Adjectives For Christianity

Over the years I have heard more than a few sermons and indeed more than a few speeches that used clever word choices to hopefully make their comments more memorable. Usually there were three points because somehow that’s the law.

One of those devices included using words that started with the same letter or sounded alike. I am not sure why the thought came to mind, but I found myself thinking about using such a device to describe peoples’ experience of the Christian faith. Once I started, I had trouble turning off the word machine. I even began to divide them into categories.

One such grouping (the largest for some reason) I would call relatively easy Christianity. Words like convenient, comfortable, compatible, compliant, complementary, and complacent came to mind. These words describe a faith that fits in easily with who I already am or am comfortable being, and does not require all that much from me at all.

Another grouping fell into an adequate category. Competent and capable as a description, came to mind. Here, I know the terms. I can find my way around the scriptures. I am fairly regular in my church attendance. Basically, as my old Sunday School teacher used to tell us, “I do the bit.”

Another grouping was a bit more disturbing. These included words like combative, confrontational, and competitive. There is an “us against them” sense to those words. What seems to be important is deciding that my faith is better than yours or makes me better than you.

A last group, more to the point I believe, included converting, convincing, or convicting. Using these words, or others like them, describe a faith that is transforming, that calls forth something from us, that sees the faith as a motivation for making a significant difference in our living.

Having done this small bit of linguistic inventory, I began to wonder what the results would be if we asked the general populace in a survey to pick which of these words or which other words they would choose to describe Christianity. Given the images abroad, I am not sure I would be pleased with their responses. I fear that most of the answers would fall into one of the first three groups listed above.

Diana Butler Bass writes in her book Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening:

“The old religious Right may have won some cherished political battles, but in the war over the hearts of their youth they surely lost more than they gained. And for American public opinion, conservative evangelical politics may have been the worst marketing campaign for the word “Christian” since the Salem witch trials.”

We need to remember that before anyone even thought about naming this movement Christianity, it had another name, and that was “the Way.” And that “Way” was Jesus, his teachings and his ministry. And the way made a difference.

Eddie S. Glaude Jr in his book Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own describes the motivation of those who struggled for Civil Rights, but he might also be describing those early followers of “the Way.”

“They broke free from the world as it was, because they imagined the world as it could be”

The words we choose to use matter. They matter because their description? shapes perceptions, our own and those of the world around us.

For me the question is “How do I describe my faith?” And further, “In light of my lived out witness, how would others describe the faith that I affirm?”