What counts as holy?

A line from Noble’s sermon this afternoon:

God couldn’t give a crap about your happiness when it comes to his holiness.

If God is holy, what does he give a crap about?

Should the holiness of God have any effect on how we talk about him?

Another language catastrophe

Steven Furtick describes a baptism at his church today as pandemonium.

For a man who makes his living with words, this is terribly clumsy.

The word has multiple meanings, none of which flatter Furtick or his church. From dictionary.com:

1. wild uproar or unrestrained disorder; tumult or chaos.
2. a place or scene of riotous uproar or utter chaos.
3. the abode of all the demons.
4. Hell

Why can’t these Turnstile leaders use words from God’s Word when they describe the church?

(The obvious answer is that they’d have to deal with terms like sober, decency and order, though perhaps you have some other theories.)

Do words really matter?

If you follow the comments to any of these posts (they’re usually more interesting than the posts themselves), you’re aware that there’s a bit of a discussion emerging about the propriety of claiming to be jacked up about the Gospel. The word is commonly defined as either being broken or being under the influence of drugs. I and a few others have taken the position that it is not an appropriate term to describe one’s reaction to the preaching of the Word, and others are saying that emotions trump whatever words we choose to describe them. In other places on this blog, we’ve looked at how the modern church is frequently promiscuous in its use of language.

Does it really matter? Should Christians be so careful about the words we use?

Absolutely.

We follow a Savior who described himself as the Word. God created and sustains us and everything we see by the power of his word. Words are powerful and meaningful. If we assume we can take liberties with the words we use (Bamf, jacked and BangORang to describe God’s work, for example), then we strip words of all their meaning, usefulness and power.

When God told Timothy to study, what was he supposed to study (2 Timothy 2:15), if not words? When Peter tells us that some of Paul’s teachings are difficult to understand (2 Peter 3:16), it’s the words that hold the key to their meaning. When God wanted his prophetic message to be clearly expressed in Habakkuk 2:2, what did he use? Written words. What would make Solomon judge a word as fitly spoken (Proverbs 25:11), if not an excellent match between a word’s definition and its application?

When we want to understand the precise meaning of Scripture, we go to the original languages to research the definitions and usage of the words we’ve translated into English. In knowing God’s revelation, precise and unchanging meanings are crucial. If we treat words as being infinitely malleable, we give ourselves the liberty to treat the Bible cavalierly and read our own meanings into it.

Words are so important, God would rather us not use them at all than to use them carelessly, which is one of the important lessons Job had learned by the end of his book.

The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth be silent before him. (Habakkuk 2:20)

Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. Go near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools, who do not know that they do wrong. Do not be quick with your mouth, do not be hasty with your heart to utter anything before God. God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few. (Ecclesiastes 5:1-2)

I would expect that there’s a very high correlation between leaders who carefully watch their language and who preach God’s Word faithfully, insightfully and effectively. If you don’t treat the definitions of words seriously, how can you possibly study the Bible?

Find a preacher with a loose tongue, and you’ll probably also find a preacher with loose doctrine.

Noble vs. Noble Jr.

Father Noble:

Uh…Charisse is repeating everything she hears…which is NOT good when they say “the best d@#+ sports show” and she yells it out!

Pastor Noble:

The kid said, ‘I want to go back to the damn church.’ I said, ‘Get his name because he’s going to be on staff someday.’

HT: Albert.

Pajama Pages gets results (Part III)

After I pointed earlier this week out how rotten his language is, Perry Noble appears to be trying to pull up his socks. My evidence? His Twitter feed:

Holy crap…I’m in “the zone” this morning…thank you Jesus for this gift!!! WOW!

Now it’s not just crap, it’s Holy crap.

The epithet is in good company. Holy God. Holy Spirit. Holy Bible, Holy crap, etc.

Actually, I jest. If you think you can put those two terms together, what does it say about your understanding of holiness? What is your understanding of sin?

Perhaps Perry’s special dictionary says something different, but holiness is all about setting something apart as hallowed and sacred to God. Crap is set apart, but for exactly the opposite reason. Try contrasting these two verses:

Then He said, “Do not come near here; remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” (Exodus 3:5)

Designate a place outside the camp where you can go to relieve yourself. As part of your equipment have something to dig with, and when you relieve yourself, dig a hole and cover up your excrement. For the Lord your God moves about in your camp to protect you and to deliver your enemies to you. Your camp must be holy, so that he will not see among you anything indecent and turn away from you. (Deut 22:24)

The holiness of God is not a joke, neither is the indecency of sin.

Talking of both at the same time is actually quite revealing, according to James.

Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. …

From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so.

Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and salt water?

Can a fig tree, my brothers, bear olives, or a grapevine produce figs? Neither can a salt pond yield fresh water. (James 3:1, 10-12)

Noble uses Holy Crap as the opening to a prayer. How exactly is that supposed to work?

Pajama Pages gets results (Part II)

From Noble this morning:

Discovering that I am either making the enemy happy or pissing him off.

From Furtick this morning:

Thanks to blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and the like (read: blah blah blah), every idiot with an opinion has a printing press. And it is becoming increasingly socially acceptable to talk crap about people you’ve never met as if they were fictional characters.

I assume he’s just trying to catch up to Lamb and Noble’s Google c**p counts.

Substituting scatology for theology

If you’ve listened or read to much material from pastors like Perry Noble, Steven Furtick or Gary Lamb, you’ve been exposed to a great deal of profanity. A search for “crap” turns up 141 pages on Noble’s blog, 145 for Lamb and 102 for Furtick (and now at least one for me). That’s commitment to the cause.

The incidence of this kind of language is a blight on the pulpit and on the church, and it sends exactly the type of message that no pastor should want to be associated with.

1. It testifies against sanctification. One of my first online introductions to Perry Noble came through this account of a conversation he had with his pal, Gary Lamb (yes, the same guy who breathes out murderous threats against the church). He had asked Perry how many people he thought might attend the first Unleash conference.
   

   His response was (and Jason Moorhead was there to prove it) that if 300 people showed up he would “crap his pants” and if 400 people showed up he would eat his underwear. Well, I am assuming since he said he would crap his pants he was meaning those were the pants he would eat. SO that has me motivated to make sure 400 people are there.

   They are at a little over 200 now. We are taking between 30-40 people so we need some other churches to step up. I personally would find it funny to see Perry eat his crap filled pants.

   BTW, I am only slightly joking.

   How can either of these men credibly teach people about purity, sobriety or self control?

2. It treats culture as an elevated source. After I had criticized NewSpring’s youth pastor for using the BAMF epithet against the church, the defense, such as it was, was that this was a term that had been popularized by a television comedian. These are people who excuse their refusal to use the word Christian because it is only used a few times in the Bible and may have been created by people who weren’t themselves Christians; however, language that they hear in an HBO special is uncritically adopted.
3. It twists Scripture. Some pastors point to Philippians 3:8 and say that Paul used a word akin to shit or crap, so they can use similar words for shock value themselves. Matt Colvin researched the actual use of the word, skubalon, and found that it was generally used by Greek authors in a medical context (i.e. faeces), or to refer to household refuse that’s thrown to the dogs (compost or scraps) or agricultural uses (manure). It means something useless that is thrown away. It was not used by the Greeks in comedy or other bawdy literature. In other words, it was not used to shock or titillate the way that our cussing pastors use similar words today.
4. It trashes the audience. If someone is a guest in my home, or a visitor to my office, I generally expect that they will watch their mouth and speak civilly as a mark of respect. If you started with the gutter talk, I would assume you thought I was as low-brow as you. What do cussing pastors tell their congregations, who are members of Christ’s body, about what they think about them when they replace theology with scatology?
5. It terminates creativity. These cussing pastors generally pride themselves on their ability to present the Gospel in new and creative ways. Why, then, resort to the most unoriginal and base language around? As someone said,
   

   Swearing is the outlet of the unimaginative, the dull of wit.

6. It titillates instead of trains. It seems as though some preachers can’t teach a lesson without trying to spice it up with something that will shock. A case in point is a personal lesson by Steven Furtick about propriety in witnessing. Everything was going well until he got to the point of his lesson with this sentence:
   

   What the crap would make me so self-conscious that I would stop talking to my wife about the God who means everything because somebody might think I’m one of those weird Christians?

   Who talks like that? The profanity seems so contrived as to suggest that the only reason it was there was because he was reaching the end of the post and needed to drop something unsavory into it.

7. It taints teaching. I and many others enjoy the teachings of Mark Driscoll, yet the crudity and language that seeps into his speech make it difficult to fully embrace what he does. It’s like being treated by a doctor who keeps wiping his runny nose with the back of his hand. He probably knows what ails you, but you’ll always wonder if he knows what ails him.
8. It trivializes our witness. Lowering our standards of conversation to the world’s is not any way to communicate a call to holiness. The implication is that when you become a Christian, you really won’t have to change many of your current vices if you don’t want to, because–look at us–we’re pastors; when they told us we were going to be fishers of men, we thought we needed to be able to swear like fishermen as well. The message (intended, I think) is, Our God is just as badass as your gods, so why not make the switch?
9. It intoxifies the preacher. Letting so much poison flow out of your mouth has to have deleterious effects on the soul. God apparently thinks so, according to James 3:6. John McArthur does too:
   

   Many of the world’s favorite fads are toxic, and they are becoming increasingly so as our society descends further in its spiritual death-spiral. It’s like a radioactive toxicity, so while those who immerse themselves in it might not notice its effects instantly, they nevertheless cannot escape the inevitable, soul-destroying contamination. And woe to those who become comfortable with the sinful fads of secular society.

