Worship 101 Lutheran Worship in America

There isn’t a set pattern for “Lutheran worship.” Instead, it’s easier to talk about worship that happens in the United States. As we started talking about worship we went down this rabbit hole and you are invited to this bonus episode that offers a very basic approach to Lutheranism in the United States. 

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Scripture quotations from the COMMON ENGLISH BIBLE. © Copyright 2011 COMMON ENGLISH BIBLE. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Welcome to Facets of Faith, our Worship One One series. I've been teasing you with the idea of getting into worship over and over and over again. But before we get into the specifics of the worship that St. John does week in and week out, I want to back up a little bit and talk about the history of Lutheran worship and how Lutheran liturgy, we'll explain that word in a minute, how Lutheran liturgy came to be from 1517 through the people moving into America and then through the creation of worship resources, which are ultimately called hymnals, and we'll talk a little bit about the story of those. So once again, we've got Keith with us, and he's gonna kind of help guide us in this conversation.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

So as a uh as a uh jumping off point, um, as I had mentioned in the opening uh remarks before we started recording, I've been a Lutheran for 15 to 20 years now, maybe about 20 years, but I really have very limited experience with how the Lutheran tradition developed in America. I mean, I understand, you know, um Martin Luther and where that came from, but then there was this, like in my mind, there's this fast-forward whatever, 400 years to 1980 or 1990, when whenever I converted from Catholicism to become a Lutheran. How did we get here? What does our tradition look like, and more importantly, how did it start in in America?

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Yeah, and that is true. We frequently jump from 1517 when Luther legendarily nailed those theses on the door, and then we don't talk about the formation and development of liturgy again until maybe the 80s, 90s, when there's kind of this boom of a new style of worship. Um, so if you think back, America is 250 years old. We just learned that, that's exactly 250 years old, but before that, like a hundred years before that, people were already immigrating to the land and they were bringing with them their native religions, right? The religions that they were celebrating in their home countries. And so initially some of those early immigrants were Danes, Swedes, um, people in that neck of the woods, and so they would bring their particular liturgical styles with them. And then at some point we started getting Germans coming over. They brought their liturgical influences over, and then for the first time ever, these Lutherans had to start to figure out what it meant to have Lutheran worship as opposed to German worship or Swedish worship or Danish worship. And so they became almost like a melting pot of liturgy, and they would start to kind of work together to find different patterns of worship and things like that. Because the Lutheran church never had a strict policy of this is exactly the way worship must go. There's always been a level of cultural context influencing the shape, the structure, the language, the music of worship. So when you come to America, their culture suddenly changes, so therefore the worship starts to shift too. And so you see them kind of borrowing things from here and there, and you hear about uh, you know, arguments over, you know, my liturgy is better than your liturgy, we should do my liturgy, not yours, that kind of stuff. Um, and that kind of continues on and on through, and then you start to get different denominations of Lutheranism with Missouri Synod and Lutheran Church in America and the American Lutheran Church and a bunch of other little ones that I can't name off the top of my head right now. And they all have their different styles. And as printing becomes cheaper and more available, literacy rates are going up, uh, people started to develop hymnals, and these hymnals gave a level of pattern of worship and a repertoire of music they could use. Now, each denomination tended to have their own, but every now and then they would collaborate and they would actually work together to create a hymnal that would be used across multiple denominations of Lutheranism. And so that created some level of cohesion, but when you look at uh like the rubrics, I always find this fascinating. The rubrics, if you don't know, um hymnals are the books that we use in worship or that have a lot of the words in worship that have the language we use as well as a bunch of songs that we sing. And the rubrics are those italicized words, much like in a screenplay, that give you directions and tell you how to do something. And the rubrics often say things like, This may happen, the presiding minister may do this, the congregation may do this. And so then rather than the hymnal being this prescriptive, this is how it must be done, the hymnal becomes a resource of liturgy and things like that. So, really, from the time that people came to America and were finding themselves in conversation with people from other countries, this became a creative cultural, contextual melting pot of liturgy. And even now, liturgy looks very different even within ELCA churches because it's very context dependent. That was a very long answer to a short question, but I, you know, I couldn't help but keep going.

SPEAKER_01 5:49

I listened to every word, but I also could not help myself from thinking of okay, I have this question, this question, so I'm gonna start at the beginning. Fair enough. The so the so you started going down the path of Missouri Synod and not Missouri Synod. Yeah, Wisconsin, right. So we are Missouri Synod? No, we are east of the Mississippi Synod.

