Purpose of This Glossary

The arguments of this suite have repeatedly turned on distinctions between corporate-legal vocabulary and ecclesial-theological vocabulary. The two registers use overlapping words — member, authority, officer, governance, body — to mean structurally different things, and the failure to distinguish them is one of the recurring sources of the misalignments the suite has examined. This appendix gathers, in alphabetical order, the terms that have done significant work across the seven papers, with definitions that mark the corporate sense, the ecclesial sense, and the relation between them where the two senses are connected. The glossary is meant for use as a reference rather than as continuous reading; entries are written so that each can be consulted without reference to the others, with cross-references where the relations among terms warrant.

The definitions are not exhaustive legal or theological treatments. They are working definitions, calibrated to the suite’s arguments, that allow a reader to recognize which sense of a term is operative in a given context and to identify when a single word is being asked to do the work of two different categories. Where a term has both a corporate and an ecclesial sense, the glossary marks the distinction explicitly. Where a term belongs principally to one register, the glossary notes the register and indicates how the term interacts with the other.

Accountability. The condition of being answerable for the exercise of a role, decision, or stewardship to another party who has standing to receive the account. In the corporate sense, accountability operates within defined legal and fiduciary frameworks: officers are accountable to boards, boards to legal members, members to civil regulatory authorities, and the corporate entity itself to the courts and the public in matters where its conduct is subject to review. In the ecclesial sense, accountability is more comprehensive in scope and is grounded in the texts’ framework of mediated authority. Recognized leaders are accountable to Christ as head (1 Peter 5:4; Hebrews 13:17), to one another in the plurality of recognized eldership (Galatians 2:11–14), and to the body in the senses Paper 2 examined — the testing of teaching against Scripture, the visibility of significant decisions, and the participatory roles of the assembly in selection, discipline, and discernment. The suite has argued that the dual accountability of ecclesial leadership — to Christ and to the body — is constitutive of the office rather than optional, and that arrangements which acknowledge accountability in one direction while resisting it in the other have departed from the texts’ framework. See mediated authority, stewardship.

Assembly. Used throughout the suite as a translation-neutral term for the called-out body of believers in a particular setting, corresponding to the ekklēsia of the New Testament. The term is preferred to church in technical sections because it avoids the cluster of institutional connotations that church has accumulated in English usage and because it stays closer to the texts’ own register. Where this glossary refers to “the assembly,” the reference is to the local body of believers gathered together for worship, fellowship, and the work the New Testament describes; where the reference is to a wider association of such bodies, the context will indicate this. The assembly is not equivalent to the ministerial corporation that may serve as its legal vehicle, and this distinction is one of the recurring concerns of the suite. See ministerial corporation, corporate entity.

Body of Christ. The theological description of the assembly developed principally in Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12, and Ephesians 4, in which believers are members of a single body whose head is Christ. The metaphor emphasizes the genuine interdependence of members, the distribution of gifts across the body, the necessity of every member to the body’s life, and the priority of Christ’s headship over every internal arrangement. The body of Christ is not a corporate entity in the legal sense, and the membership of the body of Christ is not equivalent to corporate membership in any ministerial corporation. The suite has used the body metaphor as one of several biblical frames whose proper register must be distinguished from the structural implications it might be made to carry. See member, headship.

Corporate entity. The legal person constituted by the act of incorporation under civil law, distinct from the natural persons who hold offices within it. A ministerial corporation, like any other religious nonprofit corporation, is a corporate entity in this sense: it can hold property, enter contracts, sue and be sued, employ staff, and act in civil matters as a unified legal person. The corporate entity is a creature of civil law and exists by the law’s recognition; it is not equivalent to the assembly it serves, though it may be the legal vehicle through which the assembly conducts its civil affairs. The distinction between the corporate entity and the assembly is one of the suite’s recurring themes; arguments that conflate the two by speaking of the corporation as if it were the body of Christ, or speak of the body as if its identity were defined by its corporate form, have failed to maintain a distinction the texts themselves do not make and the law itself recognizes. See ministerial corporation, legal person.

