by Mark Ward Sr.

As an educator in speech and composition, my daily schedule is governed by teaching. But I cannot teach what I do not know. So my professional life is centered on research. And as a fundamental Baptist, I have a special research interest in the speaking and writing that occurs in our churches.

Not long ago I traveled, over a four-year period, to about 200 Fundamental Baptist churches in 17 states and attended more than 250 worship services. Afterward I made an ethnographic analysis of the speech codes that we unconsciously use in our subculture.

Much of the speaking we do in church is unintelligible to outsiders. We know the usual catchphrases and can fill in their meanings, but visitors lack this knowledge. Why? Because our Fundamental Baptist subculture has certain assumptions about the ways people should relate to each other and about the importance of certain symbolic actions. These assumptions are reflected in the way we talk.

We have different names for interacting with believers (“having fellowship”), with unbelievers (“witnessing”), and with God (“having devotions”). This unconsciously marks the unbeliever as alien to our subculture, someone we must approach with a different communication strategy. The word “unbeliever” is itself an extremely strong form of negation. By it we define outsiders in negative relation to ourselves-in the same way, for example, that the terms “good” and “ungood” function in Orwellian newspeak.

Our church buildings have few crosses. The Bible is our dominant symbol. The layout of our sanctuaries draws every eye to the pulpit, where the leader is in symbolic command of our Bible discourse. We address him honorifically.

Thus in highly symbolic ways we send to visitors a message of top-down hierarchy and of monologue rather than dialogue. And this decreases our perceived relevance to a surrounding culture that prizes individuality and engagement. This is not to say we should diminish the pastor’s role of preaching with the full authority of Scripture, and in the power of the Holy Spirit. However, I do believe we need to teach and write differently in order to remain relevant to our culture.

Our fundamentalist preference for monologue over dialogue was also evident to me at a recent international conference for teachers and scholars of writing. There I attended two panels titled “Mapping the Fault Lines of Evangelical Identity and Composition Studies” and “The Question of Identity: Critical Issues for Composition Teachers and Religious Students.”

Scholars from major universities had surveyed freshman composition teachers nationwide. These instructors are charged with teaching freshmen how to compose an argument. They reported that their Christian students insist the Bible makes all argumentation moot. Why? Because this is the discourse the students hear in church.

By refusing to do research and construct arguments, these students were reinforcing the stereotype of Christians as obscurantist Bible thumpers. They were clearly getting nowhere with teachers and classmates. And in resisting the lessons of rhetoric, of how to invent compelling arguments, Christian college students were opting out of meaningful engagement with the surrounding culture.

These experiences came to my mind as a judge for the Baptist Bulletin student essay contest. All the entrants are winners for stepping out in faith and using their writing gifts for God. The winning essay is commendable for being theologically sound, making a vital point for all fundamental Baptists, and displaying sound writing mechanics. It is appropriate for Bulletin readers, makes fine devotional reading, and could be profitably recited from any pulpit.

But with all due respect for the winner’s achievement, I would like to draw attention to another essay. My burden is that a theme of “Balancing Biblical Truth and Cultural Relevance” should be an occasion for us to look beyond the discourses we use in church. We must rethink the unconscious messages by which our subculture alienates visitors. Though we continue to prize sermonic monologue, we must also learn to construct arguments and engage in dialogue.

For these reasons I commend to your attention the essay “Can Christ Be Culturally Relevant?” which begins on page 22 of this issue. The essay utilizes what postmodern theorists call collage or montage, constructing arguments through juxtaposition of different elements rather than the linear argumentation that characterizes modernism.

By using a postmodern composition technique, the author demonstrates how a fundamental and Biblical message can be expressed in a postmodern culture. Also, the essay shows how multimodality-combining textual and visual elements-can be employed to express Biblical truth in a relevant way.

This requires some outside-the-box thinking on our part, perhaps even changing the essay judging guidelines for next year’s contest. Asking judges to assess a submission’s structure, development, and mechanics can imply modernist assumptions of linear argumentation. To explore our relevance, we may need to reexamine our assumption that Biblical arguments must always be linear, must always be “structured” and “developed” and follow “mechanics” in a postmodern culture where these assumptions no longer hold the sway they once did.

Yes, our message is eternal. But do we best convey that message by declaring propositions-or by inviting conversations? In a multimodal world characterized not by hierarchy but by networks, where text is now hypertext and media are convergent-where even books and Bibles are electronic-we must consider what it means today to “give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15).

Mark Ward teaches professional writing and communication studies at Clemson University, where he is completing a PhD. Read more about Mark in “Meet the Essay Contest Judges“.