Words, words, words

In the musical My Fair Lady, Eliza Doolittle gets so put out at her suitor that she sings, "Words, words, words...is that all you blighters can do?"

Ruminating on Mike's words yesterday about church of Christ, rather than Church of Christ (that some are still writing the name with a small case c), I had to think to myself, Who cares? Who cares when they see the name of the church with a small c?
Only English teachers, I guess, who wonder what kind of education those people have.

There was a time in Hamlin during the thousandth split when a group moved to the other side of the tracks into a house and put up a huge sign out front that said
THE CHURCH. Now that's in your face! But again, who cares? This striving at dotting i's and crossing t's is getting on my last nerve. At the risk of being disfellowshipped by some, I believe that God doesn't sanction the restoration of the early church in the way we have done it. He must be shaking his head as we go all over the New Testament looking for things to implement "exactly as they did it."
Would that we had chosen to implement the church in Acts 2:42-47. Wonderful words there.

In his book Telling Secrets, Frederick Buechner writes, "Words wear thin after a while, especially religious words. We have spoken and listened to them so often that after a while we hardly even hear them anymore." Perhaps we need to do as Buechner proposed, "make poetry out of prose" so the words and the quest have more meaning and power.