Every year liturgically-minded pastors and parishioners bemoan the intrusion of Christmas upon the season of Advent. It’s not that we don’t think Christmas is important. Quite the opposite—it’s so important that the Church anticipates the Nativity of Our Lord with the month-long penitential season of Advent. But since our sinful world has no use for…
Two Anglican publications have had a profound effect on the worship of nearly all English-speaking Lutherans: The King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer (BCP). Nearly every reading, intervenient chant, and collect used in our liturgy today has come to us through one of these sources. The Encyclopaedia Britannica speaks truly when it…
One of the questions we hear most frequently is this: “When can we expect the missal to be published?” We understand—you, like each one of us, are anxious to have a completed book in your hands, so that you can set it on your missal stand, open it up, and simply pray the prayers and…
Fr. Stefan and I recently spoke at the St. Michael Liturgical Conference in Detroit. A recording of our presentation was published earlier today. You can find the video along with some additional information by following this link to the Gottesdienst blog.
In September of 2021, I put up a short video explaining the task of sorting through the 50,000 prayers we had amassed from about 50 sources. Since that time we expanded our scope by another 25 dioceses from the Holy Roman Empire, the Baltics, Scandinavia, and a few other sources we deemed important. This brought…
Last October the editors of The Lutheran Missal began work on the lections for the Temporal Calendar. With the data from nearly seventy sources—ancient, late-medieval, and Lutheran—at our fingertips, we were finally ready to make informed choices about our own missal. For those who are interested in our editing process, the first week of Advent…
As the perennials emerge from the ground around this time each year, so too questions concerning the reading of the St. Matthew Passion on Palm Sunday. Should the entire Passion be read or only Matthew’s account of the Triumphal Entry? Does the lengthy Passion reading infringe on the theme of Palm Sunday? Was the Passion…
In the early days of The Lutheran Missal project, when we first began to catalogue the contents of the late-medieval missals, we choose to limit our scope to the German dioceses. These sources, show in blue below, roughly correspond with the territory of present-day Germany (outlined in green). Several months ago, as we began editing…
Today we officially welcome two assisting editors to The Lutheran Missal, both of whom have substantially contributed to the project over the past two or three years. The Reverend Andrew Harris has served as pastor of Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church in Clinton, WI, since graduating from Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne in 2018. Prior to…
Recently we added three ancient lectionaries: Würzburg c. 700, Murbach c. 800, and Alcuin c. 800. A day may come when these important sources are properly introduced with a dedicated blog post, but it is not this day. Instead, this post will attempt to put forever to rest the notion that there is no such…