What on earth do they mean by that?
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What on earth do they mean by that? |
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Jargon gets in everywhere and church is no exception. We’re trying to cut down but some words we use may need a bit of explaining – here are a few …
What we believe is what the apostles (Jesus 12 chosen disciples and Paul) have told us about Jesus in the Bible. We believe them because they were first-hand witnesses of what happened, they saw Jesus with their own eyes and Jesus chose them to tell us. So we are an apostolic church.
When we say, “we are a catholic church”, we don’t mean Roman Catholic. What we do mean is that we are a church for everyone – no preconditions, no membership qualifications, no exclusivity. Jesus takes people as they are: he changes people, he doesn’t expect them to change themselves. We try not to expect that either – but we often fail, of course.
These two are actually the same word in two different languages. It means someone set apart to do something special for God and is used of various people in the Bible – usually kings and prophets, but also some rather unexpected people! It is most often used of Jesus, because what God set him apart to do was the most special. When the Bible speaks of the Christ/Messiah it means Jesus.
The church is us. We don’t mean St Mary’s (a church building), we mean the people who meet together to hear what God has to say to them in the Bible. Whether we meet in the church building, the school hall or someone’s house, we are still the church.
God gave the Jewish people circumcision as a sign to mark them out as special, as the people to whom God had given his law. But Jesus did what the law couldn’t do, put us right with God, and so made circumcision unnecessary. So after Jesus came, circumcision usually refers to people trying to follow rules and regulations to please God rather than accepting what Jesus has done for them.
We all do things that God doesn’t like, that he doesn’t want us to do. When we do things that hurt other people we need to say sorry to them. Because all the wrong things we do hurt God, we always need to say sorry to him too. When we meet together we say sorry to God in what we call a confession and take comfort that Jesus has already dealt with the problem for us.
These two words mean the same thing. God deals with us through promises that we can be absolutely certain he will keep. These promises are a special sort of contract between God and us. What makes God’s contract with us special (a covenant) is that we give him nothing for what he gives us. It is like the promises made in someone’s Will (also known as a Testament): those benefiting pay nothing in return.
This is a word that scares church people as well as everyone else! But all that we mean by evangelism is telling other people what God has done for us. (“ev…angel” means “good…message” – the good news about Jesus.) It doesn’t involve pestering anyone, persuading them, winning arguments or anything like that – just telling them the good news of what Jesus has done for them, if they are willing to listen.
When we talk about grace, we mean everything that God has done for us because of what Jesus did for us and despite what we deserve! When we talk about The Grace, we mean a prayer that we pray for each other. Many of us therefore look around at each other when we pray it.
This means set apart for God rather than “good”. All Christians are therefore holy because God sets them apart for himself, not because they are any better than anyone else (phew!). Obviously though, because Christians are set apart for God, they try to do things which please him.
People like to do things their way rather than God’s way; they walk in the direction that they want to go – away from God. Repentance is turning around, turning your back on your old life so that you can walk in God’s direction by accepting what Jesus has done for you.
Most people know of Jesus’ resurrection, when he came alive again after dying on the cross. We also talk about our resurrection, when we will come alive again following Jesus return and (like Jesus) have new bodies in God’s new creation.
When we talk about saints, we don’t mean especially good people. Roman Catholics use this word differently, but we mean all Christians, all those people set apart (made holy) by God for himself.
We sometimes call the wrong things that we do “sins” and in that sense, everything that we do which isn’t what God wants us to do is a sin. Usually though when we talk about sin we mean our whole attitude of rebellion against God – wanting to do things our way rather than his.
A witness is someone who says what they have seen or heard or otherwise know about a situation. Christians witness when they say to other people what they know about God and what he has done for us.
We don’t use worship (except when we forget!) to mean what we do when we gather together on a Sunday. Christians believe that what God wants from us is our whole lives and, when we do what pleases God, the way we live those lives is worship.
We don’t believe that God is a gentle, slightly senile old man with a white beard; we don’t believe that he doesn’t care about all the bad things that happen in the world that he created; we don’t believe that he will say to us “there, there it doesn’t matter”. God hates evil, and being fair, he punishes it. The problem for us that we are the problem! Wrath describes God’s controlled anger towards us for what we have done to him and his creation. Jesus died to take God’s wrath on himself so that we don’t have to face it. Jesus had to die for us to escape God’s wrath.
Last updated 9th October, 2006