SPEAKER_00 6:16

So I sorry, I shouldn't be laughing. Um, but for folks who are watching from home, our cameraman is laughing, and that is making me laugh. So um when I say Missouri Synod, so language gets tricky. Anytime you're talking about anything, language gets tricky. So there's different denominations, right? And denominations are groups of um Christians that follow a particular set of beliefs, theology, um, way of structuring, things like that. And so Lutheranism started in 1517, right? Pretty much right off the bat, there became different pseudo-denominations. They didn't call them that yet, but different denominations, different localized chapters of this religion that practice things and believe things slightly differently. And so as time progresses, these denominations become more institutionalized, become more of a thing. And then when they came to America, they founded new groupings based off of shared experiences, shared um beliefs, shared theologies, structure of church, etc. Now, what the different denominations of Lutheranism were named, that's where it gets confusing. Because one of those denominations is called the Missouri Synod.

SPEAKER_01 7:39

Um guessing was not founded in Missouri?

SPEAKER_00 7:43

I actually don't know. Um I'm not Missouri Synod, so I don't know. I just know that that's what they're called, and it's a denomination of Lutheranism. There's another one um called the Wisconsin Synod, it's the same kind of thing. Whereas some of the others were um like American Lutheran Church, that was a denomination. The Lutheran Church in America was a denomination, they just didn't use the synod word. And then in our denomination, which is Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Oh, ELCA. Yeah, so the ELCA is on the same level structurally as the Missouri Synod, we then have smaller structures under that umbrella called synods. But we use that word differently. Differently. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:25

So what is the without getting into a philosophical rabbit hole, what is the like what's the primary difference between ELCA and let's pick one, pick something else, like Missouri Synod or Wisconsin Synod. We believe in Jesus differently. I mean, I feel like we're Lutherans, so we probably all share basically the same beliefs.

SPEAKER_00 8:45

There are there are. There's a lot of similarities between the two. We both go back, um, or we all go back to Luther, we all go back to the Augsburg Confession. If you're curious, look it up on Google. It's a very big book. Um we all kind of go back to those same roots. But then structures of how worship gets built and how church gets led, that's where a lot of the big differences come between the Lutherans. One, I was actually just talking to someone about this on Sunday. One of the most obvious differences between Missouri Synod and Wisconsin Synod and then the ELCA is that the ELCA ordains women. Hi. Missouri Synod and Wisconsin Synod don't. They also uh practice something called um, oh, I forget how they phrase it, and I don't want to use the wrong term, but they have a communion practice where only members of the church can commune there. And so in ELCA Lutheran communing at a Missouri Synod church would not be considered um apropos. Whereas ELCA kind of has the approach of this is Jesus table, come on down. So these are not um thank you.

SPEAKER_01 9:54

So these are not theological biblical differences as like so, for instance, Jewish people do not believe that Jesus Christ is God's Son. Christians do. So that like, I mean, I'm I'm using that as a it as a very strong, you know, dichotomy to illustrate the difference in religion. You could even take that a step further and say, okay, well, Catholics, you know, the Catholic tradition believes a certain way, which is different than Lutherans, which is different than Presbyterians and Protestant or um Methodists, etc. There's not, this is a statement poses as a question, there's not a difference in theological belief between Missouri Synod, ELCA, Wisconsin. We believe in Jesus the same way. We believe that the Eucharist is what it is, baptism, sacraments, you know, etc. etc. We get stuck on the you know, the the edge case details. Should we or should we not allow women to be ordained? Should we uh allow or not um confirmed members of the congregation to receive the Eucharist or not, right? Again, I'm not minimizing those differences, I'm just saying these are not theological differences. Oh, we believe in Jesus a different way, or is there?

SPEAKER_00 11:20

So I I'm gonna start off with what I don't know, and I'm gonna move into what I do know. Um I don't know for sure the exact communion theology, I don't know for sure the exact theological specifics of Missouri Synod, Wisconsin, Synod. I've had friends in those denominations, but I'm just we've never got into those topics. Um but then I would hesitate to say that the ordaining of women is not a theological concept. Because the fact that the ELCA ordains women comes from a theological basis.

SPEAKER_01 11:55

Okay, that would be a good idea.

SPEAKER_00 11:56

And it did because it's a theology is how we understand God and what God is up to in the world. And so in our theology, we understand that God is speaking through um humanity, all of humanity in all its varied forms and and guises. And so there, and there's theological reasons why the ELCA says we do promote these other things that um the Missouri Synod does not. So I don't want to say there's no theological differences because I view who we're ordaining and who we're communing as theological concepts. It's just not kind of those core who is Jesus kind of stuff. Until next time, this has been Facets of Faith and a Worship 101, and we can't wait to see you next week.