This is Ben, and this is Keith.

And this is Main Street Lutherans. And in this episode, we are going to be discussing Evangelical Lutheran worship, which sounds like a category of something, but it's actually the title of a book. It is the most recent. Well, actually, no, that's not even true anymore. It's the most recent full hardback research hymnal. And we're going to talk about that. That the ELCA currently uses. To discuss this with us, we've brought somebody who really knows what she's talking about. And that is, again, Deacon Margaret Fulken Leonard, who is one of my colleagues at St. Matt's New York. And we're glad to have Deacon Meg with us to discuss this and all things worshipy. So welcome, Deacon Meg.

Thank you. Glad to be back.

It's good to have you here again.

Yeah. So before we talk specifically about the book, as we are, as we commonly do, how does the ELW get used at St. Matt's in York?

Yeah, it's funny, actually. You know, Megan speak to this, too. But I'm gonna. I wanna answer that from the perspective of the person sitting in the pew, which would say, well, we don't use it at all. That, you know, we. If you're in our auditorium, we don't have them present, so they may or may not know that it exists. And if you're sitting in our nave, they're in the pew racks in front of you. But unless there's been a typo in the bulletin, we never crack them open anymore. But that's only part of the answer, so I'll let Meg answer that a little more fully, completely and accurately, as she so often does.

Yeah. So we use the components of Evangelical Lutheran Worship Hymnal and Service book, which are words I just added to it primarily in its digital form. So there is a website that the ELCA has, in partnership with augsburg Fortress Press, 1517 Media. These are all things that are sort of the publishing branch of the elca. And it has in its. In its database on its website, all of the hymns, the prayers, every possible thing that is in ELW is available on this website. And the ELW was created. When it was created, was at a time where more and more people were moving toward having everything in the bulletin or everything projected. So this way, you had access to it all digitally. In fact, early on, they even had a lot of it available on CD ROM that you could pull in. Yeah, yeah. CD ROMs for the young kids are round, sparkly discs that cool things happened with. Anyway, so. So anyway, so, yeah, they. They created that. So we use the components of ELW all the time. And in fact, in our bulletin with our. Our hymns, we reference what the hymn number is in the book. So some of the choir members, for example, if they are inclined to go looking for a harmony version that maybe didn't make it into the bulletin, they might crack open the book to look at. Look at it for that purpose. But, yeah, so we, I mean, and I imagine most churches, even if, you know, they have services sort of like our auditorium worship, use components of it all the time and just don't know that that's what they're doing because that is the. Where, you know, various worship settings, the majority of the prayers, all sorts of things. While some are newly created for Sundays and seasons, most things are really being drawn from elw. So it's sort of sneaky in the background of everybody's worship.

Yeah. So in essence, we use it all the time. We just, you know, we don't use the book, but we use the larger resource that it's part of. Yeah, I don't think. Well, and where we gonna reference again?

Yeah, and actually I, in sort of brushing up on my ELW history for this podcast, discovered that they very intentionally didn't call it book. So our predecessor hymnals, service book and hymnal, Lutheran book of worship, and this is simply Evangelical Lutheran worship. So they. It's essentially created with that intent of like, this is not. It's not contained in a book. You can't contain worship in a book. It, in fact, is much more expansive.

Cool.

Sort of, I think, in the back of their minds. Yeah.

So a question I had then was if a service is projected, I think a lot of folks assume that it's contemporary. And what you're saying is. No, it's just that it's projected up on a screen. That doesn't make it contemporary worship.

Right. And I mean, we could have a much longer separate conversation about. And maybe you'll. We'll get into it a little bit later about, you know, what is, quote unquote, contemporary worship. And for a lot of people, it is simply how do I receive the information I'm using for worship. So in that sense, more and more, I mean, many churches operate like they might use the hymnal, they might use ELW for the hymns, but much of their services and their bulletin are projected at this stage.

Sure, sure. The other thing that's come up in some topics lately is the worship wars and the folks that aren't familiar with that. I don't know if that it's ended, but congregations have fought the fight over where their hymns, what kind of hymns they use, and actually just started again in my congregation. People voicing their displeasure with contemporary Christian music in the service for the same reasons that it's been complained about for a while, things like that. Without music to it, it's hard to see where it's going or its repetition or what have you. Now, if I understand right, you guys use some contemporary songs too, but you've got some criteria for including them in the service.

