The importance of terminology

Posted at 1:18 AM

Words matter. Despite what literary deconstructionists say, we can communicate meaning with them. The words we use have an effect on what we think, and vice-versa. Using a word that isn’t quite right, or that someone else has a different understanding of, can lead to miscommunication, and sometimes to wrong thinking and practice.

We have to be careful that we have the right definition of words we use as Christians, because we can misunderstand what God is saying if we don’t. For example, if your understanding of the word “evangelism” includes living a distinctive life, not just telling people the gospel, you won’t feel the same urgency when being encouraged to evangelise. If your understanding of the word “doctrine” is that it is by definition dry and irrelevant, you’re going to think Paul was being boring when encouraging Titus to teach what is in accord with sound doctrine (Titus 2:1). If you think “faith” is by necessity “blind”, then half the New Testament is going to sound anti-intellectual. Words matter.

They matter in how we use them, too. If we always refer to where we meet as a church as “the church”, we’ll gradually – even if we wouldn’t say this! – begin to think of the church as something we attend, not something we’re part of. If we refer to the pastor as the minister, we may start thinking that ministry is something other people do. If we refer to the pastor as a priest, we slide into thinking he intercedes for us before God.

Now, referring to the pastor as a priest is actually a true statement! It’s just that we’re also priests, and the most perfect priest is Jesus. Using a correct statement nonetheless gives rise to a dangerous idea – that of someone other than Jesus as an intermediary between us and God.

During the course of New Word Alive, I came across a couple of words in very common use that I felt could be (or were already) prone to these kind of dangers. The first was “mission”, and the second was “worship”.

The word “mission”

I attended Krish Kandiah’s seminars on “Kinetic Christianity”. In the first session, his use of the word “mission” was different to how I use it. My use of mission is almost synonymous with evangelism – he was using it in a much broader sense, specifically “that which God sends the church into the world to do” (my paraphrase of Krish quoting John Stott). Mission, then, includes evangelism and social action. This was the first time I’d heard this formulated; I’ve been struggling to see how exactly to relate the two for a while.

As a result, we got talking about how using words in a way the Bible doesn’t can lead to wrong emphases in our practice. Redefining mission (from Latin “missio”, to send; “as the Father has sent me, so I am sending you” – John 20:21) as solely evangelism is to miss the message of parables like the good Samaritan (which Krish spoke on in a main meeting later in the week) and others like it. If we use mission to mean evangelism, then we’re never going to feel the real force of such passages, and we’re going to have a skewed practice that rejects the need for social action, all for the sake of being “faithful to the Bible”. We’re going to feel guilty about doing anything other than evangelism, and, at the extreme, we’re going to become uncaring! Using the wrong word (mission, not evangelism) distorts the biblical picture.

In passing, Krish mentioned the misuse of the word worship, and how equating it to just what we do when we meet together has led to a lessened view of worshipping God with our whole life. I agreed wholeheartedly, and (co-incidentally enough) happened to be going to a seminar on worship after his.

The word “worship”

Having just written about Marcus’ and Anna’s seminar, you can see that it challenged me deeply. There was only one thing that concerned me, and in some ways it was quite a minor thing. After all, the message of the seminar was something that I and others like me desperately needed to hear. As you might expect given the entry I’m currently writing, the issue was one of terminology: I felt that Marcus’ use of the word “worship” to describe what he was advocating didn’t follow the New Testament pattern, and I wasn’t sure I was comfortable with that. (The following section assumes you were at the seminar, have read my previous entry, or have at least glanced over the article much of his material came from.)

We talked about this after the seminar, and I expressed my concern as follows: given that much of the understanding of worship in the seminar seemed to come from the Old Testament, and the New Testament passages (Philippians 3:1, 4:4) didn’t use worship language, what evidence is there that what he’d described should be called worship? I said I wanted to make sure I was using biblical words in biblical ways, and wasn’t convinced this understanding of worship in the New Testament era was how the Bible used the word.

His response was taken from Revelation 4, where the word worship is used. Here we see the kind of worship which is specifically adoration in words or song – the Greek word itself meaning “to come towards to kiss”.