Corporate governance. The set of structures, procedures, and relationships by which a corporate entity makes decisions, allocates authority, holds officers accountable, and conducts its affairs in conformity with its governing documents and applicable law. Corporate governance in a ministerial corporation typically includes the legal members who hold voting rights, the officers who exercise day-to-day authority on the members’ behalf, the board or council that deliberates significant matters, and the procedures that define how decisions move through these bodies. Corporate governance is structurally distinct from ecclesial polity, though the two interact: the corporate form is the legal vehicle through which certain ecclesial decisions take effect in civil terms, while ecclesial polity addresses the distribution of pastoral, doctrinal, and disciplinary responsibility within the assembly. The suite has argued that conflation of corporate governance with ecclesial polity — treating membership in the corporation as equivalent to membership in the body, or treating ecclesial offices as if their authority were derived from corporate position rather than from the texts that establish the offices — produces the misalignments examined throughout. See ecclesial polity, governance rights.

Discernment, congregational. The biblically authorized capacity of the assembly to test what is taught against Scripture and to recognize what is faithful from what is not. The texts treat this capacity as belonging to the body, not only to its officers; the Bereans of Acts 17:11 are commended for examining the apostle’s preaching against the Scriptures, and 1 Thessalonians 5:21 instructs the assembly to “prove all things; hold fast that which is good.” Congregational discernment is not equivalent to corporate voting or to the deliberative procedures of corporate governance; it is the body’s exercise of its own responsibility before God for the soundness of what it receives. The exercise of discernment does not bypass recognized teaching authority; it is the body’s faithful reception of teaching authority, with the testing the texts authorize. See body of Christ, Berean disposition.

Discipline, congregational. The exercise of corrective action by the assembly in response to grave and persistent sin, conducted in concert with pastoral leadership and oriented toward restoration. The biblical pattern, examined in Paper 2, includes Matthew 18:15–17 (the progressive engagement of one, then two or three, then the assembly), 1 Corinthians 5 (the gathered body’s action under apostolic instruction), and Titus 3:10–11 (the rejection of the divisive person after admonition). Discipline is not equivalent to corporate sanction or to administrative removal from staff or office; it is an ecclesial action with restorative purpose, distinct in nature from any concurrent corporate or employment consequences that may attend the same situation. See restoration, ecclesial polity.

Ecclesial polity. The distribution of pastoral, doctrinal, and disciplinary responsibility within the assembly, considered as a structural matter. Ecclesial polity addresses questions like how recognized leaders are identified and ordained, how teaching authority is exercised, how discipline is conducted, how the body’s discernment is exercised, and how participation in the body’s life is organized. Polity is not the same as corporate governance, though the two may interact in any given assembly that operates through a ministerial corporation. The New Testament gives ecclesial polity in the form of patterns and principles — the plurality and locality of elders, the qualifications of overseers, the participatory roles of the body — rather than in the form of a single specified institutional structure. The suite has argued that contemporary arrangements within ministerial corporations should be assessed against the polity principles the texts authorize, with explicit recognition that the corporate form is one administrative expression of the polity rather than the polity itself. See plurality of elders, qualifications.

Elder. In the New Testament, presbyteros, the office of recognized senior leadership in a local assembly, characterized in 1 Timothy 3, Titus 1, and 1 Peter 5. The texts treat elder, overseer (episkopos), and shepherd (poimēn) as overlapping rather than as separate offices, with each emphasizing a different aspect of the same recognized leadership. The qualifications for the office are overwhelmingly character qualifications, and the conduct of the office is consistently described in terms of stewardship under Christ as chief Shepherd, exemplary rather than coercive in its texture, plural rather than single in its appointment, and locally rooted rather than remotely exercised. The suite has argued that contemporary office that claims continuity with the New Testament elder is on stronger ground than contemporary office that claims continuity with apostleship, and that the polity principles of plurality and locality apply to the elder office as the texts establish it. See overseer, qualifications, plurality of elders.

Family business. A rhetorical frame, examined in Paper 4, in which the assembly is described as a family enterprise in which all members participate. The frame combines the warmth of family with the agency of business and assigns both, by implication, to all who hear. The suite has argued that the frame, used without clarification, performs structural work the metaphor cannot honor: the corporate arrangement of the typical ministerial corporation distributes ownership and decisional authority along narrower lines than the family-business language implies, with the result that members who orient themselves toward the implied stake encounter expectation mismatch when the actual structure becomes visible. The frame is not malicious; it is imprecise. Alternative frames — household stewardship, covenantal community with recognized elders, body of Christ at work, workers in the field, priesthood of all believers — capture what is true in the family-business language without importing the ownership implication. See household, priesthood of believers.

