"Filter by Service"

Muslim name AND a French Beret

By Larry Beane

The new and improved LCMS Locator on the website has an interesting feature.  When you are looking for a church, you can specify the type of service you are looking for.

This could be a helpful feature, considering the "box of chocolates" nature of our Synod - you never know what you're going to walk into on Sunday morning.  So, you might expect when you "filter by service" you would see certain fields in the drop-down box, maybe a list like this:

TRADITIONAL
CONTEMPORARY
BLENDED
AGING HIPPY
DANCING GIRLS
SMELLS AND BELLS
NAILS ON A CHALKBOARD
PAGE FIVE NO CHANTING
FRUITY EMERGENT RELEVANT

or perhaps:

HIGH MASS
LOW MASS
NO MASS
NO MAS
NO
NOOOOOOO!

... or some such.

I was surprised to see that it is actually a list of ethnicities (for the most part).  So, you might imagine a list something like this:

GERMAN
GERMAN-AMERICAN
PRUSSIAN
HESSIAN
GERMAN-NORTHERN
GERMAN-GERMAN
SWEDISH
NORWEGIAN
DANISH

with maybe a token

SERBIAN

or

ICELANDIC

thrown in for a little Lutheran-style diversity.

However, the list is a little more diverse than one might expect.  But hey, Lutherans are all over the globe, speaking every imaginable language these days, so this isn't such a crazy list after all:

ASIAN INDIAN (as opposed to "CLEVELAND INDIAN?")
CHINESE (an hour later and you want to go back to church)
ETHIOPIAN
FRENCH (a.k.a. FREEDOM PEOPLE by the FOX-NEWS crowd)
GERMAN (ya think?)
HEARING IMPAIR (a.k.a. SPELLING IMPAIRED)
HEARING IMPAIRED
HISPANIC
HMONG ("Everybody blames the Lutherans...")
JAPANESE
JEWISH (Wait, what?)
KOREAN
MUSLIM
OTHER AFR..

Whoa!  Back up...

MUSLIM.  Did I just read "MUSLIM"?  Yep, MUSLIM.  That's what Confessional Lutherans call the "TURK" or the "MOHAMMEDAN."

At any rate, you can actually search for MUSLIM services in the LCMS at the LCMS website.  That's, er, interesting.

I still think a search tab for "traditional" would be more helpful and practical, though.

HUMOR ENABLED