What's off the menu?

Among theological conservatives, it is common to hear complaints about innovative approaches to evangelism and non-traditional methods of enticing people toward Christianity. The general criticism is that people using these newer styles of Christian outreach are resorting to worldly forms of persuasion and rhetoric instead of relying upon God and God’s message to draw people. This is certainly a concern worth taking seriously.

But the difficulty is that when someone employing one style of presentation looks at someone employing another style, it is easy to mistake different for inferior. And when such rhetorical xenophobia starts wrapping itself in the sanctimonious garb of tradition, we should pause to consider some possible categories for differentiating otherspeak:

1. Rhetoric which is truly incompetent or unclear.

2. Rhetoric which only appears competent because I am familiar with its particular form of incompetence.

3. Rhetoric which is far more persuasive than my own and of which I am therefore suspicious in part because it threatens to reclassify my own as inferior by comparison.

4. Rhetoric which is very innovative and different from my own and therefore tastes a bit strange to me, but which expect from the embodied diversity of God’s creative nature.

5. Rhetoric which is innovative and different in a way which really deviates from the core idea that people come to God because of God rather than coming merely to the projection of their own desires found in enticement predicated upon such an idolatrous appeal.

It's ever so easy to find a pretext for rejecting any approach which is different from my own (or that of my tradition) and then mislabel that rejection of style as doctrinal superiority. But just as we must not remake God in our own image, we must also not try to remake His other children according to the pattern birthed in us. Just because God has truly given me my flavor of Christian outreach, that does not mean every other combination of speech spices is an unsavory defilement of God’s cuisine.