Commenting that "Language is important" in our own post-modern context is like saying "It's all about Jesus" in Sunday school. You might get a gold star for your comment, but it's hardly news. But that hasn't clarified things for us one lick. Our imaginative horizons continue to be our most significant barriers, whether we're talking about not believing that humans are responsible for climate change, or family feeling painful dysfunction.
How we understand church 'to be' matters. If we imagine it's a brand-name, we'll never be anything other part of the culture that surrounds us. If we imagine that we are what we've always been, we circle around the drain of that tautology.
A friend mentioned today in a conversation that in sharing with his community that his church was an Episcopal mega-church--by having more than 150 people on a Sunday, thereby being in the top 10% of Episcopal churches--he neatly blobbed together the language people thought so clear. They were neither mega-, nor parochial--they were both.
You can see this same kind of 'blobbing,' a fairly admirable technique, in things like the unwieldy subtitle of McLaren's book A Generous Orthodoxy. (Click through the link if you want to read the thing--Amazon eventually truncates it after using ellipses, which seems a little heavy handed. Surely one grammatical smackdown should suffice.) By gumming up terms, we can force things out of the contemporary contextual limits and invoke other meanings, ones that don't fall back on consumerism (or at least try not to).
Other techniques work, too. Introducing something that doesn't fit into pre-established categories--like "emergence"--is one (although we're good categorizers these days, so it can be tricky). Another is to act with integrity, which has become so unusual as to become headline-fodder--by even trying to do what we say in the public sphere, we undermine our modern Victorian era sensibilities. Another language trick is to break language, pushing language-symbol beyond its value. We usually restrict this to discussion of the cross and Jesus, who have become fairly broken images in the contemporary context, but we also do it with the very words 'church' and 'worship.'
I wonder if it's possible to transform our imaginative horizons with an apophatic language trick, understanding the apophatic not to be a rejection of being but a turning to 'more than' being, a 'not only . . . but also.' Certainly, this is tried in various venues these days--centering prayer, Thomas Merton-ish stuff, etc--but I always wonder if the apophatic theological lessons could apply more broadly. Can we change our vision of church be seeing that it is never merely, never only 'church', but also something more powerful, something more? I wonder.
