The Whatchamacallit Dilemma
In 1978 Hershey unveiled a new candy bar and tagged it “a penut-flavored crisp candy topped with a layer of caramel and dipped in chocolate that has a name and a taste that is hard to forget.” They named their product “Whatchamacallit.” Marketers for Hershey were able to play off the name by branding their bar as something so full of flavor and so complex that the consumer wouldn’t know what to call it either. Choosing the right name for a product is part of Branding 101. What you call something matters.
An experience I had recently with one of our community members has me thinking about how we name ministries or programs or events in the life of the church. We participate in a men’s retreat with several other churches from the Northeast. The weekend is simply called, “The Northeast Men’s Retreat.” I was speaking with a guy who was very reluctant to sign-up and join our group to go. The reason he was hesitant was because he had no idea what a ”retreat” was and what you do on it. This friend did not grow up in the church. The word “retreat” was not part of his vocabulary and because he didn’t understand the concept at the outset, convincing him to go would be an uphill battle.
Now I assume emergents are pretty cautious when it comes to naming things. We choose our words carefully. We use ”initiative” over ”program,” “spiritual formation” over “discipleship,” “learning community” over “bible study,” ”teams” over ”committees,” and “missional” over “missions.” Even in our word-choices, however, I wonder how accessible our new nomenclature really is. For the post-Christian in our community, there is an irrelevance around new descriptors because they are in reaction or in relationship to something in the past that is not part of their vocabulary or experience. For example, the word “missional” may mean very little to this one because the word “mission” or “seeker” means very little. Even for the experienced church-goer or follower of Jesus who has experienced what has come before, there tends to be an inaccessability when it comes to the language emplored by the emerging or missional or whatchamacallit church.
An overarching question for me (one I am tackling in my doctoral project) is how do you make a conversation and its lexicon, something which has been dominated by academic theologians, author-pastors, and high level church leaders, how do you make it accessible to everyday folk? This is a larger question which I would love to hear your reflections on. Other questions I have are: In a brand-driven culture like ours is it possible to be post-nomenclature? Do you or your communities get hung up on what to call things and when you do name something, what that something really means? How do you navigate the bridge between the name and its meaning in a post-literate and post-Christendom context? I would love to hear your reflections!
Comment by Dave Dennis on 9 October 2008:
“Whatchamacallit” is a grand name. It and so many other terms seem to grow from the soil of our cherished nouns. Perhaps the bridging terms could drink at the fountain of verbs and verbal form. Subjects, objects and such noun-like terms as well as adjectives would be freed up a bit to be dynamic as well as descriptive.
For example, a favorite creature of mine is a tiny protozoan of the genus Paramecium. The old way of classifying protozoa depended on the way they move and from there went into how they made their livings.
In churchy parlance,mission/missional related could be picked up along the lines of “putting skin on God’s dream” or some such.
Comment by Tom Robinson on 10 October 2008:
I hear you Tony - I have been mentioning ‘the emerging church’ at my place for the last few years while I have worked on my own doctoral project. I thought I explained it fairly well. Then one day one of the older gentleman came in to my office and said, “Some of our buddies were asking over lunch, ‘What is this emerging church that Tom keeps talking about? Does he wants us to do that?’”
Oi vay.
I guess you’re right - we do have to be really careful what words we throw out there, because while we in the pastoral community may have done some translating, our folks haven’t. And maybe even our translations don’t quite have it
Last year we visited some of my wife’s family in the Czech Republic. Their English was good (certainly better than my Czech) but we still needed to watch what we said. It brought to mind for me how many colloquialisms we use in our culture. Everything had to be basic. I guess that’s what we need to keep in mind as we try to guide our folks (and ourselves) through this time of constant change. Take it slow and don’t assume that everybody knows what this stuff means - especially when we are struggling with it ourselves.
Comment by Leon Bloder on 11 October 2008:
In the past month I have had two different ministers invite me to lunch for the purpose of sounding me out on their plans for “emergent” worship services at their church.
I do my best to try to help them understand that its a bit more amorphous than they imagine, and has more to do with congregational transformation than with worship style… but alas. The conversations never really stay at that level, and generally devolve into Q&A sessions on what kind of videos would I use, or where could they find a book on how to plan worship stations.
I think that language matters, quite frankly. When I studied literary criticism aeons ago when I was doing my undergraduate work, we spent an inordinate amount of time reading Claude Levi-Strauss. Levi-Strauss did a lot of work on structural criticism, specifically on the structure of myth. I always connected his work with language as well, and the way that language functions. Quite honestly, I think that the way we use language in our culture to convey meaning is not that dissimilar to the way myths morph and are transfered. Levi-Strauss asserted that myth [language] can function in a retrospective way to base a traditional order on a distant past; or prospective to treat the past as the beginning of a future that is in process.
In so many ways, you could argue, language creates meaning. The way we talk about things both forms and informs how we know and are known. While we might use words like “missional” or “emergent” to converse with folks who will at least have a context from which to draw a definition, we probably need to be unpacking those terms (and other Christian-ese words and phrases) more artfully as a habit. A “missional” church could become a “congregation that cares,” or an “emergent worship” service could become a worship service where people have the “space to experience God’s grace.” Perhaps the way we talk about these things will lead us to understand and live into the hope contained within our new way of speaking.