I mean, yes, we certainly do. I would say the criteria is more subjective to whoever is really guiding those decisions, which in this case is me, but. And my predecessors, I should say, certainly my predecessors who were choosing the music for the contemporary contemporary service. The service they most use is contemporary Christian music. And yeah, so it's. Now my criteria is the theology can't be terrible or too far off the mark for Lutherans, which in and of itself can be challenging because the majority of the music that's written are from different traditions and different theologies, but also just the singability. So that when I inherited this sort of essentially, I mean, it's not bound in a book called a hymnal, but they have their own hymnal. You know, they. Every congregation has their set music that they know and that they pull from because they like it. And it is not realistic to sing a brand new set of songs every single Sunday.

Right.

So because you simply can't know them, the other criteria is it is, you know, is it singable? You know, sometimes, you know, like the average congregation member does not have the vocal range of Chris Tomlin or, you know, various others who are, you know, mainstays of that music. So is it something that can fit into the vocal range of your average congregation member?

And this will be a very unpopular thing to say, but that is why I despise Shine, Jesus Shine, because it's.

A big vocal range.

It's like two completely different songs. So anyway.

Well, yeah, but that is part of it is because if most of all, this music is intended for the radio, it's not intended for corporate, what we would call corporate worship, worship in the assembly. It is intended to be sung by a soloist. Much the same way I referenced Celine Dion, so I'll stick with her. But much the same way Celine Dion is not writing or singing her music for me to be able to reproduce in that way. You know, they're singing it for the consumption of people, not for their. Necessarily for their participation.

So that is where Saying she doesn't want to hear us sing along.

I mean, I'm sure she, she adores her fans and loves their participation, but that is not, I'm thinking, the primary, you know, high priority decision making thing for her when she, when she picks up on her stuff.

Well, the reality is, Meg, that you are perfectly capable of fully reproducing the sounds that Celine Dion does in her concerts. I am not. Yeah. So, yeah. And you know, just to tack onto that too, part of the challenge with this comes from folks, well meaning who will, you know, come into church or send, you know, Deacon Meg or myself an email and say, hey, I heard this song on our local Christian radio station. It's really great song. We should do this in church sometimes. And that's where then, you know, these criterion then come into play is, well, you know, what is the theology like and is it singable? And usually, you know, one or two of those are the reasons why the song does or doesn't make it into the repertoire. Because it may be an awesome song, but it's, it doesn't, it's not, it's not suited for what we do in, in worship on a Sunday morning.

Yeah.

And you know, and this may not be true in every setting either. Our band does not, you know, perform like say an anthem, you know, where there's just the vocalists and the band and the, and the musicians in the group, you know, performing a song like a choir would perform a song in our traditional service. They really only do music that the rest of the congregation is singing along with.

Sing along songs, right?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I will occasionally put in a song that the congregation doesn't know and make it sort of just the band doing it. But even just our band does not have the vocal capacity of these people who are doing this professionally. So.

We'Re going to move on to the actual talking about the book. But before that, when we talk about the theology. I think we're working at church through a book by Dave Dobert. We're going to try to bring him on here soon to talk about Lutheran theology and the core stuff there. One of the things that he mentions in one of his chapters of this book that we're reading, it's the Lutheran Trump cards. It talks about big assets in theology. Unfortunate name for the time, but he mentions that Lutheran worship is horizontal. Right. That evangelical worship in particular is vertical. God is up there, Jesus is up there, and we call out to God to get their attention and draw love and stuff to us, whereas Lutheran theology is horizontal. In that Jesus is there with us all the time. And so we recognize that Jesus is with us not only in the Eucharist, but also in our prayers and things. And so that's probably the biggest thing I notice in that is that contemporary music often talks about heaven and God as something far away and that. And so that's it. The other part is probably the personal relationship. And I think Keith has mentioned that you guys like to take out the me I words and make it more corporate. So we as a community. Right.

Yeah, there is. I often refer to the vast majority of contemporary Christian music as devotional music.

