A perspective on LSB after several years of use…
Feed: Pastoral Meanderings
Posted on: Monday, April 12, 2010 6:11 AM
Author: Pastor Peters
Subject: What Shall We Do
A few years ago my home congregation took the giant step of purchasing the new hymnal (Lutheran Service Book) and has been happily surprised that it was not such a stretch from their previous hymnal. Their previous hymnal was The Lutheran Hymnal (1941). So they made a jump of 47 years from one book into another and by-passed everything from the Worship Supplement (1969), to Lutheran Worship (1982) to Hymnal Supplement 98. But in the end the jump has been more a skip than a leap -- since they are perfectly content to be at home with the order familiar to them in the '41 Hymnal and which was not entirely new to that book but goes back another 30 years or so. While it is not my own preference to stay with one order from within the various Divine Services available to us in the "new" hymnal, it is certainly a legitimate one. And knowing the history and culture of my Nebraska prairie congregation, it is a perfectly natural one. Things change less out there than they do in larger suburban or urban environments. And their choice is fine. We may not be on the same page (literally) but being in the same book means we are still united on Sunday morning. Our church body may not be able to hope for more unity than this and this may be exactly the unity that the Lutherans who shaped our identity had in mind. |