Fiduciary responsibility. In the corporate sense, the legal duty of officers and board members to act in the interests of the corporation and its members, with care, loyalty, and good faith. Fiduciary duty is enforceable in civil law and is breached when officers act for personal benefit at the corporation’s expense, fail to exercise reasonable care in their decisions, or violate the loyalty owed to the corporate entity. In the ecclesial sense, the closest analog is the stewardship language of 1 Corinthians 4:1–2 and the watching-for-souls language of Hebrews 13:17, but the analog is not exact: ecclesial stewardship is owed to Christ as head and to the body He has placed under the steward’s care, not to the corporate entity as such. Where ecclesial leaders also hold corporate office, they bear both kinds of responsibility, and the two should be distinguished even where they overlap. See stewardship, officer.

Flock. The biblical metaphor for the assembly developed in Psalm 23, John 10, Acts 20:28–29, and 1 Peter 5:1–4, emphasizing the vulnerability of those who belong, the need for protection and feeding, and the role of recognized leaders as shepherds under the chief Shepherd. The metaphor authorizes pastoral oversight in strong terms and qualifies it in equally strong terms — not domineering, not for shameful gain, exemplary rather than coercive, exercised over what belongs to God rather than to the shepherd. The flock is not equivalent to the membership roll of a corporation; it is the body of believers entrusted to the pastoral care of recognized elders in a particular setting. See shepherd, chief Shepherd.

Governance rights. In the corporate sense, the formal capacities held by legal members of a corporation: typically the right to vote in members’ meetings, to elect or confirm officers, to approve significant transactions, to amend governing documents, and to receive certain reports. In a ministerial corporation, governance rights are typically held by credentialed ministers who hold legal membership, and not by the broader congregational membership. The suite has argued that the distinction between governance rights in the corporate sense and participation in the body in the ecclesial sense must be maintained explicitly: members of the body who do not hold corporate governance rights are not, by the absence of those rights, diminished in their membership of the body, and members of the corporation who do hold governance rights are not, by virtue of those rights, elevated in their membership of the body. The two senses of membership are structurally distinct. See member, legal member.

Government of God. The theological category developed in Paper 6, referring to the rule of God exercised through Jesus Christ as head over all things to the church (Ephesians 1:20–23; Colossians 1:18). The government of God is Christological in its center, mediated in its present operation, and eschatologically reserved in its full instantiation: the kingdom has come near in Christ and is in some sense present, while its consummation belongs to a coming age. The suite has argued that contemporary ecclesial arrangements may participate in the government of God when they preserve the Christological center, acknowledge the mediated character of present authority, observe the eschatological reserve, and submit to the accountability structures the texts authorize, but that the identification of any particular human office or institution with the government of God in such a way that the office becomes immune from review is a conflation the texts do not authorize. See headship, eschatological reserve, mediated authority.

Headship. The theological category developed principally in Ephesians 1:20–23, Colossians 1:18, and 1 Corinthians 11:3, referring to the position of Christ over the assembly as its head. Headship is not merely metaphorical; the texts treat the headship of Christ as accomplished by the resurrection and seating at the right hand of God, comprehensive in scope, and continuous from the present age into the age to come. The headship is not transferable, shareable, or partially delegable to any human office; recognized leaders in the assembly serve as stewards under the head, not as participants in the headship itself. The suite has argued that the preservation of Christological headship in language, structure, and practice is the most fundamental discipline the framework requires, and that conflations of human office with headship — even where the language of headship is not formally used — represent the most serious form of structural misalignment. See Christ, stewardship, mediated authority.

Household. The biblical metaphor developed principally in 1 Timothy 3:15 (“the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth”) and Ephesians 2:19, referring to the assembly as the household of God. The metaphor emphasizes belonging, mutual obligation, internal ordering, and derived identity; it does not, by itself, specify a polity in the modern legal sense. The household stewardship frame, recommended in Paper 4 as one alternative to the family-business language, retains the warmth of the household metaphor while making the stewardship character of recognized leadership explicit. See family business, stewardship.

