “disciple” is. How do I know if I am one? How do I know if you are? Is being a disciple different from going to church? Is it different from being a Christian? What about a Christ follower?
The other black hole in that mission statement is “transformation of the world.” Get 100 United Methodists in a room and ask them what that means. How many different answers do you think we’d get? If we can’t agree, how can we possibly communicate – through words or actions – this identity to the world?
This is not to say a church should never use special vocabulary. Some words may be necessary even if they are not common place. But we should at least be able to explain what our own words mean.
I suspect one reason we cling to fuzzy words and resist the idea of clearing up our meanings is that it allows us to all speak to each other without having to agree. I can say I want to make disciples. You can say you want to make disciples. We can mean radically different things by this, but because we use the same word we can maintain the fiction that we are on the same team and pursuing the same goals.
Lots of people in the denomination are chasing after plans and programs and structural voodoo to revive the church. Maybe it is because I’m a word guy, but I think we’d be better served to work on our words. Let’s figure out which words matter to us and what they mean. Then let us figure out how to live by those words.
I am a part-time local pastor serving 
The doctrine of original sin is surely more humbling to man than the opposite: And I know not what honour we can pay to God, if we think man came out of His hands in the condition wherein he is now.
I am with Willimon, and others, who argue that the church ought not give up the language of Scripture and Christian tradition. Our problem is that the contemporary United Methodist Church does a very poor job of teaching its people that vocabulary and how to use it. Hence it is stripped of its meaning and power to form character and community and becomes, as you say, opaque to the people inside the church and a black hole to the people who are outside the church.
A solution is to reclaim the tradition of adult catechesis. However, I do not see this on the horizon given our current leadership.
I’m not meaning to argue on behalf of giving up the language, but it seems to me that we are in a bad way when even we can’t explain in simple ways what they mean. (And I mean “we” as the church.)
I think your point about catechesis speaks to my same concern. I suspect we both think the same thing on this topic.