After a brief conversation, I left him to talk to another person with questions probably far more important than mine! Nevertheless, I remained unconvinced – my understanding of the Revelation passage is that we cannot extrapolate a whole definition of worship in the New Testament from it, as it’s in heaven, not on earth, and our worship in heaven will look different (though not completely) to our worship on earth. Romans 12:1 seems a more comprehensive definition of worship: “in view of God’s mercy” (it’s an emotional as well as rational response) “offer your bodies” (not just our minds and emotions) “as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God”. This will include what Marcus advocates in the above article and in his seminar – in fact, depending on how you interpret his definition, it might include it all to the exclusion of all else! (More on that later.) But just like referring to a pastor as a priest is technically accurate, it might not be the most helpful thing to define it as worship.

You may be saying “but it’s just words!” I hope that I’ve shown on the previous pages that it can never be “just words” – but I will try to engage specifically with why this particular area concerns me, and look at some other misuses of the word.

Pastoral implications

What might a misuse of the word worship lead to? The extreme is when “worship = singing”. Here we have a super-spiritual view of worship, that might lead to a divide between the Christian part of our lives and the secular stuff. Singing to God is worship, but what I do with myself on a Monday morning isn’t. We lose a whole-life view of Christian discipleship. That’s not how we’d say we think, but it’s what we end up doing, because of the power of the terms we use. I’ve seen this happen to people.

Less extreme but still worrying is when “worship = when we meet together”. There we have the same tendency to think of Monday morning as our time, not God’s time – but there’s also the temptation to see “attending church” as something we do for God. If going to church is how we worship God, then we’ll lose the biblical emphasis on us meeting together for our encouragement. We’ll become more individualistic, making church about “me and God”, not “me, my church family and God”.

If “worship = private devotional time, adoring and praising God” then there’s a temptation to distinguish too much between this time of devotions, and the rest of the Christian life. We need to be delighting to serve God in every area of life, praising him with all that we do, or we’ll still be limiting the breadth of worship. We might end up with a lesser view of how our lives lived for God are worship, and see the personal, individual time with God as “better”, or “more worshipful”. I think this is super-spiritual, and think our spirituality needs to affect our bodies and actions just as much as our heart, feelings and words.

Finally, Marcus’ definition:

Worship is delighting in, extolling, enjoying and making much of the object of your love

Looking at this in a more limited way, I think I’d say that that’s what rejoicing in God is, and argue that it’s an essential part of worship. Worship certainly isn’t emotionless duty! I think that this is crucial to worshipping God with the whole of life, but while it is worship, it isn’t worship to the exclusion of everything else. And referring to it as worship implies that.

However, if we take “delighting in” and “enjoying” in a fuller sense, that might result out of a Christian Hedonist understanding of Christian living, then maybe this does define worship after all. We’re to delight in God, the object of our love, in everything that we do. If delighting in God includes or implies a pursuit of God (see my previous entry, and Marcus’ article), then it’s going to include our whole lives. John Piper’s thesis in Desiring God is that our desire for God drives every area of our Christian life. If this is part of the definition, then perhaps it’s closer to Romans 12:1 than I thought initially. I’m still not certain I’m happy with the weighting of concepts, though, and would prefer to round out Romans 12:1 (“offer your bodies as living sacrifices”) with the joy apparent in Philippians and elsewhere, rather than the other way round.

The impression I got from Marcus, however – and bear in mind we only had a short conversation – was that he emphasised specific times of delighting and pursuing God. All well and good – as I’ve said, I need far more of these! – but I think here the issue with vocabulary is more apparent. If we’re referring to these specific times as worship, my instinct is that we lose the bigger picture of worship as a result. This might not be something that affects those who have a deeper or more rounded understanding of worship – but for those who don’t, it might subconsciously create the kind of views I mention next to “worship = private devotional time”. Yes, these times are worship – but so are our Christian meetings, or times of singing, and I hope I’ve shown the problems using worship terminology there can cause. This is why I think the words we use are important: we can all subconsciously take on slightly distorted attitudes about the Christian life. It might only affect things subtly, but the effect is still there, and will be more noticeable in younger Christians without a more rounded theological understanding.