Inclusion. A term that has been used in two distinct senses across the suite, and the distinction is essential. Relational inclusion is the texture of belonging that members of the body have in one another and in the body’s life — the warmth of fellowship, the mutual recognition, the bearing of burdens, the participation in worship and the assembly’s ordinary life. Governance inclusion is the structural capacity to participate in the formal decisions of the corporate entity — to vote in members’ meetings, to approve significant transactions, to amend governing documents. The two are not equivalent, and the use of inclusion language without specification of which sense is meant is one of the recurring sources of expectation mismatch examined in Papers 1 and 4. The suite has argued that relational inclusion language should be paired with structural transparency about the locus and limits of governance inclusion, so that members can hold both senses accurately and the warmth of relational language is not asked to imply a structural participation the corporate form does not provide. See governance rights, member.

Legal member. A natural person who holds membership in a corporate entity in the sense recognized by civil law, with the rights and responsibilities that membership entails. In the typical ministerial corporation, legal membership is held by credentialed ministers and not by the broader congregational membership. Legal membership is structurally distinct from membership in the body of Christ, from membership in a local congregation in the relational sense, and from participation in the body’s biblically authorized agencies of discernment, selection, discipline, and financial visibility. The suite has urged that the distinction be maintained explicitly in the assembly’s self-description, so that the structural concentration of legal membership is acknowledged honestly rather than obscured by relational inclusion language that implies a wider distribution. See member, governance rights.

Mediated authority. The framework developed in Paper 6, in which recognized human leaders in the assembly exercise real authority, given by God, exercised within the body, and answerable both to Christ as head and to the body in its biblically authorized agencies. Mediated authority is real authority — not merely advisory or honorary — but it is the authority of stewards rather than of those who hold their position by their own warrant; its scope is the scope of what the office mediates rather than an independent prerogative of the office in itself. The framework distinguishes mediated authority from two failure modes: the reduction of leadership authority to mere fiction on the grounds that all authority belongs to Christ, which the texts do not support; and the elevation of leadership authority to direct or self-grounding status, which the texts also do not support. The proper understanding holds the framework intact: real authority, really mediated, under the head whose authority it serves. See headship, stewardship, accountability.

Member. A term that operates in several distinct senses across the suite and requires careful specification. Member of the body of Christ refers to a believer who has been incorporated into the body by the work of God and is one of its members in the theological sense (1 Corinthians 12:13, 27). Member of a local congregation refers to a believer who belongs to a particular local assembly and participates in its life. Legal member of a ministerial corporation refers to a natural person who holds membership rights in the corporate entity in the sense recognized by civil law. The three senses are not equivalent, and the use of member without specification of which sense is intended is one of the recurring sources of misalignment examined in Papers 1 and 4. A given person may occupy several of these categories at once or only some of them; the categories should be distinguished even where they overlap. See body of Christ, legal member, governance rights.

Ministerial corporation. The corporate entity, typically constituted under religious nonprofit law in the relevant jurisdiction, that serves as the legal vehicle for an ecclesial body. The ministerial corporation has legal members (typically credentialed ministers), officers, governing documents, and the standard apparatus of corporate governance. The ministerial corporation is not equivalent to the assembly it serves, though the two may overlap substantially in personnel and operations. The suite has argued that contemporary arrangements within ministerial corporations should be assessed against the polity principles the New Testament authorizes, with explicit acknowledgment that the corporate form is a modern administrative arrangement that the texts neither prescribe nor anticipate in its present shape. See corporate entity, ecclesial polity.

Officer. In the corporate sense, a person who holds a defined position within the corporate structure with specified responsibilities and authority — typically including positions like president, secretary, treasurer, and similar roles defined by the corporation’s governing documents. In the ecclesial sense, the term has sometimes been used for those who hold recognized offices in the assembly — elder, overseer, deacon — though minister is more common in current usage. The suite has urged that where the same person holds both corporate office and ecclesial office, the two roles should be distinguished even when they are exercised by the same individual, and that the responsibilities and accountabilities of each should be understood in their proper register rather than collapsed into a single composite category. See elder, fiduciary responsibility.

Overseer. Episkopos in the New Testament, used interchangeably with elder (presbyteros) for the recognized office of senior leadership in a local assembly (compare Acts 20:17 with Acts 20:28; Titus 1:5 with Titus 1:7). The term emphasizes the watching or oversight function of the office; the elder term emphasizes the senior or mature character of the officeholder; the shepherd term emphasizes the pastoral and feeding function. The three are not separate offices in the New Testament but overlapping descriptions of the same recognized leadership. See elder, shepherd.