Sure.

It is very much about my personal relationship with God or, you know, God's relationship with. However, you know, our mutual relationship with God. But it is often not a place you're going to find a lot of plural pronouns. And that is. Has shifted somewhat. I mean, I try to find those. I look for those opportunities, but. And this is not a new thing. I mean, in the 19th century in particular, a lot of those hymns were also very devotional in nature.

Amazing grace helps sweep the sound that saved a wretch like me.

Yeah, I mean, that's not a 19th century hymn, but yeah, that. I mean, that. It's always been part of it. You know, there's always. There are always hymns that are like that, but you get a lot of these very. Like me and Jesus. Jesus is my close friend Jesus is my boyfriend kind of. Songs are not new. You know, there are tons of them in the 19th century in particular, just because it has to do with sort of how. How faith and I mean, I don't want to say fads in faith, but like, what. You know, what is most appealing to the public. So, yeah, you get a lot of that, but. But yeah, so that is something that I always try to look for. It can be more challenging. There are some groups now that weren't necessarily around, you know, five or 10 years ago that are more about worship. It's more. It's written more for worship than maybe it used to be. So, yeah, so it's interesting how it's evolving.

This will be a conversation we have with the youth gathering folks, I think, because they bring in a lot of bands that aren't explicitly Lutheran and how they choose what gets played in those settings to match our theology. Anyway. Yeah.

Yeah, I was gonna say that's really a whole separate conversation of like.

It really is.

Yeah.

So. So this red book I've got in my hand.

Yes.

You know, it's. It's neat. It's got some embossing on it. This one has been well used. I'm going to show it here. But it's got duct tape holding it together on the inside. So it's been, it's been well worn. So what, what exactly made this into being what it is?

Yeah. So the project started in the. In the year 2000. In 2000 the churchwide council felt that it was time to re examine how we worship, particularly with an eye toward the unbaptized, an eye toward those outside of the Lutheran faith and making it more accessible and sort of reaching beyond our set traditions. So they launched a project called Renewing Worship that went on for a five year period. And in that five years I think it was starting in 2001, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada joined in on the process. Part of that was putting together many different sort of groups of people to examine the pre. You know, sort of as many hymns that from our previous books as possible. Newly written hymns. Looking at the text, looking at the music, sorting through I mean we're talking you know, thousands of songs that they're going through and trying to figure out what are the ones that are going to. Narrowing it down obviously although they still have like close to 900 hymns in the book. So trying to narrow it down as best they can. So like actually my mother was involved in one of the groups looking at texts, hymn text specifically and trying to examine their language. So speaking of like I we language their theology, the amount of masculine language in fact was looked at something. Some translations were redone or like reworked a little bit to make them fit in with our theology a bit better or to just sort of follow keeping like to be more inclusive. That's the better way to put it to be more inclusive. So that's really. It took like I said it took them five years but it also included an expansion of our worship, our musical settings of worship. They pulled in a bunch of service music. So that's your less. Probably less familiar for those who worship in a contemporary setting. But your Kyrie, your Gloria, your Sanctus, which is your holy, holy, holy, your Lamb of God. There are these settings that go back previous hymnals that have been carried forward and our predecessor hymnals had three at the most then with one another supplement hymnal came out with more than we get to ELW which has 10 different worship settings and then a whole section of additional service music that you can use in any combination. And it's. There's never a requirement that like well we're using this setting so you can only use the music out of these select pages. But a lot of that, if you have a hymnal or you've seen a hymnal, and you're like, what are all these random pages with the little numbers on the bottom? That's where that stuff put in. Whereas if you get into the big numbers in the top right corners, that's where you get your songs, your hymns. It would be. I mean, I think going back into the history is a little helpful in understanding that, but.

Yeah, yeah. And so this, the big hymnal before this was the lbw, the Lutheran Book of Worship. It was put together in the 70s.

Yeah. 1978, I think, is when it. So.

And people were still upset about that in the 90s.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think it was. Let me see. I just had. Yeah, 1978. And the service book in hymnal, which is the original red hymnal, the original red book that goes back to 1958. So you can see sort of a pattern of, you know, every 20 years or so there's additions. And not only did the. So the LBW was the complete Hymnal, the green book that preceded elw, but there's also a supplement book that a lot of people probably know called With One Voice, and that is blue. And what is the way you know is it's a supplement is because it picks up with the numbers.

