Talking to People Who Aren’t in the Room Yet

Most of what a church puts out into the world is written, without anyone quite deciding to, for the people already inside it. We use the words we’ve always used, assume the knowledge we’ve always had, and speak the way we speak among ourselves. Which is natural. It’s also the very thing that quietly shuts out the person we most want to reach.

Because online, your audience is not only the folks in the chairs on Sunday. It’s the searching stranger who has never once set foot in a church, doesn’t know the stories, doesn’t have the vocabulary, and is standing at the edge trying to understand what they’re looking at. If everything you say is written for insiders, that person feels it immediately. Not welcomed exactly, but not spoken to either. Just quietly reminded that this is a room they aren’t part of.

The Curse of Knowing Too Much

There’s a simple reason this happens to faithful, well-meaning churches, and it isn’t carelessness. It’s that we know too much to remember what it’s like not to know.

When you’ve spent years inside the family, a hundred things feel obvious that are not obvious at all to an outsider. Words we use constantly carry meaning we never stop to explain. References we toss off assume a whole background the newcomer doesn’t have. We’re not trying to talk over anyone’s head. We’ve simply forgotten that our normal is another person’s foreign language. The searching person reads it, senses they’re missing something everyone else apparently understands, and feels more like an outsider than before they started.

You can watch this happen with a single unexplained word. To a lifelong member it’s ordinary furniture. To a newcomer it’s a small locked door, a quiet signal that this was written for someone else.

How to Speak So an Outsider Can Lean In

The fix isn’t to water anything down. It’s simply to remember, as you write, that someone new is reading over your shoulder, and to welcome them into the conversation instead of assuming they’re already in it.

A few habits make all the difference.

When you use a word or an idea that carries insider meaning, take one extra sentence to explain it plainly, the way you would for a friend who’d never heard it.

Write the way you actually talk, warm and human, instead of slipping into a formal register that puts distance between you and the reader.

Lead with the thing an outsider actually cares about, the ache or the question they came in with, rather than opening in a way only the initiated would follow.

And picture one real searching person as you write, not a crowd, so your words carry the warmth of speaking to a single soul rather than addressing a room.

None of this makes your message thinner. If anything, saying things plainly, without leaning on shorthand, forces a clarity that serves the seasoned members too. Clear is not the same as shallow. The deepest truths can be spoken in the simplest words, and usually land harder when they are.

Plain Words Are a Form of Hospitality

Underneath all of this is something more than communication strategy. It’s hospitality.

Speaking plainly to the outsider is a way of loving them before you’ve ever met them. It says we thought about you. We didn’t assume you already knew. We cleared the jargon out of the doorway so you could actually come in. Jesus taught the deepest things imaginable using seeds and sheep and coins and bread, the plain stuff of ordinary lives, so that regular people could understand and be drawn in. Meeting people in words they already have is not a lowering of the message. It’s exactly how the message was always meant to travel.

So take an honest look at what your church says online, and read it as a curious stranger would. Notice the words you never explain, the knowledge you assume, the moments an outsider would quietly feel shut out. Then open the door. Say it the way you’d say it to someone you’d love to see walk in for the first time. Because some of them are reading right now, standing just outside the room, waiting to see if anyone in there is actually talking to them.