Plurality of elders. The New Testament’s normative pattern of leadership in a local assembly, in which multiple elders serve together rather than a single elder serving alone (Acts 14:23; Titus 1:5; Philippians 1:1; Acts 20:17). The pattern distributes authority, builds in peer accountability, and reflects the texts’ consistent presupposition that the eldership of a local assembly is plural. The suite has argued in Paper 2 that plurality and locality are transferable principles from the apostolic pattern to contemporary practice, and that arrangements which concentrate authority in a single person within a local body have moved away from the polity principles the texts authorize. See elder, ecclesial polity.

Priesthood of believers. The theological category developed in 1 Peter 2:5 and 2:9, in which all believers are described as a holy priesthood and a royal priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices to God through Jesus Christ. The category locates the participation of all members in the priestly work of the assembly, alongside the New Testament’s clear teaching about particular offices within that priesthood. The priesthood of believers is one of the alternative frames Paper 4 proposed for capturing the universal participation that the family-business frame attempts to express, with the advantage of grounding that participation in an actual New Testament category. See body of Christ, member.

Qualifications. The criteria the New Testament establishes for those who hold the office of elder or overseer, given principally in 1 Timothy 3:1–7 and Titus 1:5–9. The qualifications are overwhelmingly character qualifications: above reproach, sober-minded, self-controlled, hospitable, not violent, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money, gentle, well thought of by outsiders, holding fast the faithful word as taught. The suite has argued in Paper 2 that the qualifications cannot be substituted by organizational competence, charisma, or other criteria the texts do not name, and that evaluation of those who hold the office must include the texts’ own criteria as central rather than as ornamental. See elder, overseer.

Rebellion. In the biblical sense as developed in Paper 3, the response of a person or people to the revealed voice of God characterized by sustained refusal of what God has commanded or promised, exemplified by the wilderness generation’s unbelief at Kadesh (Numbers 14) and the various provocations recorded in Exodus 17 and Numbers 20. The category is grave because the matter it names is grave; its proper application is reserved for cases where the matter at issue is one to which Scripture clearly speaks, where the refusal is sustained rather than occasional, and where patient correction has been given and rejected. The category is misapplied when extended to cover ordinary disagreement, prudential dispute, conscience-based objection, or scriptural questioning, and the suite has argued in Paper 3 that this misapplication produces predictable rhetorical effects that compromise the assembly’s capacity for self-correction. See wilderness warnings, Berean disposition.

Restoration. The orienting purpose of biblical discipline, distinguished from punishment or institutional protection. The pattern of Matthew 18:15–17 begins with the goal of “gaining” the brother; the pattern of 1 Corinthians 5:5 places the destruction of the flesh in the service of the spirit’s salvation in the day of the Lord; the pattern of 2 Corinthians 2:6–8 calls for the forgiveness and comfort of one whose sin has been disciplined, that he not be swallowed up with overmuch sorrow. Restoration as the orienting purpose distinguishes ecclesial discipline from corporate sanction, employment termination, or other administrative actions that may attend the same situation; the latter may have their own legitimate purposes, but they are not equivalent to the ecclesial action. See discipline, congregational.

Shepherd. The biblical category developed principally in 1 Peter 5:1–4, John 10, and Acts 20:28, referring to those who exercise pastoral care over the flock of God. The shepherd serves under the chief Shepherd to whom the flock belongs and to whom the shepherd is finally accountable. The texts describe the conduct of shepherding in explicit terms: not by constraint but willingly, not for shameful gain but with a ready mind, not domineering over those in the shepherd’s charge but being examples to the flock. The shepherd does not own the flock, does not exercise authority of his own warrant, and does not exempt himself from the accountability the chief Shepherd holds him to. See flock, chief Shepherd, mediated authority.

Stewardship. The framework developed in Paper 2, in which recognized leaders in the assembly are described as stewards (oikonomoi) of what has been entrusted to them by another. Paul’s self-description in 1 Corinthians 4:1–2 places stewardship at the center of how those who serve are to be regarded and evaluated: “Let a man so account of us, as of the ministers of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God. Moreover it is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful.” The steward is not the owner of what he stewards; his discretion is bounded by the householder’s purposes; his evaluation is in terms of faithfulness to what was entrusted. The framework of stewardship is the core category by which the suite has argued ecclesial authority should be understood, distinguishing it both from proprietorship (in which the leader treats the assembly as his own) and from mere agency (in which the leader exercises only delegated executive function). See mediated authority, fiduciary responsibility.

