Learning the Christian Language

I realize this title might turn some of you off - don't let it stop you from reading further. I'm not referring to learning a special subset of the english language for use in Christian settings. I'm talking about an approach to church that views the entire Christian life as analogous to learning a foreign language. I ran accross this paragraph in "Reimagining Spiritual Formation" by Doug Pagitt pastor at Solomon's Porch in Minneapolis. I'll quote the whole paragraph, then comment further. I'm not really sure of the etiquett for quoting and linking on blogs, if anyone has any input, I'm open.
Doug writes: "In many ways, becoming Christian is much like learning our native language; we pick it up when we are immersed in it. I would guess that nearly all of us spoke and communicated long before we started our formal education. What we then learned in school was not the beginning of language use, but the refining of it. In educational settings, the theory of language acquisition through immersion is by far the most successful means of learning. So it is with Christian faith. Rather than seeing Christianity as belief we acquire in a completed form, we ought to enter into it with the understanding that we are at the beginning of a life-long process of discovery and change. Ours is a faith that is lived, from beginning to end."
I like this comparison of Christianity to language learning for a couple reasons. First, when learning a new language, the worst possible way to do it is to learn a set of facts about the language. Some of the interns that were with me this past summer in Spain learned that even though they were getting "A"s in their spanish classes, they really weren't all that comfortable actually speaking the language. Training people in a set of truths about God, Jesus, and Humanity may not be the best way to help them actually live in the way of Jesus. Much better to immerse both ourselves and newcomers to the community of faith in life together.
Second, knowing facts about a language isn't the best test of how well a person knows the language. My best friend in high-school was Uruguayan. He also almost failed spanish class. Did he know Spanish? Sure. He spent most of the time correcting our teacher. But when it came to the rules of grammar and how to conjugate verbs, he was often at a loss. Many times in the church we measure how well someone is progressing in the faith (or whether or not they are even part of the faith) by how well they can explain the faith and their experience of it. Somer and I find it difficult sometimes to explain what we implicitly understand and do and experience with relationship to God. This caused us problems when we were evaluated by World Harvest Mission two years ago - making them wonder about our intimacy with God. I mention that not to criticize WHM, but to say that I've experienced first-hand the misunderstanding and frustration that comes from forgetting the language-like nature of our faith.
What if we viewed church as one long experiment in learning the Christian language? I think I want to ponder this some more and come back to it in a few months. I'd love to hear how some of you see these ideas playing out in your specific context.