language makes the world - worship trick 90

grace on saturday night ( yes i decided to go and watch the football later...) was really good with lots of stuff to chew over for months to come i suspect. we've been having a few discussions on the language we use in grace and how it can be used to include or exclude often unwittingly. speaking of god was the first service where this has been picked up. jenny has written the service up in the grace archive, with links to prayers, confession and so on...

overall the service was an invitation to take the risk of breaking out of ways that language might restrict or tie us in to familar ways of speaking and doing things and to find more expansive language. people were invited to park words - these were put on the spines of books - the yellow words are words that people parked. then later on invited to explore language with new ideas and words that were more expansive - these are the other colours on the book spines. people then composed and read out prayers with words that had caught their imagination. these will be added to the page gradually i am sure. the two i wrote were quantam and jesus is not lord!

i am making speaking of god worship trick 90, series 3

language makes the world so paying attention to language is to do nothing less than attempt to remake the world so it could be a long journey that we are embarking on...

[photo: dean ayres]

Comments

[A Twitter User]

very nice, jonny. we were in christchurch NZ (part of a 2 week visit, including mark pierson's "just worship" event). went to the christchurch art gallery and one of the exhibits was of recently acquired works. a local artist had taken the 1600 terms in the Thames & Hudson dictionary of art and put each one on the spine of a constructed book. these were all stacked (in jumbled order) on a loooong table. i thought that it was brilliant and of course connected it with your post just now.

[Sound_Mike]

Hi Jonny,

Thank you and the folk at grace for this. It has really made me think about our use of language and have just blogged about it here. http://mike-thornton.blogspot.com/2010/06/what-language-to-we-use-to-describe-god.html