evangelical verbs

Herb Stahlke hfwstahlke at GMAIL.COM
Fri Aug 14 11:43:39 UTC 2009


During my wife's final approval meeting for Lutheran ordination, a
Lutheran seminary professor criticized her use of "pastoring" as a
transitive verb as not Lutheran usage.

Herb

On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 3:27 AM, Randy
Alexander<strangeguitars at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Randy Alexander <strangeguitars at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: evangelical verbs
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 11:35 AM, Neal Whitman<nwhitman at ameritech.net> wrote:
>> Our church isn't especially evangelical, but when we actually attend, I've
>> noticed a few lexical idiosyncrasies. One is "lift up" meaning "bring to
>> your attention". Another is "worship" -- detransitivized with a definite
>> understood object, and causativized (i.e. "cause or allow someone to worship
>> [God]"), as in "At last week's service, we worshipped 442 people, and
>> collected $2320." I've kept meaning to do a blog post on this one, with the
>> title "My church worships me." They also tend to talk about "having
>> fellowship" or "fellowshipping" in reference to social events like potluck
>> dinners or prayer breakfasts or outings for various groups.
>
> Or maybe "Church will worship you for a small fee" or some such.
>
> In my minister of music days ('90s) I had never heard "worship" used
> that way, but "fellowship" was very common.  But it was only a
> Presbyterian church.  I shied away from more evangelical
> denominations.
>
> --
> Randy Alexander
> Jilin City, China
> My Manchu studies blog:
> http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu
>
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