Right.

So where, you know, if the ELWS or the LBW's last him number was 750 with one voice starts at 751. You know, those aren't the. The real numbers, but.

And there was a red. There was a red supplement too.

No.

Or was that an auxiliary?

Was it the original red Book was the service book in hymnal.

Right.

It goes back to the 50s. Then. Then you had the Green Book in 1978, which expand again. Each book is really an expansion.

Right.

So Service Book in Hymnal is much smaller that probably for those in the Episcopal world. Looks more like your Book of Common Prayer, kind of looks more like that. Then LBW expands, then With One Voice comes out. It's blue. It's in the 90s, early 90s. There is a book called the Worship and Praise Song. There are any number of song books that were released in addition, like the Worship and Praise Songbook is a collection of more contemporary songs that also came out in the 90s in book form. And then all of those resources, all the hymns, like there are hymns that were in the service book in hymnal that didn't make it into LBW that were brought back and put in Evangelical Lutheran worship, for example. And there are songs that were in no hymnal before either because they were that new or they came from the contemporary world and they were all.

If I can just interject, there's also a really well known hymnal supplement. I think this might be what you were referring to, Ben.

Now the feast.

People our age, now, the feast we're really familiar with was written by a really famous Lutheran musician named Marty Haugen, but wasn't published by Augsburg Fortress.

Okay. That was gia.

Yeah, it was published.

That would have been a Catholic.

Right. Even though lots of Lutherans used it and are familiar with that. Either the book itself or. Or some of. Either the liturgical music or hymns that are. That are in it. Yeah, lots of really familiar. That came out.

Yeah. So that wasn't an official hymnal of the elw.

I didn't realize it. So it's Catholic. That's a Catholic service.

Yeah. GIA is a Catholic press. That is the Catholic publishing.

That's right. So we were that close to merging.

Yeah, so close. Just in that one book. I know, right. We do. I should say, while we're mentioning books, Augsburg, our prep, the Lutheran Press printing press, they came out with a Spanish language hymnal and also an African American influenced hymnal called this Far by Faith.

Yes.

This Far by Faith is they all have their own individual colors, which is why you often hear people say, like the red book, the green book, the blue book, this Far by Faith, maroon. And that has its own settings, its own hymns that come out of the African American worship experience. And I think.

I think one of those settings is in. In the elw, right?

Yeah, it likely is. Yeah. So each of those books have their own settings and. And a lot of them made their way into elw and all of them, except for the service book in hymnal. But every other hymnal that we have created is available on Sundays and Seasons website. So you can pull from any of those books at any given time and look at how things were done. And that allows for the churches that, you know, are still using the green book, for example, because the Cranberry book, it's very specifically advertised as Cranberry Red, by the way, Evangelical Lutheran worship. So the Cranberry book is. It's too wild for them. So they stick with the lbw.

Well, they. They are not cheap. It is a. It is a large investment to update from one to the next, so.

Yeah, absolutely.

Right.

Which is another reason why so many churches choose to just print their own bulletins and then Use the digital versions that Meg, you were just referring to.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, a church, my. A church in York down the street from us never purchased elw. I mean, they purchased some of the leader books and the organ book, but they in their pews, they still have the green book. They don't use exclusively the green book, but.

So since we've talked about Sundays and Seasons, what let's flesh that out a little bit more. So I've been using Sundays and Seasons for a few months, but Keith, you're probably the most familiar with all the aspects of that. So what is that?

