ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 80.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. ******** >> NICK: How did the Lutheran Hymnal come to have the common service, and do we find the same kind of service in Lutheran worship? >> DR. JAMES BRAUER: Nick, the technical term common service refers to a particular historical version of our Lutheran liturgies. And it is kind of an interesting story how we got this. Many pastors may not even be aware of it. So let me tell it kind of as a story that explains how the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, Wisconsin Synod, the major Lutheran bodies in the United States, have the same basic liturgy. And the common service is at the heart of this story. In the earliest congregations in the United States, those Lutherans who came before Missouri Synod people did, struggled to keep the kind of worship they had in Europe. So we find already in the 1700's that pastors were attempting to retain this. By the 1800's, they had sorted out how to remain true to the Lutheran confessions against many who wanted to make changes in the teachings and changes in the worship in order to fit, as they said, American culture better, especially the Protestants that surrounded them. So it was that a group of people who had worked in English, including the Missouri Synod's friends who had formed a district to work in English and lived on the East Coast up and down from Charleston, at least, north to New York City, to Baltimore and so forth. Those who were working in English, while the Missouri Synod was working exclusively in German by design in the 1880�s, a group of leaders gathered in Charleston and assembled what they call the common service, namely, to look to the sixteenth and seventeenth century church orders that we discussed before. See those as the liturgy design that was truly Lutheran and to create one that could be put in the various hymnal publications by the groups in the United States. And this was done in 1888. So when our friends who were working in English and were related to the Missouri Synod chose to make their own hymnal, the Evangelical Lutheran Hymn Book in 1897, they published a version with the text only. So that's how they got started in our circles. This group was unable to publish a book with music. It was just too expensive for their market. So when they were brought into the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod in 1911, they made a deal. You help us publish our hymnal in English with music, and that will be a great help to work in the English language also in your congregations because they were starting to do this more and more. So that resulted then in the 1912 version with music Evangelical Lutheran Hymn Book. You may find copies around in old congregations with a green cover. This was eventually given to Concordia Publishing House. You'll find other dates on it. But within that was the service like we laid out from Luther's Latin Mass in particular. And that became the norm for the confessional type synods in the United States. So it's not surprising when we were preparing a hymnal with the synodical conference that included Wisconsin Synod in the late 30's, that moved directly from our previous hymn book into the 1941 book called the Lutheran Hymnal. And because it was in other church bodies, as we worked on the next project that was joint under the Inter-Lutheran Commission on Worship preparing the Lutheran Book of Worship published in 1978 that we would have a common framework for that liturgy, not necessarily common music, but a common framework. Then those who assembled the 1978 book gave us common music so our version of that book called Lutheran Worship published in 1982 really shares, now, a lot of music and often a common text for the parts of the liturgy and the same design. As we go to the next hymnal in 2006, we're still going to share much of the music and the design with the other church bodies because of this common service factor in our history.