Well, just to clarify, I'm not against ministry in the marketplace at all. If you've read my post carefully enough, you'll find that I'm so in favour of it man. Just that I'm a bit chary of overusing the term "marketplace" to refer to everything outside the church, because in normal marketplace language, "marketplace", well, means marketplace. Period. Not culture, not education, not the arts or community or politics. It's against the misuse of the term "marketplace" that I'm unhappy about.
Lest you think I'm nitpicking about mere terms, I'm influenced in a large degree by C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man. In the first chapter, he launches a scathing attack on two professors who write in an elementary school textbook that the term "sublime" refers to what the person thinks of a waterfall, rather than the intrinsic nature of the waterfall itself. Lewis recognizes it as a harbinger of something more catastrophic than just a mere semantic difference - it is actually teaching schoolboys in a very subtle way that words can mean anything what you assign to them, and that we don't have a solid foundation to describe the intrinsic nature of things... thereby making way for the deeper message that you won't be able to describe correctly anything with words. And that applies to God and moral values.
When I first read Lewis' argument, I was bowled over. I was thinking, "Wah, this fellow thinks too much lah. Reading too much into words leh!" But when I looked further into the argument, I realise it's highly cogent. Makes huge sense.
But what the hell am I quoting CS Lewis about? Well, it all boils down to this, that we have to be very careful how we use words. Because the improper use of these words can, if not correctly communicated, cause people to misunderstand what we are really talking about. What comes to your mind when you first hear the word "marketplace"? Business, right? The corporate sector, right?
That's precisely what I'm unhappy about. We have expanded the term "marketplace" to mean more than it means. well, it means what it means when we use our Christian dictionary. But when we check out what it means in the English language, it simply means this:
marketplace: • noun 1 an open space where a market is held. 2 a competitive or commercial arena. (Source: The Compact Oxford Dictionary. Dun play-play ah...)Thus we marketplace ministers are shooting ourselves in our feet when we carelessly bandy about the term "marketplace" to mean more than it should mean. We only confuse our younger believers, who haven't been taught about the importance of bringing the Gospel message to every sector of society.
That's why I'm suggesting that we sit back and not blindly follow the faddish trend of "marketplace" this and "marketplace" that. The way we throw about this term, you'd think that my toilet was also a "marketplace"! (Well, I do business there... ok, yes, my toilet is a marketplace! YAY! duh...)
But why am I quibbling over all this? Well, like I've said before, I think it's because we are confusing a lot of younger Christians. And we shouldn't be doing that. Because like it says in 2 Cor 1:13a "Our letters have been straightforward, and there is nothing written between the lines and nothing you can’t understand." But we are writing between the lines when we say that the marketplace includes culture, education, media, arts, politics, community care and God knows what else. That's word-bloat. By overly stretching the term, we render its meaning increasingly meaningless and irrelevant and ... useless.
I'll illustrate with a contrasting difference - which we ministers in the marketplace can take note of - think of the term "redemption". It is a very normal, commercial term. But it is also a very powerful word in the Christian lexicon. Why?
Because it means this, and only this:
"repayment of the principal amount of a debt or security at or before maturity (as when a corporation repurchases its own stock), or, the act of purchasing back something previously sold" Precisely the term that the writers of Scripture used to illustrate our being bought by the blood of Jesus! Is not the message startlingly clear even to ordinary, uneducated salarymen in the marketplace?
So I suggest that we think of a more relevant term to name our "battlefield". Call it "marketspace" if you want... though that's still not accurate enough. Call it... "everyplace"? "Everyspace"? Because it's accurate.
And while we're at it, perhaps we could also think too about how to illustrate the Gospel in contemporary corporate terms... use the terms "merger", "redemption", "acquistion", "takeover", etc. etc. Preaching the gospel in marketplace language. Clear, and in words that business-minded people can "get it" at once.
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