It has been puzzling to me as I read some of the new papers, magazines, and bulletins seen recently across our nation. Somehow I have been missing something. I cannot quite understand what is being said.

Then it dawned on me that I was not using the right dictionary. When I stumbled across the idea of this glossary and began to use it, things began to clear.

If you wish to understand some of our brethren, take note of the following definitions:

Conservative: a person with selfish motives steeped in tradition and ignorance.

Liberal: an altruistic person with pure, high, and holy motives for the church, who has a higher level of learning, and who waits patiently for conservatives to be enlightened.

Ultra-conservative: any conservative who disagrees with a liberal, resists change, and does not accept the higher level of learning and sophistication.

Ultra-liberal: no such word, never used, never heard of it!

Right-winger: anyone who disagrees with a liberal and is hurting the church by outdated preaching; a "proof-texter," and a "Bible-spouter," can only quote a lot of scripture.

Left-winger: no such person in the church today!

Women's freedom: free at last, praise God, free at last; at least to compete with men for all activities, especially those that pertain to public appearances.

Authentic woman: one who holds liberal views, demands equal time and pay with men, vigorous, outspoken, aggressive, willing to attack preachers and elders to show them their dinosaur ways.

Progressive: connecting to the culture, speaking to the "boomers and busters," fulfilling human potential, and responsive to youth and authentic women.

Traditional: refuses to connect, fulfill, or be responsive, set in ways of dinosaur worship and study.

Extremist: anyone critical of "change agents."

Tolerance: one who accepts identity with other streams of the "American Restoration Denomination," broad-minded and loving enough to accept denominational brethren.

Victims: anyone suffering criticism from traditional right-wingers.

Worship change: realizing freedoms and potentials of all folks to ape denominational forms of worship.

Equality: a woman doing every-thing a man can do, no submission, no following, but showing the beauty of feminine potential and power.

Church renewal: changes to suit teens and young teens and young twenties, the worldly, and all the friends in denominations.

Worship renewal: making enough changes in worship songs and forms so that all well-known songs and ways are never used again.

Non-sexist: a man who will agree with a woman liberal.

Church of Christ (upper case "C"): one of three denominations born of the American Restoration Movement, and the one that is presently in the U.S.A., and the one that is perhaps, just perhaps, closest to the Bible.

Change agent: a person in a congregation helping a traditional Church of Christ to be a church of Christ.

Old hermeneutic: inadequate interpretive methods used only by legalists, proof-texters, Bible thumpers, and such as ignore context, history, culture, and eschatology.

New hermeneutic: an enlightened new method in response to being better educated, one that understands and applies New Testament teaching ac-cording to our modern culture.

New Testament: a love letter from the Lord.

Core gospel: teachings found in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and the only applicable teachings to our enlightened and educated generation.

Epistles: only the way certain first century teachers tried to apply the true "Core gospel" to their congregations and cultures.

(With apologies to the Wall Street Journal, January 21, 1994, p. A14 in an article by Dennis Prager!)

Guardian of Truth XXXVIII: 17, p. 8
September 1, 1994