Full Text for Lutheran Worship 2- Volume 0 - Introduction (Video)

ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 00.LW2 Captioning provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 ******** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ******** >> DR. ARTHUR JUST: My name is Arthur Just, and I am a professor of exegetical theology at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I have been a pastor since 1980, and the first four years of my ministry I spent as a pastor at Grace Lutheran Church in Middletown, Connecticut, a lovely parish on the Connecticut River. We had about three hundred souls, a congregation that had some conflict but was really a wonderful experience for me. I've been at the seminary now for twenty years. I'm starting my twenty-first year. And I�ve taught a number of things in the course of those twenty years. For a long while, twelve years, my primary area of teaching was homiletics. Throughout that time, I've always taught Lutheran worship, although liturgy in Lutheran worship is, in a sense, a bit of a hobby for me. It's a secondary aspect of my work because my doctoral studies and my studies at the STM level were in the New Testament I went to the seminary that I now teach at, and I received my Masters of Sacred Theology from Yale Divinity School in 1984 in New Testament and liturgics, and then my Ph.D. at the University of Durham in England in New Testament in 1990. My thesis was on the Emmaus story so my primary area of teaching is Luke and Acts, but I also teach courses like Galatians and Hebrews. I have taught pastoral theology as well and really, many other courses in the pastoral ministry department. I'm also the dean of the chapel at the seminary in Fort Wayne and have been that for about four and a half years now and enjoy it immensely. It's a wonderful experience to be able to lead the worship life of our community and to be there every day to greet people and to worship with them. I also am director of the deacon of studies program which is a new hat that I am wearing and also am enjoying that very much because I think it's a wonderful opportunity for our church and for the women in our church to serve the Lord in this capacity. I'm essentially from New England, which is where I was born and raised although I've had a lot of experience overseas. My family lived in Mexico City for eight years and in Spain for four years. And I have a wonderful family. I have a daughter who is a graduate from Valparaiso University, and she's now an English teacher getting married this year. I have a son at Indiana University in Bloomington studying to be an artist. And then I have a son who is going to be a freshman in high school which is a very exciting thing for us. We love the years of high school. One of my passions, as I think you'll see in this course, is the worship of the church. And the last twenty years, I think one of the primary places that I have found myself to be in this church, is somebody who is out in the church speaking about the worship of the church. So as much as it is, in a sense, a secondary thing for me, it really has become very primary, especially now that I've become dean of the chapel. But I look forward to the time that we're going to have together and to be able to think through some of the very important things that we have to do as a church, as we gather together for worship. And I hope that the time we have together is one in which it will be salutary for you and one that we will be able to, at some point when we perhaps meet one another, share in the common treasures that we have as Lutherans in our liturgical life. >> DR. JAMES BRAUER: I'm Jim Brauer, professor of practical theology at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis and dean of the chapel. I was born in Colorado. I lived in Utah as a youngster and then Wisconsin. Living in Utah was a little bit like living in a foreign land among the Mormons. That was slightly formative in itself, even though I was quite young. I'm a graduate of Concordia Seminary St. Louis, and I also have a master of sacred theology from St. Louis, a master of sacred music from New York's Union Seminary, and a Ph.D. in music from City University of New York. Now that's an interesting combination, a Lutheran institution, a really Protestant institution, Union Seminary, in it's kind of global view of Protestantism. And from the City University of New York in music which is very global in the sense that the history of musical instruments was at the museum in the curator's office, and the *musicology course was taught by somebody who was born in Ethiopia and was an African himself, to introduce you to this plus the other kind of world scholars. The thesis that I wrote was about Lutheran music in the seventeenth century so I did my research in Germany and studied how the French, English, and Italians influence the German sacred music in the use of instruments. So it was kind of a cultural orientation. And I was ordained in 1965 in Green Bay, Wisconsin, home of the Packers. I hope that doesn't get me in trouble with any students, but it is part of my life. My call, my first one, was to teach at * Bronxville Concordia College, New York. And thus my orientation, all in New York schools, and to teach Latin, Greek, and religion. Then after a few years of doing that, I moved into the music department, eventually became department chairman and division chairman. And after twenty-two years of serving there, I was executive director for the Commission on Worship for four years. So I got to see kind of a global picture and ethnic viewpoints as we worked on various projects. And then, thirteen years ago, I came to Concordia Seminary to teach. Now along the way, when I was a college teacher, I was also involved on a weekly basis in congregations in the leadership of worship, especially the musical side because the pastor usually didn't have an assistant. When he went on vacation, I would go preach in his place. And I'd get somebody else to play the organ. But that gave me an interaction in the congregation life in one place for fourteen years where I dealt with the children and adults in how to express and use music in that place in artistic ways, even though it was primarily a blue-collar kind of committee. And then later, for another six or seven years, in a place that was mostly white collar and very interested in the arts. And I had others who would take care of other choirs. Even when I was in college and high school, I was already assisting with worship by playing the organ and so forth, and even held positions where I did this on a Sunday basis in college. So, you know, I was formed into these questions just by needing to know and make good choices and to work with others. That was helpful when I came to Concordia Seminary to teach about worship, to see it kind of in a user's viewpoint because I heard the sermon twice on Sundays. I got to do things multiple times and to learn to assess and to help people in doing it. Likewise, to be on a campus with a daily chapel through all these years and then to lead a seminary campus in a daily chapel program and to prepare the special services and to teach then the courses that prepare people to do this. So I teach the basic course. I teach also about hymnody, about the theology of worship, about cultural adaptation of it, even to a doctoral level. And this has been a great joy for me to wrestle with all the questions that come theologically, culturally into the practice of individuals with many different congregations as the students of this course will have individual choices to make. And I hope what we do will be extremely helpful.