Esoterica of the 2026 Convention Workbook
An odd-bin appendix to 374 overtures revealing the longest, the shortest, the most Greek, the most gloomy, the most likely to have been written by a chatbot, and much more.
The 2026 LCMS Convention Workbook contains 374 overtures across ten floor committees. The full corpus also has a long tail of curiosities and oddities to consider for no good reason at all.
Longest: 9-06, 9,264 words. Twenty times the corpus median, roughly the length of a New Yorker feature, except about Synod incorporation paperwork.
Shortest: 4-04, 77 words. Two WHEREAS clauses, one Resolved, done.
Most Greek: 9-48, at 104 hits — built around διάκονος, πρεσβύτερος, and ἐπίσκοπος as a critique of LCMS ministry vocabulary drift.
Most masculine voice: 10-10, “To Study Ecclesiastical Supervision in Light of Lutheran Confessions” scored against Ad Crucem’s 13-pair rubric of LCMS masculine-feminine coding (oh, horror). 10-10 hits seven of thirteen masculine categories: Authority, Doctrinal Clarity, Conflict Orientation, Structure & Order.
Most feminine voice: 7-08, English District, encouraging congregations to support the Concordias. Runner-up 3-04 from the Southeastern District is the only overture in the entire corpus to record zero masculine tokens against fifty-one feminine.
Most likely written with the help of a chatbot: a tie between 5-11 and 9-11, on the now-standard “delve into,” “tapestry,” “navigate the complexities” tells. Five hits each, which are low in absolute terms, meaning that you cannot say outright that “ChatGPT wrote this,” but there is a high probability that a human draft passed through an AI filter.
Most prolific congregation: St. Paul, Brookfield, IL, with thirteen overtures filed by a single congregation. Runners up, Good Shepherd (Lincoln, NE) and Trinity Fort Wayne, with nine each.
Most likely to spark debate disproportionate to its length: the Charlie Kirk martyr cluster (4-53, 4-54, 4-55). Three short overtures that will probably draw three times their proportionate share of floor time or get omnibused to the memory hole.
There are twenty-six awards in all, and the methodology is included (lexicons, heuristics, rubrics, caveats).
Read the full appendix: Esoterica of the 2026 Convention Workbook
I didn't think it was possible, but you have made the convention workbook entertaining. Well done! I'm looking forward to your analysis of the convention resolutions after they have been pasteurized and homogenized by the floor committees. Great work!
Do an analysis of the overtures that are the biggest waste of convention time. I'm sure that is difficult given the number of overtures that are either nothing more than reiterated virtue signalling or calls for studies that won't be completed for years at which time they will surely be out of date and not to mention utterly lacking in any meaningful conclusions.