You can learn a lot about a culture by looking at how it’s language developed. Take Latin as an example. It’s got something like 38 different words for “kill” (that’s a rough unscientific estimate…from my head). Kill in war. Kill in battle. Kill in a duel. Kill a stranger. Kill your brother. Kill your mother. Kill a baby. Kill a schmaby. That’s because they did a lot of killing.
We’ve got our own issues with that. Do you know how many different words we have for things like “mad”? Angry, frustrated, resentful, livid, exercised, agitated, irritated, wrathful, heated, ticked, peeved, P.O’d…. Or sad: depressed, downtrodden, distraught, distressed, grieved…. Emotion is clearly one of our big concerns.
But in the last couple of generations we’ve begun to accumulate – or at least convert – a lot of derogatory terms for “strong-willed”. Rigid, dogmatic, doctrinary…. I can’t remember where I was reading today, but there was a comment on the post that used a phrase that is becoming utterly ridiculous: “ideologically driven”. Read more
November has been a rare month for me, in that I’ve just finished my fourth book in 3 weeks. This time around it’s Simple Church by Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger. The premise is this, “After hundreds of consultations with local churches and a significant research project, we have concluded that church leaders need to simplify.” ((Rainer, Geiger; Simple Church, pg. 4)) They acknowledge the rise of simplicity in business from Apple to Southwest Airlines. Then they discuss how they came to their conclusion.
If you’re a reader at GetReligion you’re aware of the tendency for journalists to see churches only in political terms. Last Monday’s opinion piece on the emerging church is no different. Tom Krattenmaker writes about the “growing movement of believers [for whom] an activist faith means more than proselytizing about Jesus and stoking the fires of our culture wars.”
