The Problem with Words

I apologize to all who have missed my words of wit. (ha!) I have been gone on Mission trip and then spent some time getting better. Actually the trip was fine but the long drive home nearly killed me. I am better thanks to some good doctors and a wonderful wife.

I have been working with some of our Ministry Teams and last night during our Worship Team meeting, it dawned on me that we were all using the same words but we obviously had different meanings. So we spent some time working through what certain terms meant so our discussion would be meaningful for all of us. Here is what we decided about worship:

The word "Traditional" for some of us means a more liturgical, high church, type of service, but for some in the meeting the word was being used to refer to the way they did church thirty years ago. We discovered that what they were referring to was to my understanding a more "revival" type of service. You may remember that much of the early history of the UM's in this country was from the Camp Meeting days - a spiritual movement that swept over the new country and land.

We decided that some people like a more "contemporary" type of service and then quickly realized that even that term was difficult to understand. For us it will be used to describe a worship experience with more modern praise songs, usually accompanied by guitar or band music as opposed to a piano or organ. And we then realized that some of our worship services were often a "blend" of more than one style of music.

Isn't it strange how we use words and mean different things? In seminary, the argument of the day was over using gender-neutral language about God. We are past some of that discussion now, but we still need to pause everynow and then to understand our the other person is using the same words that we are using.

Well, I suppose I need to stop or this will turn into an academic paper. I don't mean to do that but if you have questions, we would love to discuss them with you. Why not meet us on Sunday and let's talk about what Jesus meant. Perhaps together we can begin to understand his words. See ya! Allen