Matt Stanford on Amateur Theology
collective language
Posted on September 21, 2007 by Matt Stanford
Filed Under Church, Emerging Questions | 8 Comments
Prompted by my LifeGroup: what does the language of a corporate experience of God look like?
I think it’s quite a poorly developed area of communication for us.
In my experience, when we talk about what God’s doing, we talk about it from a first-person perspective: “something I’ve learned this week…”, “God told me…”, “my experience this week has shown me…”; I’m really not sure our 3rd-persons language is familiar or well developed: trying to describe what God is doing with the upper or lower case C church seems to result in us pulling specific instances.
At the very least, it’s not something we spend much time talking about.
This, to me, contrasts against the things I read about when God spoke about Israel, his people, as a singular entity: we don’t seem to think of ourselves in the same way today as much, instead focusing on the individual or the intimate church group. Is that a result of post modernism, and is it what God wants from us? If we’re called to be other-centred, doesn’t that mean collective language should be our primary language type?
What’s God doing with us as a people? How does Jesus feel about his bride right now? What’s my role as part of that as an individual, a church member, a Church member? A hand, or a foot? Or a cell IN a hand or foot?
