Teig Mons - Keeping time : the Churchs years

Evangelical Lutheran Worship includes a number of related print editions and other resources developed to support the worship life of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada. The core print editions of Evangelical Lutheran Worship, released in 2006, include the following:

Pew (Assembly) Edition [AE]
Leaders Edition and Leaders Desk Edition [LE]
Accompaniment Edition: Liturgies
Accompaniment Edition: Service Music and Hymns

An encounter with these core editions and their introductions is important to an understanding of the goals and principles embodied in Evangelical Lutheran Worship.

In addition to the core materials, Evangelical Lutheran Worship includes other published resources that are prepared to extend the usefulness of the core editions and to respond to the developing needs of the church in mission. The Evangelical Lutheran Worship leader guides, which include the present volume, supplement the core editions in a variety of ways.

These resources are intended to provide worship leaders and planners with support for Evangelical Lutheran Worship in ways that would not be possible within the core editions themselves. Although the assembly edition includes more interpretive material than its predecessors, such as the annotated patterns for worship that complement the notes within the services, it provides only minimal guidance for leading worship in a variety of settings. Although the leaders edition includes a more extensive section titled Notes on the Services, it is not designed to accommodate deeper historical context, theological reflection, or extensive practical counsel for those who want to lead worship with understanding and confidence.

The leader guides include a set of three volumes, Using Evangelical Lutheran Worship. This set addresses as its primary audience pastors, seminarians, and church musicianspeople who together take the lead in preparing the assemblys worship week by week. In a time when many congregations have implemented a broader sharing in worship leadership and planning, however, the contents of these three volumes will be valuable also for assisting ministers with various roles, altar guilds and sacristans, worship committees, and worshipers who are seeking deeper understanding.

The Sunday Assembly, the first book in the set of three volumes, includes a general introduction to worship that is evangelical, Lutheran, and ecumenical. That is followed by in-depth historical, theological, and practical reflections on the service of Holy Communion and the Service of the Word. The Christian Life: Baptism and Life Passages is the second volume in the set and takes up the service of Holy Baptism and related services such as Affirmation of Baptism, together with the services of Healing, Funeral, and Marriage. This book, Keeping Time: The Churchs Years, the third volume in the set, addresses the churchs calendar of Sundays, festivals, and seasons; the place of the lectionary and other propers; and the cycle of daily prayer.

The leader guides series includes two volumes focused on assembly song. Musicians Guide to Evangelical Lutheran Worship presents essays on the musical leadership of assembly song in a variety of styles and genres, and offers music performance helps for each piece of liturgical music and every hymn in Evangelical Lutheran Worship. The Hymnal Companion to Evangelical Lutheran Worship includes detailed background on the words and music of the hymns, together with an overview of the role of hymnody in the churchs worship. Both of these volumes, while having particular appeal to church musicians, will be useful also to pastors, seminarians, worship committees, choir members, and other worshipers.

Other reference and interpretive resources will be included among the leader guides as needed. Indexes to Evangelical Lutheran Worship is one such volume, with an extensive list of suggested hymns for the church year and an expanded set of other indexes.

Many of the churchs gifted teachers have contributed to the writing and assembling of the leader guides. They have sought to discern and give additional focus to the vision for worship among Lutherans that emerged from the five-year Renewing Worship process (20012005) that engaged thousands of people across the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada in encountering provisional materials, sharing creative gifts, and evaluating various stages of the proposal. To be sure, this vision is one marked by a great diversity of thought and practice, a diversity the contributors seek to reflect in these volumes. Yet these gifted teachers also bring to this work their own distinctive points of view, shaped by their own experiences and by their encounters with other teachers, rostered leaders, and worshiping communities around the world.

The Evangelical Lutheran Worship leader guides thus do not intend to provide definitive answers or official positions in matters related to worship among Lutherans. In these volumes, however, we are invited to engage in conversation with teachers of the church, to consider how their insights and guidance may best inform and inspire the many different contexts in which local leaders guide the worship life of their communities. In so doing, these leader guides in their own ways seek to do what also the core editions set out to do: to make more transparent the principle of fostering unity without imposing uniformity, so that ultimately all these resources might be servants through which the Holy Spirit will call out the church, gather us around Jesus Christ in word and sacrament, and send us, enlivened, to share the good news of life in God (Evangelical Lutheran Worship, Introduction, p. 8).

Time, the fourth dimension of earthly existence, is both blessing and bane. It allows for measured progress, for the joys of watching a childs development, for anticipation of holidays, weddings, reunions. It also allows for the dread of less happy future events: a risky surgery, a confrontation. Time gives order to our lives, so that matters dont just come at us randomly, but it also can take over to such an extent that we may feel we are serving the clock, the calendar.

Think of how our lives are bound to appointments. It is time for school or work. It is time for a meeting. It is time for teeth cleaning. Our lists go on and on. Clocks measure seconds, minutes, and hours but do not speak to the significance or content of events that fill time. Calendars list appointments and important dates but can only hint at the deeper realities those events may contain. For all its centrality in our daily existence, chronological time or clock time is empty, moving space waitingeven demandingto be filled. When we dont fill that time we sometimes say that we are killing time or wasting time.