We’ve Lost the Vocabulary of Scripture

Quoting Pastor Todd Wilken from the March 23rd Issues, Etc. segment on the Catechumenate with Dr. Kent Burreson:

Think about how the Scriptures describe the movement from unbeliever to believer. You know nowadays we just have this category “unchurched” and “churched.” How barren, how empty, how hollow a way of thinking about the move from what Scripture says is “death to life,” “enemy of God” to “friend of God,” “sons of wrath” to “those who have been shown mercy,” “kingdom of darkness” to “kingdom of light,” and we in the modern Church say “churched” and “unchurched?” How vacuous. Maybe that’s part of the problem.

We’ve lost the vocabulary of Scripture when it comes to the difference between the Church and the world. And having forfeited the vocabulary of Scripture in these things we think more like the world about these things. Well, it’s just a sociological category, you’re unchurched or your churched. And we are poorer for it. And in fact, we may be through our empty ways of bringing people into quote unquote membership or attendance into the twenty-first century Church not so much making Christians, or disciples, but simply making members, associates. What’s another term that they might use, clients? Who knows. When the Scripture speaks of it as going from death to life, from being an enemy to God to being reconciled to God, sons of wrath to sons of mercy, darkness to light, it means that these are not just metaphors, these are the truth of what it means to go from unbelief to belief, from the world to the Church and the body of Christ. Do we need it? Of course we need it. And if we lose it, what we lose is perhaps the Church itself.

photo credit: monkeyc 2