Semantics
Antics
by
Major Stephen Court
Words have power. Yes, this truth is usually used in the
context of either speaking life instead of death (see James on
the tongue) or of the prophetic (see the creation account of
God speaking things into being).
But it also goes for semantics - the meanings of words.
When we use certain words we imply and apply certain meanings.
When these words enter the general vocabulary they shape the
meaning of the things they describe. Words have power.
We (The Salvation Army) have been using some words and terms
far too carelessly. Here are some examples:
lay (as in 'lay people' and ‘laity’): this refers to people
who are not ordained and otherwise qualified to participate in
Christian service. It is carelessly applied to everyone who is
not an officer. This is poor theology and terrible history.
Despite the spiritual inferiority complex-induced mistake of
the late 1970s and the 'ordination' of officers, there is not
some mystical abracadabra 'ordination' that accompanies
commissioning. All of our generals and the vast majority of
our commissioners (in all of history) have not been 'ordained'
in the mistaken sense that the relatively recent commissioning
exercise has appended. By the loose use of the term 'lay' that
means Booth, Railton, Booth-Tucker, Higgins, Carpenter,
Orsborn, Kitching, Coutts, Wickberg, Wiseman, Brown,
Wahlstrom, Burrows, Tillsley, Rader, Gowans, Larsson, Clifton,
Bond, and Knaggs were/are ALL 'LAY PEOPLE'. The term is
ridiculous in a Salvationist context. There are no 'lay
people' in The Salvation Army. There are converts, recruits,
soldiers, and officers. That's it.
Words have power.
clergy: Official
SA websites (AUE, USE, C+B, among others) as well as
influential sites (e.g. wikipedia) define or equate officers
as and with clergy. This is evil. Officers are not clergy.
Officers are soldiers who have given up secular employment and
covenanted to make themselves exclusively available temporally
and geographically for the salvation war in vocational
leadership. ‘Clergy’ by definition requires ordination.
Watch the end of the faulty reasoning:
If ‘officer’ equals ‘clergy’; and,
‘Clergy’ requires ‘ordination’ (which it does by definition);
then,
All the generals and most of the commissioners were not/are
not officers.
By using words like ‘clergy’ and ‘laity’ we are reinforcing
the unbiblical clergy/laity split, one of the key strategies
of the devil against the people of God.
Words have power.
pastor: These are the four New Testament
'offices' Paul outlines in Ephesians 4: apostle, prophet,
evangelist, and teacher/shepherd. The last - teacher/shepherd
- includes a word that is translated only once in the whole
New Testament as 'pastor' but clearly means 'shepherd'.[i]
Those covenantally involved in vocational Christian leadership
- our leaders - are called corps or commanding officers,
divisional commanders, territorial commanders, and general.
They are not formally called evangelist, apostle, prophet,
shepherd/teacher even though many fill one or more of these
roles. To pick one out of the hat (with the increasingly rare
exception of ‘evangelist’ as in ‘territorial evangelist’, the
chosen term is always ‘pastor’) is to call hockey hall of
famer Wayne Gretzky a penalty killer. Now, Penalty Killer
Wayne Gretzky certainly was efficient in killing penalties but
to limit his impact on the ice to penalty killing is
ridiculous.
Why then do officers (and lots who attend meetings) call
officers 'pastors'? Excellent question, no good answer to
which is available, but some explanation is possible:
A. we have an inferiority complex when compared to churches;
B. we have an identity crisis in which we don't know that we
are not a church (see below);
C. we are catering to a church subculture instead of fighting
to rescue lost people from hell;
D. we are overwhelmingly influenced by non-Salvationist
Christian content (books, conferences, TV, radio, podcasts,
blogs, etc.).
Remember, words have power. What are the effects of officers
being called ‘pastor’?
i. we sabotage our mission because, among the people we are
trying to rescue from heading to hell, 'pastor' generally has
negative connotations. So we inaccurately identify with
something that is unpopular in trying to reach the people with
whom it is unpopular. Ridiculous.
ii. we change what it means to be an officer from some heroic
combination of apostle/prophet/evangelist/teacher\shepherd
leading troops in a salvation war to some bad-breathed,
shellac-haired, touchy-feely stereotype aiming to keep the
pews warm.
iii. we limit Holy Spirit, who actually works through all FOUR
offices, not just a distorted half of the teacher/shepherd
one.
