This is for all of you knowledgeable Lutherans and former Lutherans out there.

Is it common for Lutherans to call their worship service a “Mass?” Is it even done?

The reason: I just passed a Lutheran church that had a big sign out front advertising “La Misa en Espanol,”
and I was wondering if I had grounds before I started raising a stink about it.

(In case you don’t know, Lutheran churches in some areas, particularly in Chicago, have been accused of basically pretending to be Roman Catholic for the sake of Hispanic immigrants. Or, to put it another way, of having a lot of traditional Hispanic Roman Catholic trappings about and doing nothing to disabuse anyone of the notion that this might actually not be a Roman Catholic church.)

From the comments: Don asks a good question:

But maybe the more relevant question is not what “Mass” means to a Lutheran, but what “misa” means in Spanish, esp. to an Hispanic who has little or no English. I.e., how does a Spanish-speaker read “misa” — “generic Christian service, which might be a Catholic Mass” or “Catholic Mass”?

I don’t know. Anyone?Anyone?

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