“Verbicide,” C. S. Lewis writes in his excellent collection of lectures called Studies in Words, “the murder of a word, happens in many ways.” Lewis goes on to explain that there are a few more common ways that words are murdered: inflation (using “sadism” for “cruelty,” as an example) or verbiage (using a word in a way that implies a promise that will never be kept; for example, describing something as “significant” without any reference to what it might signify). Over the last five years, we’ve been witnessing just such a crime. It has, sadly, been a corruption in parts, a slow death that has gone almost unnoticed by all but the most observant. The victim: the verb “to follow.”
To wit, ask yourself what it means to follow something or someone. Think about the ways you’ve last used that word, whether you were referring to watching your favorite television series, like Lost, or being the dedicated fan of a band, like U2. Do you participate in social network sites, such as Facebook or Twitter?
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This isn’t just a journal full of God-talk.
As we wrote and edited each article, we thought about how to make it personal, conversational, and life giving. From Chris Webb’s focus on what it means to be honest as we face God to Juanita Rasmus’s candid story of transformation, and from Dallas Willard’s challenge to relinquish our kingdoms and enter exile to James Bryan Smith’s call to look at the stories we tell ourselves about what God is really like, we asked ourselves and one another, What does it mean to each of us, personally and corporately, to follow the Jesus way? The point isn’t just a magazine full of interesting insights but, as our tagline suggests, that we together provide a forum for authentic transformation, a springboard for real conversations and spiritually renovating practices. Disciples, as John Ortberg said in San Antonio and relates in his article later on, are handcrafted, not mass-produced
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