So Sundays and Seasons is the name of both a print book and a digital resource. The website that Meg has referred to a couple of times is called sundaysandseasons.com and it's owned, operated by Augsburg Fortress. Every year the Augsburg publishes a new edition of Sundays and Seasons for church worship service planning. And in that, again, both in the print book and online, they make a whole set of service spoken liturgy texts available that are themed to each of the seasons of the church year. So if you open up to adventure, you know, a lot of churches are probably planning for Advent worship right now. You can flip open to the new edition of Sundays and Seasons and look up Advent and see what Advent liturgy they've, they've got available for this year. And if you looked at the Advent liturgy from last year, it'll be, it'll be different. And these are just the spoken components. This is, you know, the confession, the prayers before and after Communion, the, the actual prayers for Sunday to Sunday. Those, those things are all available from Sundays and Seasons and you can, you can flip open the book and see them or especially if you're going to be like, you know, cutting and pasting them into bulletin format, you can go to the website and if you've got an online account, you have access to all that material to cut and pasted into your bulletins or onto your screens or however you're going to be giving. But then with that too, as, as Meg can probably speak better than I can are our resources for say, choosing service music, hymns, liturgical settings, even, even I think Meg music for choirs and other ensembles. Is that right?

Yeah, they have recommendations for ensembles, other things like that, and then they link you to some of those in another sort of online digital arm of the Oxford Fortress. But yeah, I mean, they have hymn suggestions, things like that. Yeah. So basically, like, there is very little you cannot find relating to Lutheran worship on Sundays and seasons. They even have recommendations for contemporary Christian songs or different Books that come out alternative, like alternative music, so some world music, some things from other places. So there's really just a. An incredible amount of music and music suggestions that is held within that in addition to all of the worship resources, prayers, etc. What's nice too is it like if you are a leader of worship, everything you might need for like from the Leaders edition is on there or the service book for the Armed forces. All of those sorts of things are included in the library. And like I mentioned earlier, all the previous hymnals are listed as well. Going back, I should say from the LBW forward, things are listed there.

Yeah, it's a pretty neat resource. I'm sure all three of us have used it a good bit. So it's hard to get a good grasp of what it is. Chances are if you go to a ELCA church that they use this in some form. If you're interested in it, you should ask and see if you can take a look at it. It's kind of interesting. It even has things like being able to generate a children's bulletin, something that we used to order en masse. And it would get shipped out every week and you'd get it, you'd stuff it into a bulletin or whatever. So now it's definitely more on the self printing side, which is cool.

Yeah. And there's, there's so many resources for planning. You know, there's, there's blurbs that you can put in the front of your bulletin on a weekly or seasonal basis. There's little intros for each of the lectionary readings for the week. As I said, there's, there's prayers that are prepared every, for every Sunday and every festival I've contributed to. The preaching helps. You know, if you're looking for a sermon illustration, you can go there and there's, you know, a half dozen or eight different, you know, kind of just things to think about that might springboard you to coming up with a sermon illustration. Ironically, St. Matthew doesn't subscribe to that portion of the Sundays and Seasons profile, so I don't get to use it, but I write some for them every year. That's right.

It sort of dawned on me partly because I looked up at my bookshelf while we were talking, but where it's sort of just while we were, you know, we moved on to Sundays and Seasons. But in talking about elw, I'd mentioned earlier that it was intentionally not. They intentionally didn't use the word book or hymnal in the title. Right. And I don't know if either of you are super familiar with the Gray accompaniment books. Again, everything has a color, but they're part of why it was such an expansive project. This renewing worship project was about not just providing, creating a new resource for hymns and worship settings or words for worship. What was to really, really come up with resources or information or to really re examine what does worship mean? What is Lutheran worship? And so there are these books. Now, I was introduced to them in seminary, but I was in seminary post the Creation of which I know Keith wasn't, but they're called Using Evangelical Worship. And there are three volumes. One of them is called the Sunday assembly, and it talks about the formative role of baptism and the sacrament, just the sacraments in general. I can't talk how worship is central to our life and how it interacts with all of these things, environments, life in general and for the church. So then there's another volume called the Christian Life, which talks more about, you know, our life in faith and how worship is part of our life and faith, where the rights come from, like the affirmation of baptism, usually called confirmation, the confession, things like that, things that form our Christian life and are part of our faith. And then there's one called Keeping Time, which explores the lectionary, how we mark time through festivals and seasons and commemorations, daily prayer, all of that kind of stuff. So they're all available on Augsburg Fortress website and they are really interesting, helpful sort of manuals, if you will, textbooks to help help us know. And I think they are obviously designed for anybody to read, but it's more likely you're going to find that your, your leadership may know of them or may benefit from. So just FYI, there's also a great book that I this is where my inner liturgical nerdiness comes out. But it's called the Indices. And there's been an indices to every hymnal, but it has all the suggestions for hymns. It has a lot of, and I think honestly slightly better suggestions than Sundays and Seasons comes up with a little more targeted. And it also has a lot of great, like index, you know, an index for, you know, finding a hymn that directly matches a reading, knowing, you know, being able to sort of reverse engineer a lot of these things of like, all right, I have a reading that's not in the lectionary. Is there anything in our hymnal that goes with that or that mentions that? Anyway, so these are additional resources that exist beyond the cranberry book that Ben is holding at this moment. Anyway, so before I forgot we're going to talk about elw. We need to mention those things.

