Churchy lingo...

BATHOS

I read a blog post today that made me think a little. Recently we had a special potluck at our church where we served haystacks. Now many who read this  post know that I'm speaking of food and not...well...a stack of hay!

Yet one of our churches more recent members essentially had no idea what I was talking about until lunch when she finally had her very first haystack. Now for those who are reading this and don't know what a haystack is. Basically it's corn chips stacked with beans, lettuce, tomato's, onion's, olives, cheese, sour cream, and salsa (and basically anything else that you can stack on top to a certain degree:-) This has long been an Adventist tradition. Honestly I don't know who started it or how it started. If anyone would like to chime in with the history please feel free to leave a comment.

The point though is not about haystacks of course, but about how many times in our churches we speak our own language. Another example of this particularly for my context would be times when I have said things such as, "NAD", "the conference", "quarterly" (Sabbath school lessons), "GC", "morning star foods and/or worthington", and on and on...

Now I think that to a certain degree we do this just because we figure "everyone" understands what we're talking about and that may be the case. BUT isn't one of the essential points of church to have those among us that are NOT like us and don't know the lingo?  Perhaps one issue is that we just don't expect to have that many people at church that don't know our 'lingo'. We assume most understand. 

Maybe it's time that we expect to have more people that don't speak our 'churchy lingo' because hey Jesus came to "seek and to save that which was lost" and we need to be careful that things don't get lost in translation...hmmm

So do you hear a lot of 'churchy lingo' where you go? Do you speak 'churchy lingo'? 

boy it's lunch time, I would love to buy some haystacks...BUT no one sells that around here! Well I'll have to settle for a nacho belle grande with no meat, extra beans please:-)

Javi

image by [mudpig]