Only church people seem attached to terms like ‘pastor’.
Could it be that we use a term like 'pastor' because we want
church people to attend our meetings and don't really care
about people who are lost?
Words have power.
church: For centuries we have understood the ‘Church’ to be a
place where the gospel is preached and the sacraments are
administered. However, The Salvation Army is a revolutionary
movement of covenanted warriors exercising holy passion to win
the world for Jesus.
Based on these definitions, is your corps a church?
No. (unless you are surreptitiously passing around bread and
grape juice and splashing your people with water)
So, by definition, your corps is not a
church. Why call it one?[ii]
Why identify with something that is manifestly unpopular with
the people who are headed to hell that we are trying so hard
to reach with the Gospel? Why sabotage your local mission and
the mission of our global movement? Your corps is not a church
despite what someone stuck on a sign or put in a magazine or
said from the microphone.
Words have power.
service: This one is hilarious. Just this Sunday afternoon a
salvationist took a phone call at the hall. The person had
been calling, apparently, for the last hour but our explain,
"we've been in service for the last hour and a half... we were
in service... we were in service..."
Well, this person was evidently LOOKING for some service and
it made absolutely NO SENSE to him that The Salvation Army had
been in service and yet had neglected to pick up the phone to
SERVE him! Now, our friend had been taught that what had just
happened was a religious ceremony (that is the definition of
her use of the term 'service'). But to the people going to
hell, ‘service’ means service - the act of being served - and
we'd not been serving them.
So, for the record, The Salvation Army does not hold
'services'. We have what are called 'meetings'. Check out your
history. We have holiness MEETINGs and salvation MEETINGS and
soldiers MEETINGS and all kinds of meetings. But we don't
'have services'. As the sign on the way OUT of one garrison
said, 'The service begins when the meeting ends'. Let's keep
our serving in VERB form, please.
Words have power.
Do you get it? The words you use affect what we are. When you
use terms like 'church' and 'pastor' and 'service' and
'clergy' and 'lay' you are watering down The Salvation Army
and compromising the testimony of salvationists and insulting
soldiers and limiting Holy Spirit and sabotaging our mission
and hindering our effectiveness. Stop it, please.
Don’t even get me started on ‘members’, ‘ministry boards’,
‘sanctuaries’…
Endnotes
[i]
1. 'Pastor'. For some reason, people like this term.
In KJV it comes up once - Jeremiah 17:16 (NIV renders
it 'shepherd'); in NIV 'pastor' turns up once -
Ephesians 4:11.
But the word in Ephesians 4:11 is 'poimen' and it
actually appears 18 times in the New Testament, 17
times being translated 'shepherd'. So it seems like
'pastor' is a biblically rare synonym for the much
more popularly used term 'shepherd'.
Since 'shepherd' actually means something, apart from
being a synonym, and since 'shepherd' lacks the
negative connotative accretions of 'pastor' in today's
society, it makes much more strategic and biblical
sense to use that term instead of 'pastor'.
This says nothing of the replacement of CO with
'pastor' ('pastor' is not nearly synonymous with CO
and so is an even worse replacement for CO than it is
for shepherd).
So, let's agree that 'pastor', being unbiblical and
unpopular, is a term we should avoid.
[ii]
'church'. The Bride of Christ? Metaphor. Flock?
Metaphor. Building, temple, body? All metaphor. But
the Army of God? The Salvation Army? We’re not a
metaphor. We’re not a comparison to something that we
aren’t. We’re an army. 'Church' carries negative
connotations throughout the West. The large majority
of populations in developed countries vote with their
feet that 'church' is irrelevant and unimportant and
marginalised. Why on earth would we rush to pretend to
be a 'church' when it is, a. not accurate, and b. not
effective? Why on earth would we forfeit our
God-given, biblical identity as an Army? (possibly
because we got the 'prophetic trumps relevant'
principle backwards and we have a spiritual
inferiority complex).
|