Stop Borrowing Someone Else’s Words

The vocabulary you already have is more powerful than any outreach language you could import

Somewhere along the way, someone on your staff brought back a phrase from a conference. “unchurched.” “seeker.” “the lost.” “prospect.” Maybe it showed up in a sermon series graphic, or a training script for greeters, or a line in the bulletin. And maybe it landed fine. But maybe — if you’re honest — it felt slightly foreign coming out of your pastor’s mouth, or your own. Like a word borrowed from a tradition that isn’t yours, worn for a season because it was the only outreach vocabulary available.

That’s not a small thing. It’s worth stopping on.

Most outreach language in wide circulation was written by and for a particular kind of church — nondenominational, contemporary, growth-oriented, often quite young as institutions go. It works there because it fits there. But if your congregation carries two hundred years of history, a liturgical calendar, a confessional tradition, or simply a quieter and more reserved way of talking about faith, that borrowed vocabulary doesn’t fit. It sits on top of your church rather than growing out of it. And a congregation can feel that mismatch even when no one names it out loud — which is usually why the outreach language never quite catches on, no matter how many times it’s repeated from the pulpit.

Here’s the deeper problem underneath the awkward vocabulary: the words a church uses for the people outside its walls aren’t cosmetic. They reveal posture. “Prospect” puts your agenda at the center. “The lost” can carry real theological weight in some traditions and sound presumptuous in others. “Visitor” quietly assumes church is a place they’re passing through rather than a place they might belong. Every word choice is a small, unexamined statement of theology — and importing someone else’s words means importing someone else’s theology of who these people are and how your church relates to them.

So the more useful question isn’t “what’s the right outreach vocabulary?” It’s “what do we already call the people in our circles — and does that language reflect what we actually believe about them?” That’s a question only your congregation can answer, and it can’t be answered by adopting someone else’s script. It has to start with listening to how your own people already

talk, in the hallway and the fellowship hall, not just what a curriculum tells them to say from the platform.

This is why The Ripple Effect doesn’t hand every congregation the same language. Before any curriculum is introduced, the consultation asks what your church calls the people in its five circles of relationship — Ring 1 through Ring 5 — and builds the entire engagement around vocabulary your theology can actually sustain. A Sunday Morning Language Scorecard looks specifically at whether the words your congregation already uses from the platform welcome newcomers or quietly confuse them. None of it assumes evangelical shorthand or a megachurch playbook. It assumes your church’s own history, confession, and voice are the starting material, not an obstacle to work around.

A two-hundred-year-old sacramental congregation and a thirty-year-old nondenominational plant should not sound the same when they talk about the people God is calling them to reach. If your outreach language has always felt like it belonged to someone else, that discomfort was trying to tell you something true — and it’s not a problem your congregation needs to overcome. It’s a signal pointing you toward the vocabulary that was already yours.

Ask the Center for Healthy Churches about a Sunday Morning Language Scorecard for your congregation, and how The Ripple Effect builds its entire approach around your own theology and vocabulary — not a borrowed one.

Talk to the Center for Healthy Churches about how The Ripple Effect’s culture-building process could work in your congregation’s context — and what it would take to turn that silence into the first sentence.