Destroy Your Vocabulary.

As a songwriter who is a believer in The Gospel, it is easy to fall into a certain language when speaking lyrically that really only exists in evangelical circles. Even more, the language or "code" spoken does not edify or express the reality of the Gospel as it relates to total reality. After reading Schaeffer, Guiness and Pearcy -- I realized that in order for me to truly communicate like a believer that I need not use the "code" language of evangelicalism any longer. So I sought to destroy my vocabulary and rebuild it like a human being instead of a sub-cultural robot.

It's taken me months and months to do this but after a while, communicating has started to become liberating (imagine that!) as I've moved deeper and deeper into "the spacious freedom in which God is working the world's salvation". (Eugene Peterson)

Lauren Winner is an author I've been following recently. She had this to say about unlearning christian-speak:

"How to avoid “Christian-ese” in one’s prose? A super important question--because it is the unthinking use of insider-speak that drains the life out of so much Christian writing. What struck me at lunch was that there are two levels at which this question can be addressed: on the simplest level, don’t worry so much about avoiding Christian-ese that you get paralyzed--just write! And at draft 3, or draft 33, you and your red pen can go back to your text, reading ruthlessly for, and excising, Christian-speak. This is what I usually tell my writing students.

But isn’t there another problem with Christian-speak, not just one of form, but also content? If we find ourselves lapsing into clichés when we write about matters of faith, ought we be concerned that our faith itself, and not just the words we use to describe it, has become too pat? This is a problem that the search-and-replace feature of your word processing program can’t address…"