Yeah. So I think one of the problems, and I've had some. I actually had a Bible study where we were talking about Genesis and folks were, you know, how do we. We're talking about the lectionary and how to get lectionary things. And I'm like, well, you can see what the daily readings are in the elw. And they're like, where. It just has hymns, doesn't it? And so we did a quick tour through it. So let's talk about how the book's organized. Actually had somebody who should have known better the other day, and I won't name them, partially because I just met them and don't remember their names, but.

I just assumed it was me.

No, they couldn't find the table of contents, but it is right there on about fourth or fifth page. So it has a whole summary and it lists. I mean, there are hymns in there, but again, it gives you the listing of what they call assembly songs. But everything else that's in there, the different worship services and the prayers. So that's the place to get started. Right. This is the table of contents. What else of interest? I guess the way to navigate. Let's start with that. So the table of contents gives you a general setting. But let's say you wanted to find a hymn. Like you remember the words of a hymn, how would you find that?

So there's a great index in the back. So the index, indices, any index you're looking for, they're all in the back of the book, but they're the very last things in the book. So if you remember the first word. So all of our hymns are titled by the first line. So that work. So like, sometimes that can be confusing for a song like Shout to the Lord, which is in the hymnal, because that's the. That is, I'm going to say loosely contemporary because of its age, but that's a lot of that music we know by the refrain, not by the first line of the song. But the very, very last thing in the book are the hymn titles, first lines and titles of hymns. So that's on page 1205, the very, very back, you can find all the hymns. So if you're like, I know it starts with the word bless, you go to the bees, you find the bless, you get the numbers, you get the name. And it's super useful if you're thinking of a liturgical piece of music or something like that. That's on 12 oh, four. Or if you're like, I know that this hymn goes to this specific tune and I happen to know what that tune name is. There's an index for that. If you know who wrote the hymn, there's an index for that. So like the sources. And I actually if. When you're doing a tour of ELW for people, especially people who are like, all the hymns are old and white and European and whatever, I always invite people to look at that sources of service music and hymns and just like, yeah, it's a lot of names and you don't know what the names are. You don't know their ethnicity or background. But there are also things in there that like, are very clearly like from different countries or, you know, some of them are, you know, very obviously of different backgrounds or say North American or African American or Cameroon or, you know, any number of things. I always encourage people to sort of take a little time to go through that and be like, actually it's a pretty diverse book when it comes to the sourcing of these songs beyond just, you know, they're slow and boring, like, well, no, that's not true. You haven't spent much time in ELW if you think they're all slow and boring. So anyway, fun things.

Absolutely. I think one of the other confusing things is that we have little numbers in the bottom and the big numbers in the tops and that the hymns aren't numbered by page. And that gets confusing.

Yeah, I mean it's. That is for sure true. So one of the unique things about E. ELW that was not true in previous books is that the first 150 hymns. Songs in the book. Hymn is just a fancy word for song. Are the Psalms. The Psalms P S A L M S. Yeah. So the Psalms are our first hymn book, are the church's first hymn hymn resource. They were all. Psalm means song. They were all originally sung. They all had music. We don't have that music at this point. But they were all chanted, sung in some way. So they are the first 150 in the book. And I don't have a good answer for why it switches from the little numbers at the bottom to just the big numbers at the top. It's possible that it was more confusing to have literal page numbers in addition to the hymn numbers because some hymns, you know, take up three pages, some hymns take up one, some take up half of one. So that's why the numbers are assigned to each individual hymn. Otherwise you would be like, all right, page whatever, second hymn down. It Starts with this word. It goes over a couple pages. Don't worry about it. So I'm sure it's an ease of use thing, but it is always a little interesting to have to say to people like, we're going to him 105 or him 206, which is in the back half of the book. That's usually how I tell people. It's the big numbers at the top versus the little numbers at the bottom. And the little numbers at the bottom indicate that you are in where the prayers are. Where the. I mean, it's got so much in it. Lectionary settings, whatever.