   Profanity from the pulpit is a multiple-victim offense. It corrupts everybody.

Theology, actualized to the nth degree slaphappy and cacographic

A few years ago I had a student writer who thought she could jazz up her writing by rewriting her plain language with the help of a thesaurus. Her prose ended up being utterly ridiculous and unreadable, or as her thesaurus might have written, her tongue came to a halt actualized to the nth degree slaphappy and cacographic.

As I’ve chronicled before on these pages, there’s a deliberate effort afoot to remap Christian language to make it more acceptable to the unsaved. To a certain extent, there’s wisdom in speaking in a language that a listener can understand, but many of the efforts have the same outcome as my wannabe writer’s prose. You can’t just replace words rich in meaning with another word that a thesaurus writer has determined is within some extended semantic family.

Nick Charalambous, in advocating that we put saved in our back pockets for awhile, pointed his readers to a list of traditional Christian words and their suggested replacements. While not everything on the list is disagreeable, there are quite a few that do a great injustice to the carefully cultivated meaning of the original word.

Let’s look at a few of the suggested changes:

1. Converted becomes changed. Conversion implies a complete and radical change. I can convert my car from gas to biofuel, and in so doing I change the basic nature of the car. I can change my car’s fuel from 87 to 93 octane easily, but I can just as easily change back if it doesn’t suit me. Conversion talks of altered natures and character. Change is something one does to oil and underwear.
2. Get saved becomes made a decision to follow Christ. The key difference here is who’s doing the doing. If I need saving, there’s going to be someone or something that was the agent of that salvation. If I’m on a sinking ship, I generally don’t have the luxury of choosing whether or not I get saved. By emphasizing a decision to follow, we lose the emphasis and dependence on grace that is denoted in saved.
3. Preach becomes talk about. Everyone can talk, few are called to preach. Talking is something that buzzes around me and invites me to ignore it; preaching is God’s Word directed at me that demands my attention and obedience. Who wouldn’t rather be talked to than preached to? Talking is casual; preaching is insistent, which is probably why it’s taboo.
4. Christian becomes Christ follower. Belief is replaced with works. See a fuller discussion here.
5. Sin becomes acting against God’s will and offending God’s character. Acting against God’s will is one way we can sin, but it ignores the doctrine of original sin. I sin without having to do anything at all. I am not God, so my very existence falls short and offends God’s holy character. If sin is about doing bad things, then I can become less of a sinner by doing fewer bad things. Sin, in its full original sense, nails me regardless of what I do.

In a related article, a sensitive evangelist also suggests that we not talk about sin.

Rather than talking about “sin,” discuss the nature of broken relationships with God and the need for healing.

Healing? We’re dead in our sins and need an entire new life, not a few therapy sessions. It’s a similar diminution in meaning as we see in the converted vs. changed redefinition.

Which points to a more profound issue in evangelism. From what I can tell from the Bible, conversion involves repentance and belief. If we’re resorting to creating Christ followers who haven’t heard us talk about sin, perhaps we’re dealing with people who have neither repented nor believed.

If so, would that be their fault or ours?

File under “Inane”

Regular readers will know that I am not impressed with the tendency of the modern church to reshape and redefine vocabulary. I’m working on a post for next week about the issue, but here’s a little taste of how language seems infinitely malleable to these cutting-edge leaders.

From Brad Cooper’s Twitter account this afternoon:

‘Very Good’ is Very bad…. just go ahead and BE GREAT!

BCoop, you can’t just invert language. What is the difference between very good and great anyway? If very good is very bad, what is very bad? (Note to self: that may explain how very bad language is treated as great.)

Good and Very Good were good enough adjectives for the Creator.

I suppose we postmoderns have every reason to be bored with them now though.

Never mind, it wasn’t really profanity

It turns out that BAMF, or anything you like, is OK to say.

A reader alerted me to Cooper’s new teaching on what defines profanity.

