I’ve just finished a Bible study that will be published in July through Threads. It’s called Holy Vocabulary: Rescuing the Language of Faith. You can see the basic art for the cover below, which I think is really cool:

Neat, huh? Here’s what the study is about.

I think all of us are a part of different kinds of subcultures, whether we recognize it or not. It might be the subculture of Star Trek, of coupon moms, of cancer patients, or of video gamers. In each subculture, there is a certain dialect that you start to incorporate into your regular vocabulary. Here’s the danger of the subculture, though – we can become so familiar with these terms that we can use them without even thinking about what they mean.

That’s what happened in the Christian subculture. In the church, we’ve got our own language that we speak, but if someone from the outside suddenly jumped into the subculture, chances are they would be very confused. What does “saved” mean? Are people really “lost”? And what does it mean that Jesus is “begotten”?

Even if we’re in the subculture and using these words, we are often doing so without really thinking about what they mean. This study is an effort to recover the meaning of these important biblical words. It’s an attempt to rescue the language of faith from the Christian subculture. So in the study, you’ll find 7 sections of 5 over-churched words. For example, you have in the “God” section words like “holy” and “glory.” In the section about humanity, you have words like “lost” and “sin.” In the section about the Holy Spirit, you have “filled” and “gifts.”

If you’re planning on doing a late summer Bible study or are already thinking about the fall, I’d love for you to consider this one as a way of either laying the groundwork for Christian doctrine, or as a refresher course and a reminder of what it means to believe. Stay tuned for more information…