---

Speaking in Tongues
The language of faith or just more confusion?
by William MacKinnon

I am bilingual! Pretty cool eh? Now I’m not talking about the twenty weeks I spent learning French back in high school, or the smattering of Spanish I picked up when in Mexico for a week this Spring. I’m not counting the few sentences of Polish I picked up from a workstudy student or the nifty Latin phrases I gleaned from watching Robin Hood on PBS.

No, the “second” language I’m talking about is one have I learned in twenty plus years of being in an evangelical Christian church. I’ve heard it called by different names, but I call it ChurchSpeak. I’ve recently been critically reviewing what I know of ChurchSpeak and have come to the conclusion that it’s not all that good and not particularly helpful. In fact, many of the terms and phrases used in ChurchSpeak may actually mislead people that hear it, and possibly distort the Gospel we are called upon to proclaim....