Lost in Translation?

During college, I spent a summer living in Ukraine with a mission team. I was one of the only members of our team who had studied any Russian, and I pick up languages pretty quickly, especially when I'm immersed in them, so I spent quite a bit of time talking to our Ukrainian counterparts and wandering around Kiev, trying out conversation with the locals. It was great, except that there were these times when I would forget which language I was speaking, and speak in Russian to an American teammate, or in English to the woman at the bakery. With a stop in Germany on each end of the trip, just call me triply confused.

I was reminded of this experience by a post that Teri recently wrote about the different languages we speak in church and non-church culture. Christianese has never really been my thing, but I've learned to speak it - a couple of versions of it, actually - out of necessity. When you work within the church, you learn to speak the language, even if it's not your native tongue.

It happened to me first in college, after my conversion experience, when I joined an Intervarsity chapter, and phrases like "accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior" were said all around me. That one never quite rolled off my tongue, but I could talk about witnessing, giving personal testimony, and having a relationship with Jesus with the best of them. It happened again when I started taking religion classes, and the terms of historical Christianity, philosophy, and liberation theology entered my vocabulary. It happened big and bad in seminary, when words like "eschatology" and "premillenialism" become part of my daily discourse. And then there's the return to congregational life, which slaps you in the face with the sudden knowledge that all those words you learned in seminary, while providing a helpful foundation, need to be adapted and translated back into the dialect of the "normal" Christian.

And then there's the rest of the world, where people often have little or no idea what you're talking about if you start speaking to them in the language of the church.

I'm lucky in that I didn't really grow up in church, and I've always had relationships with people outside of whatever Christian circles I was part of at a given time. My family doesn't speak Churchese, and neither do most of my friends from realms other than seminary. They've picked up a little here and there, mostly from my slip-ups and from those moments when I can't quite figure out how to translate. That doesn't mean the concepts aren't relevant to them, but the actual words don't mean much.

The foreign languages I've studied in the past, my Russian, German, French, and bits and pieces of others, are all a little rusty for me right now. This week I met with a group of community college students who are of a more standard evangelical strand of Christianity than I am these days. As I strained to understand them, and even more to speak in a way they would understand, I felt much like I had encountered a group of Ukrainians. I had to grasp for words that had once been easy.

Frankly, I would have preferred trying to speak Russian, a language that carries less baggage for me. But the fact is that my job now relies on my ability to be a multilingual translator. I work in a church, where we speak the language of church, albeit a progressive church sort of language that is much more comfortable for me than most. A big part of my job is being outside of the church, with people who have nothing to do with church and no reference for Churchese. I also work with groups of other Christians with whom we collaborate, who speak a whole different dialect of Churchese. I have to be able to converse with all of these people, and communicate to them what the other groups are doing and thinking.

I say this as though it's a taxing enterprise, but the truth is that I find it fascinating and challenging. As the boundaries in our world increasingly bleed into one another, and the church becomes less and less of a common reference point in Western culture, this is not a task that belongs only to me and to others who have jobs that blur church/non-church lines as explicitly as mine. There is value in preserving our language of worship and theology, but it's no longer adequate for this to be the only language we speak. If we Christians want others to understand us, we need to be able to speak another language - perhaps a multiplicity of languages. We encourage our children to learn Spanish and Mandarin so that they can survive in a cross-cultural world; perhaps it's time that we add to our Churchese as well.