Profanity is no longer a list of words to not say… RATHER, there is a way to use your words that makes much of God in all you are saying or doing. Any other talk, BY DEFINITION, is PROFANITY.

on a secondary note- there is another definition of ‘profane’… that is, ‘common or base’…. so one uses profanity when you use a word so much it loses it’s meaning… you have literally profaned the word. So again, by definition, profanity has much more to do with the speaker of the words rather than the words themselves…

It’s not about what you say; it’s about your intentions. So long as you’re talking about God, go ahead and peel the paint.

Cool.

Inside-out, upside-down language

Some of you have probably noticed the disparity in how NewSpring and its fellow traveling churches use language. When they talk to or about sinners, the language is watered down to strip the essential meaning out of the words.

• Sinners become people far from God.
• Unsaved becomes unchurched.
• Unregenerate becomes “unregenerate.”
• Sanctuary becomes auditorium.
• Christian becomes Christ follower.

When they talk about the church, the language turns violent and profane.

• Pastors are whores.*
• Worship is BAMF.
• The Bible is to be @#$#& believed.
• Wise financial stewards are to be vomited upon.
• Old ladies should be clubbed with baseball bats.
• Traditional churches should be burned down.

If you get into their heads, the logic sort of makes sense.

* Noble complains that pastors who preach for pay are prostitutes. Besides the insult and error in the claim, the hypocrisy is astounding. Noble is paid so much by his church that they worry about an IRS audit for excessive payment to the CEO of a non-profit (Check items 14 and 16 in the linked pdf in this article). Understand that I have no problem with Noble’s high salary. He is obviously an effective leader and his congregation definitely values him; they can pay him as much as they care to. But if it’s good for NewSpring, why can’t Noble extend the same privilege to other congregations who are happy to pay their own pastors?

Hey Jesus lovers, watch your mouth!

For a few hopeful seconds, I thought NewSpring was about to reform its approach to profanity when I saw this watch-your-mouth headline from the church’s web pastor.

I thought he was going to recommend against using paint-peeling cuss words in church. Sadly, it was too good to be true.

So what did Pastor Charalambous want us to be careful about?

Don’t say saved. It’s too Christian.

It’s a whole new world, isn’t it?

BAMF = Bless you, Reverend.

Saved = Wash out your mouth!

Amazon.com appears to have more discernment than NewSpring’s clergy

You don’t have to take my word for how offensive bamf is. Amazon sells T-shirts with those letters emblazoned across the front. From the site’s product description:

Crack Smokin T-shirts are far more then just a novelty, they’re a lifestyle. A company that covers all bases of the crude t-shirts market, making people laugh and cringe day in and day out. All shirts are 100% soft cotton with awesome silk screen print and a WILD message. Take your ordinary offensive t-shirt to the next level of obscenity.

My headline = Amazon’s description. That’s WILD.

A quick thought experiment

For those who would discount Cooper’s bamf description of his church because he only used the initials, not the actual words, let me ask you this:

If someone tells you to your face that you are full of bee ess, are you offended any less than if he or she used the full words?

If a child responds to a parent’s instruction with an eff eewww, do you think the parent should just take it in stride because the kid didn’t actually say the magic word?

It wouldn’t happen in my world, and I doubt it would happen in yours.

Regardless, it should never happen in church.

NewSpring takes desecration to the next level

You have got to be kidding me.

A few weeks ago I pointed out how pastor Brad Cooper asked his congregation if they frickin’ believed the Word of God (frickin’ being just a different spelling of the f-word.)

This evening I clicked on a Twitter picture from Cooper of people receiving Christ at NewSpring’s Easter service. Very good, no problem. Then I clicked on another of his photos and found this.

The caption says Fuse Factory looking bamf! (FYI, the Fuse Factory is the church’s newly completed youth “worship” center.)

I didn’t know what bamf meant until this evening, and my Internet filter did its very best to block me from finding out, so vile is the meaning. If you’re brave and not near anyone who could fire you from your job, check out the meaning here, though I really suggest that you don’t. Take my word, this makes frickin’ look positively genteel.

Come on, people. Why aren’t alarm bells going off all over Anderson?

If you go to NewSpring, I won’t ask how you can support this (though if you do, I’d love to hear from you), but I would like to know you can stand by when this is happening? How do you go to a church that keeps on doing this (as if once weren’t enough)? Do trash-talking pastors mean more to you than God’s holiness?

Either BCoop knew what bamf meant, which is unthinkable, or he used it without knowing what it meant, which is unthinkably stupid.

Much of what NewSpring does is debatable, meaning that you could make an argument to defend its beliefs and practices.

This? This isn’t debatable; this is unbelievable.

And on Easter Sunday. Way to go.

Update: It’s not the first time. Apparently worship at NewSpring is bamf too.