Acts 2:1-12 - Speaking Other Languages
Aug 05, 2021
In this blog series, I’m going to take a look at the book of Acts from a strategic point of view. What was going on in the days of the early church and what can we learn from it today in the 21st Century?
At the start of Acts 2, everyone is together. Suddenly the Holy Spirit comes and the believers all start speaking in other languages. There are 16 people groups listed in all, suggesting a fair number of languages spoken. Here’s the big idea. You can’t reach a world only speaking your language.
If you want to reach the world, you’ve got to learn the world’s languages, or to go one better, have the Holy Spirit speak to them through you.
We all have the message of the Gospel that we want to reach with people, but it’s not the world that has to learn our language, we’ve got to change our language to reach them.
Across the world, the church has had it’s own language: Christianese. You’ll know Christianese because it uses a lot of words in ways that no-one else uses them. “Be washed in the blood of the lamb, brother!” is a classic phrase. We know this means accepting the forgiveness of Jesus through his death and resurrection. However, take it out of its context and it conjures up bizarre images of killing a sheep and taking a bath in its blood. How is that going to make you clean? The stink! The horror!
We speak Christianese because it's in the Bible. Washed in the blood of the lamb is an image used in the book of Revelation. But just because it’s in the Bible, doesn’t mean we need to adopt it in casual conversation.
If we want to reach our world, we need to speak their language.
This is where I love Scripture. In this passage, the Spirit enables them to do it. They didn’t go and start downloading Duolingo, they were enabled by the Spirit. They got an instant Matrix-style download.
Wherever you are, you need to reach your world, and that means that you need the Holy Spirit’s power to enable you to speak in their language. The interesting thing is that there are many languages within one language. Our language is determined by our culture, our likes, the TV shows we watch, the book we read and so much more. If I were to say to you, “One does not simply…” you’d probably think, “One does not simply what?” But the context is that it is a meme taken from the Lord of the Rings films. The next line in the meme is always an observational humour joke. That means that when I say that line, I’m setting up a joke.
Life is full of these little idiosyncrasies, but it’s these idiosyncrasies that we need to know if we are going to reach our communities. So how can we switch up our language?
- Social Media
Your Social Media is one of the most important places where you need to be speaking the language of your target market. Most people will visit your social media before joining online, and therefore this is now your church’s new front door.
If you are posting things that don’t make sense to people who don’t know Scripture, you’ll lose people before they put their head inside the door. This is not about watering anything down, it’s about making the message clear in their language, not our own.
- Website
The next place people visit after your social media is your website. This is often where we can get muddled, as it’s very easy to get confused who the website is for. Is it for your congregation or for new people? This is somewhat a false dichotomy, it needs to be for both, but that means the language of the church needs to be consistent throughout. Remember, our job is to speak their language, not to teach them ours.
- Worship Lyrics
Have a good look through the songs in your repertoire. There are some wonderful songs, but not all of them will be speaking in the language of the people you are trying to reach. There’s a really good song that our church started singing which has the line, “I saw Satan fall like lightning.” Good Christian Bible readers will know that this line is a quote from Jesus. However, in the context of the song it is not clear what that line means. If we would have trouble explaining it, then there’s no way that the people we are trying to reach would understand it. It’s a great song, it just wasn’t the right one for our community.
So often the songs we sing at church are done at the behest of the Worship Leader. My recommendation is that you have a much more thorough process of song selection that includes thinking about the language of the song. Sometimes a song might have a very deep theological point, and therefore it might be beneficial to explain the song lyrics before you sing it, in the language of the people you are trying to reach.
- Preach
Whoever preaches in your church needs to have a good think about the language that they use. It can be very tempting to use big words like “hermeneutics” and “exegesis” that you can lose people before you even start. Once again, this is not about watering anything down. The world is full of shallowness, that’s why they are looking to your church. They want depth. But depth still needs to be understandable. This is the great job of the preacher and teacher today.
Whatever you do, rely on the Holy Spirit. At the end of the day, He is the great enabler. He will guide you to the right words to say, but that doesn’t dissolve us of the need to learn the language of those we seek to reach. The better we prepare, the greater the Holy Spirit’s enabling will propel us forward.