“(un)Learning Christian-nese”
On a harder note, I’ve been thinking long and thoroughly these past few days on the nature of “my job”, my calling, or what it is that I do. For the past month I havepreached every single Sunday… over and over again, read a Biblical text, exegete it, contextualize it (while keeping the purity and integrity of the Word intact), and I present it to the congregation at Cornerstone.
Now rounding off my 3rd year as youth pastor I have come across a very valuable observation that continues to convict and remind me of the sensitive nature of speaking publicly.
Your words need substance. AND… people can be easily fooled by trends without substance.
What am I getting at? There are tons of great, inspiring, and motivational Christianleaders, speakers, singers, lead worshippers - and so very similarly to their secular counterparts, audiences from around the globe perceive these public figures and within the private spaces of their own contexts emulate and seek to recapture the lingo, the verbage, the tone, the fashion, and the hype that each of these figures display.
The awesome and yet dangerous thing about emulating our heroes or idols (figures we look up to) is that we can easily fall prey to what my hermeneutics professor coined as “christian-nese”. For example, we pray, but we pray theology that we do not know of. We sing, but we sing of a God whom we do not understand… AND YET, it’s sounds and seems as though we do!
Even deeper, how often have we heard phrases like,
“God helps those who help themselves”
“Let go, let God”
“Accept Christ as your personal Lord and Savior”
(I’ll let you guys wrestle with these examples and why they’ve been brought up)
But here’s the truth… As diligent believers, our duty and our calling is to proclaim the gospel of Christ, to love who He is and love the people He loves… but if our understanding of the Bible goes no further than what the latest pop-preacher or pop-worship group presents to us, AND we do not have the knowledge to back what we say… how are we any different than the pagans that Jesus refers to in the gospels (Matthew 6:5-15) as those who pray meaninglessly without substance or understanding…
Instead our prayers, worship, sermons, teachings should serve as a response, an echo from our soul testifying our relationship with our savior. Authenticity then becomes (or more appropriately is revealed as) something that the latest pop-icon lingo cannot pass on, but what you as a disciple of Christ develops.
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