I hope I’ve been fair to Marcus’ teaching on this, and if you feel I haven’t then please let me know (particularly if your name is Marcus Honeysett!). Marcus is far wiser than I am and I’ve learnt much from him, and so I hope that where I’ve disagreed with him, I’ve done it with an attitude of humility. However I do want to be concerned about using biblical words the way the Bible uses them, because I think the words we use can affect the way we live and view things. I’m trying not to be someone who merely “argues about words” (2 Timothy 2:14), by being someone who strives to “correctly handle the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15).

I should also add that I think the lack of these times of delighting in God in conservative evangelical circles is a far greater problem than referring to them as worship! That’s not to say I don’t think there is an issue – just that there’s a more important one. Marcus mentioned during our conversation that he was emphasising certain things because our conservative evangelical culture urgently needs to rediscover these whole-hearted gospel affections – and to that I say amen!

So in summary, just as conservative evangelicals need to recapture the fullness of the word “mission”, I think we need to do the same with the word “worship”. Let’s get the fullness of the biblical picture, living the whole of our lives for Jesus as we delight in him and pursue him more. It shouldn’t surprise us that that’s where true joy, and true worship, can be found.

Learning from the charismatic movement

Posted at 10:10 AM

Here is Dave Bish’s summary of Dan Edelen’s analysis of the needs of the charismatic movement. I’ve seen charismatic theology accompanied by Scripture being ignored or misused, a selfishness shown in seeking emotional experiences with little internal change, a very Old Testament view of Christian worship and Christian meetings (namely, the two are far more connected than Romans 12 and Hebrews 10 would have us believe) and a lack of discernment (shown most clearly in ignoring or expressing irritation at the testing and weighing of teaching by others). Two things to say, then.

Firstly, praise God that these problems are by no means universal! It’s years since my first encounters with the charismatic movement, and since then I’ve read and listened to many, many charismatic speakers who have all helped instil in me a deeper love and a better understanding of God, a greater day-to-day experience of God, and a greater love of the Bible, but more importantly, Christ. It’s brilliant to hear that those in the movement are as concerned about parts of it as I am, as there’s no way I’m ever going to be listened to! It’s also brilliant that those in the charismatic movement are effectively shaking up many conservative Christians and getting them excited once more about God’s sovereign plan for the world. Conservative authors and speakers like Jim Packer have been calling for deep relationships with God for years; in my case, at least, it took the charismatics I know to get through to me! Recently, it’s mostly through charismatic writers and bloggers that I’ve grown to love God more and love Scripture more, and learnt to be more discerning, more loving and more accepting of those different from me.

Secondly, the striking thing is that each of Dan’s points has to do with a loss of focus on Jesus and his importance. This particularly hit home because I recognise that I can do exactly the same things. Very easily can I slip into a pattern of life that sidelines Jesus, or make the things I read all about abstract issues and not about Jesus. Rather than over-emphasise the Spirit, I can over-emphasise the Bible as an end in itself, and theology as a pursuit for its own sake, rather than both as a way to know and love Jesus better. I may not make the mistakes as publicly as some in the charismatic movement, but I make them all the same, in my own, quiet, conservative evangelical way.

In summary, these problems are by no means universal in the charismatic movement, and they’re not specific to it either. So let’s all throw out dry and boring theology and teaching; let’s recover passionate preaching about Christ from his Word, and let’s live whole lives for God’s glory, enjoying his presence with us, through good times and bad. Let’s not expect things to be easy; let’s not forget our flesh is sinful; but let’s remember that God has given us new hearts, and he gives us the grace we need for each day. Let’s keep our eyes on Jesus, and remember that both the Spirit and the Bible point to him and help us to know him and love him more.

Let us know; let us press on to know the LORD;
his going out is sure as the dawn;
he will come to us as the showers,
as the spring rains that water the earth. (Hosea 6:3, ESV)