Submission. A term that requires careful specification because it operates differently in different texts. In Hebrews 13:17, submission is paired with obedience to those who watch for souls as those who must give account; the submission is grounded in the watching and the accountability, and is not absolute. In Ephesians 5:21, the assembly is instructed to submit to one another in the fear of God, establishing a mutuality that texts on submission to particular offices presuppose. In 1 Peter 5:5, the younger are instructed to submit to the elder, with all clothing themselves with humility toward one another. The suite has argued that the language of submission, properly understood, is not the language of unconditional compliance to whatever an office requires, but the language of taking seriously the mediated authority the texts establish, within the framework of dual accountability that the same texts maintain. See mediated authority, Hebrews 13:17.

Transparency. The structural condition under which significant decisions, financial matters, and operational choices are made visible to the body in accessible terms. The pattern is grounded in 2 Corinthians 8:20–21, where Paul takes pains to handle the collection in a manner honorable in the sight of men as well as the Lord. Transparency does not require the transfer of decisional authority; it requires the giving of an accounting to those who are properly entitled to it. The suite has argued that transparency is one of the structural disciplines that supports the framework of mediated authority and prevents the conflations examined in Paper 6, and that arrangements in which significant decisions are not visible to the body in some appropriate form have departed from the apostolic pattern regardless of their legal form. See accountability, visibility.

Visibility. The practical form transparency takes — the actual mechanisms by which significant decisions, reasoning, and outcomes are communicated to the body. Visibility includes accessible financial reporting, communication of significant decisions with the considerations that bore on them, and the regular reporting of the assembly’s life in terms members can engage. Visibility is not the same as authority; the body that has visibility into a decision is not, by virtue of that visibility, the decision-maker. But visibility is the condition under which the body can hold its leaders accountable in the senses the texts authorize, and its absence is one of the indicators that the framework of mediated authority has lapsed in operation even where it is affirmed in formal documents. See transparency, accountability.

Voice. Used in the suite, particularly in Paper 4, for the structural reality of being heard in decisions that affect a member’s life in the assembly, distinguished from care (the texture of pastoral concern that flows to members) and from governance rights (the formal capacities of legal members of a corporation). Voice includes participation in the biblically authorized agencies of the body — discernment, selection, discipline, financial visibility — and the channels by which member concerns reach those who exercise authority and receive a response on the merits. Voice is not equivalent to corporate governance, but it is not nothing either; it is the structural counterpart to relational care, and its presence or absence is one of the indicators of whether the framework’s disciplines are in operation. See care, inclusion, participation.

Wilderness warnings. The cluster of biblical passages in Psalm 95:7–11 and Hebrews 3:7–4:11 that take up the wilderness generation’s unbelief and apply it as warning to the assembly. The warnings address response to God’s revealed voice, the disposition of the heart toward His promises, and the danger of hardening through sustained unbelief. The suite has argued in Paper 3 that the warnings are biblically serious instruments whose proper use is essential to the assembly’s life, and that their misapplication — extension to ordinary disagreement, prudential dispute, or scriptural questioning — both compromises the assembly’s capacity for self-correction and dilutes the warnings’ weight by using them in cases that do not meet the texts’ own conditions. See rebellion, Berean disposition.

A Note on Cross-Register Terms

Several terms in this glossary — most notably member, authority, governance, officer, body — operate in both the corporate and the ecclesial register, with structurally different meanings in each. The work of the suite has depended on keeping the registers distinct, not because the corporate register is illegitimate or because the ecclesial register is unrelated to administrative reality, but because the conflation of the two produces the misalignments the suite has examined throughout. The reader who has worked through the seven papers and consulted this glossary should be in a position to recognize, in any given context, which register a term is operating in, whether that operation is appropriate to the context, and whether the alignment between language and structure that the suite has urged is being maintained or eroded in the speech under examination. The glossary is an instrument in service of that recognition, and its value is in the use the reader makes of it as the work of disciplined alignment continues.