About the Sport Principle
Have you ever been frustrated at being excluded from something because you cannot access the specialist language? Olympic track cycling presents this frustration for me. Every four years, I excitedly tune in to enjoy what strikes me as a gripping event, but every time, my inability to distinguish my keirins from my madisons, to mention nothing of the omniums (these are actual names of track cycling events) leaves me feeling angry that I can’t understand. More than that, the commentators seem to be in on the conspiracy to keep me in the dark. They consistently make no effort to explain the terminology, apparently revelling in the ease with which they can use the specialist terms, to the exclusion of anyone who doesn’t understand! Grrrrr!!!
Application to the Life
Life can feel like this too! For those of us who work, we can often be guilty of using language that makes no sense whatsoever to those on the outside of the elite few who are privileged to be ‘in the know’. I work in a school, and they must be some of the worst places for this. Everything seems to have an acronym or a specialist ‘eduspeak’ term that means nothing to anybody in the real world. To some extent this serves a purpose at work, but it starts to become a huge problem when it creeps into the church. How many people are we excluding from God’s Kingdom before we even start, simply because we have given no thought to our exclusive language? It starts with how we name our buildings: “Blood of the lamb tabernacle” is an actual name of a church in my part of the world. How must the average man on the street react to this? The mind boggles! It hardly encourages people to come inside! And our services themselves aren’t much better. We talk of the “agnus dei” and the “kyrie eleison”. This sounds almost like a velodrome cycling event itself – or am I getting mixed up with the keirins again? Even relatively neutral terms like ‘intercessions’ can create blank expressions when read for the first time in our service books. ‘Prayers’ would seem like a much better word for the unchurched. Jesus always seemed to say what he meant and he certainly meant what he said. He called a spade a spade. He knew his audience and adjusted his language accordingly. When talking to farmers, he’d tell stories about farming, fisherman would be told about nets, and be instructed to ‘fish for men’ etc. But when talking to the religious scholars, Jesus would routinely blow their minds with his technical expertise and, no doubt, the ease with which he was able to use the specialist terminology – even at the age of 12! Let us all commit again to communicating in simple language. May we be intentional in living as men who do not hide behind words that we know others cannot access just to prove some kind of silly point. Above all, may our language always point to the one who is himself the living word.
“….but let your yes be yes and your no be no, that you may not fall under condemnation.”
James 5:12
Image Credit: Simon Connellan
