The Church Is Not Glocal -- It's Catholic, Pt. III

Part Three of Three
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One of my mentors, a pastor whom I greatly respect and admire, once passed off a change in denominational polity as "mere semantics." With all due respect to my mentor, semantics are vital to understanding who we are. The difference between different words is a difference in how we think about ourselves. Having bishops instead of presidents may seem inconsequential, but it is a mark which separates the Church from the Lion's Club. Having a diocese or synod rather than a region distinguishes the Body of Christ from a nation or a business.

Let me be clear. Bishops and diocese are not what makes us the Church. We are the Church because we are an in-breaking of the coming Kingdom of God, called and united by the Holy Spirit, baptized into Christ's Death and Resurrection, and upheld as the Body of Christ through the Blessed Sacrament. If our steeples crumbled, our vestments rotted, and our lexicon vanished, we would still be the Church. A rose by any other name, as it were.

But our language should further differentiate us. We participate in God's creative act by giving names, by altering the fabric of our culture.

Language is a key part of culture. It distinguishes one people from another. People I interact with know I am from Georgia because I occasionally slip out a "y'all" or an "ain't." When I visited London, they knew I was an American because I was surprised when my meal came with "chips" and not a bag of Lay's. In Germany, they knew I was an anglophone because I paused before ordering a Bratwurst, searching for the words.

Language not only differentiates between cultures but also frames the way we think about certain subjects. For instance, Oxford historian Chris Wickham once remarked that the christological debates which so occupied the East, with Greek's multiple terms for varying modes of being, made less sense in Latin, and so the West largely ignored the subject. Or, more broadly, think of the debates which rage over vocabulary choice and even punctuation. We make sense of each other and the world through our language.

To quote Toliken, "[E]ach langauge represents a different vision of life."

Wall Street has a term for the intersection of the global and the local, the universal and the particular: "glocal." Wikipedia offers this history of the term:

The term first appeared in the late 1980s in articles by Japanese economists in the Harvard Business Review. According to the sociologist Roland Robertson, who is credited with popularizing the term, glocalization describes the new outcome of local conditions towards global pressures. At a 1997 conference on "Globalization and Indigenous Culture," Robertson said that glocalization "means the simultaneity -- the co-presence -- of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies."

How does a multinational corporation succeed in a new market foreign to the corporation's origin? By commodifying the local culture. And so, at Dunkin' Donuts in South Korea, you see bean paste donuts. Next door at the McDonald's, you see burgers with kimchi.

Let me say here that this process is not inherently bad. One of the best Italian dinners I've ever had was at a culinary school in Daegu, South Korea. Some of the best barbecue I've ever had was a Korean-fusion place (with kimchi cole slaw) in an Atlanta suburb. The process can be reversed in which local businesses utilize new, international tastes rather than multinational companies taking advantage of local idiosyncrasies.

So if "glocalization" is not inherently bad, why do I resist the term so vehemently?

When we talk about the Church, we have a language for describing and making sense of what it means to be within the Body of Christ. We have a way of thinking that differentiates us from the international companies and non-profits and which sets us apart as the ecclesia. And so, when we talk about our concern for the local and the universal, we have a term for it. We are catholic. We confess to believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church -- not a glocal Church. We have our own way of thinking about what we do, and if we start borrowing from Wall Street, then we risk becoming a multinational non-governmental organization rather than the catholic Church.

Adopting business terminology to describe the nature of the Church means that we are letting business, rather than Scripture, the Tradition, or Jesus, frame the debate around what it means to be the Body of Christ and what it means to worship the Risen Lord.