Words are our friends

I don’t know if the synod could have picked a name for a not-a-program more vulnerable to verbal high jinks than “Ablaze!”. First of all, it makes the capitalization, grammar, and punctuation features on your word processor go berserk. Second, there are so many incendiary! words related to burning! or its effects, it’s just hard not to heat! things up by taking aim and firing! a few of them off now and then. Even the Ablaze! proponents do it. Take the Southern District and their last year’s “Ablazing Grace – Brushfires-Ablaze.” I wonder how the folks in Florida, Oklahoma, and Texas feel about that. And come on… “Ablazing Grace?!” Though it pains me, I’ll refrain from a ditty digression. And then there’s the Nebraska District’s suggestion of starting a “Prairie Fire.” Honestly, since their own state, not to mention their neighboring states, have been in a drought for nearly a decade, you just have to ask, “What were they thinking?”

If you can keep your blood pressure down, poking around Ablaze! links can be rather entertaining. One led me to something called an LCMS Campus “Confabulation.” No doubt, with its rather simple phonetic construction, verbiphages probably spell this word during second-grade elimination rounds. And, while my mother-in-law tells me they used it somewhere in Mary Poppins, I, nevertheless, had to dig out my dictionary. I find it gratifying that our Lutheran college-level students are being challenged to improve their vocabulary. After all, some of them will be going on to seminary, where they use real whoppers like “concupiscence.” Yes, my beloved consortium of Confessionals, Conflagrate! is causing concision and confrontational conversation in the Missouri Consociation, but that doesn’t have to mean our capitulation to contumatious pressure from the liberal contingencies!! Er, sorry. A dictionary in the hands of an amateur is a dangerous thing. Where I meant to go was, it’s a shame so many congregations are laying aside the meaty vocabulary of the hymnal in favor of the whipped-cream language of contemporary Christian music. Which would you rather hear from little Lucy on the way home from church: twenty-seven rounds of “Celebrate Jesus, Celebrate?” or “Dad, what’s a paraclete?” Oi! No wonder we’re doomed. My spellchecker just suggested I try the word “parakeet.”