October 24, 2022
Christians love their lingo. They affectionally call it “Christianese.”
But often under these cute and charming quirks of Christianity there lurks a more troubling implication.
Today, I’ll explore three more popular “Christianese” words and phrases and analyze why they’re troubling.
Prayer Warriors
I hated hearing this when I was a Christian. Even worse, I hated being called one of these.
If you aren’t familiar, a “prayer warrior” is just someone who prays for you, usually because you ask them too. Typically there is a group of “prayer warriors” further lending to the idea that there’s an army.
When someone “calls upon their prayer warriors” that usually means they have a big prayer request that requires lots of people to pray for it simultaneously.
This implies (to me) that the owner of the prayer request deems their request too big and that their own solo prayers won’t be enough to push God to grant it. It also insinuates that if more people get on board with the prayer request, then that generates some kind of “power” that convinces God to grant something that he otherwise wasn’t planning to do. Almost like if enough people work together, they can change the mind of the omniscient, all-powerful, and all-knowing creator of the universe.
The whole concept of the prayer warrior just never seemed to hold up theologically to me, and my cynical ass quickly deemed it as something people did in order to gain a little bit of attention.
Since deconverting and allowing some room for spirituality back into my life, I have since come across ideas that involve many people doing a mass meditation and giving intention. Since modern religion picks and chooses pieces from existing and ancient spiritual practices and revises them, this is likely where the concept of the prayer warrior came from. However, I have not looked into this mass meditation practice enough yet in order to offer an opinion on it.
Stumbling Block
Everything was a stumbling block.
It didn’t help that every time someone mentioned some “stumbling block” in their life, I immediately pictured those concrete blocks at the ends of parking spaces that I always seem to trip over when leaving my car. Such a strange image for something that is supposed to be temptation toward serious sin.
What annoyed me most about this terminology is that, if taken to its logical conclusion, literally everything could potentially be a stumbling block.
The simplest example is the mens group who meets together and comes up with ideas of how to remove stumbling blocks that might cause them to indulge in porn. Well, that isn’t difficult: the internet and a computer. So if everyone in the room were taking this seriously, they’d cancel their WiFi and get rid of their computer.
But are any of them going to do that? No.
He Brought the Word
He brought the Word!”
This is the enthusiastic exclamation, usually said by a group of church bros, after an especially riveting or convincing sermon.
This means someone just got up on stage a gave a really good, really compelling sermon that has motivated people who go forth and make some sort of change or adjustment. It’s not much different from a motivational talk at a seminar.
This also implies that some other sermons and speakers didn’t bring the word. Kind of a nice way of saying it was boring.
At my old church, there was a teaching pastor who exclusively drew his sermons from the Old Testament. Because of this, he needed to explain a lot of history and context. Everyone in the church repeatedly confessed that they thought this guy’s preaching was boring, and when they saw it was his Sunday coming up, they considered sleeping in and skipping.
But technically, this guy “brought the word” way, way more often than the college pastor, who mostly just told slightly-bragging stories of his life before Christ and used those as examples as things that don’t bring happiness as well as Jesus. Yet it was the college pastor who always got praised for “bringing the word” when he hardly read from the Bible. The other teaching pastor taught lots of chapters, verses, and stories from the less-explored, dusty corners of the Old Testament, yet no one ever gave him any props.
Because it’s not really about the word. It’s about a combination of rousing energy and just the right amount of conviction to get people to feel like they should take some action.
To read the previous articles in this “Christianese” series, click here for Part 1 and click here for Part 2.