Small catechisms in there in the back.

I know, yeah. One of you put something about what to. What to do during a boring sermon.

That's right. Not that that happens in any of our churches.

But no, Pastor Fair never preaches a boring sermon. It's impossible.

And I never read the small catechism while I'm preaching.

Well, no, probably not, but yeah. I mean, honestly, it used to be super common for everybody to have their own copy of a hymnal in their home as part of their devotional life, their prayer life. And if ever there was a book to have in your own home, it would be this book because it has so much in it that is part of our daily life. It has daily readings, it has a small catechism, it has prayers. It has information about, you know, how our worship is formed.

So talk about the church lectionary schedules.

Yeah, yeah. What are the feast days? What are the festivals? What are the seasons? Even just the introduction gives you a lot of information about how the book came about and why it is created in the way it is. But it is not meant to be a be all and end all. And they knew that when they made it. And, you know, that's why we have all these other resources.

So. So one of the things I think is fun is to. If you've. You've got a hymn, right? You know how sometimes songs, you can sing the same words. Amazing Grace. Right. And Gilligan's aisle, right. You can sing the words interchangeably. Well, at the bottom of the hymns, right, You've got the meter, right? So you see this? Like I'm on page 414. It is 8 or 7. 8, 7. 8, 7, 7. That's the number of. Number of syllables per line, right? So if I look this. If I look that meter up, I can find other hymns, other tunes to sing the same words to, right?

Yeah.

And so you can do the same thing with poems and all that sort of stuff. I think that's fun to cross reference because one of the fun things is to sing songs to the wrong tunes, like Happy Birthday, for instance. But I think that's a lot of fun.

Yeah, It's a helpful tool, actually, for worship leaders because you might find a text that you really like, but the tune is unfamiliar to your congregation.

So you find something that they do know.

Correct. And actually to nerd out for a minute, at the most recent Luther colloquy, which is Gathering of Luther People, Luther nerds, at United Lutheran Seminary, they talked about the very first hymnal ever for Lutherans that Luther helped put together himself, which was eight songs. It was eight total hymns. It was replaced before the year even finished. It was in 1524. So by the end of 1524, they had new, bigger hymnals. So imagine that in your church. And be nice.

Did they change the color?

Yeah, I'm sure they did. Obviously. No, it was all just paper, so I don't think they were as fun colored as ours, but. Yeah, but it was eight songs and it was only four tunes. They only had four different tunes and eight texts. Because the idea was you'd learn the four tunes and then you could sing all these other things to the same tune anyway.

Well, that's cool. But imagine people singing the wrong words because now you've got all these.

Right. Yeah.

Wow. Well, we did just. What was last Sunday was I didn't preach, so it must have been all Saint Sunday. Right. And so we've got all those really long hymns with lots and lots of verses. And so people getting messed up on which verse they're on. And that sort of thing happens a lot that Sunday, I find even funnier.

When it's the person in front with the microphone that's supposed to be leading everybody else.

I never mess up what verse I'm on, ever.

I forget what hymn it was. It the. It had four verses on the left page and then three verses on the right.

That's for all the Saints.

One of the many versions of that, right?

Well, yeah, there's. Yeah, that's for all those saints who from their labors rest. I think, is how that goes.

Yeah.

Cortane, I think, is the melody. I don't know if I'm saying that right. Yeah, there's a variety. There's, like. For all the faithful women, for all the. There are other, like, you know, for the saints. I mean, there's a lot in that section that all have almost exactly the same title.

Yeah.

And by all The Saints is another one. Yeah, but some of those are fine because they do have like 20 to 25 verses.

Right.

But when you look at them, it's actually that each verse is unique to a day, to a feast day. So you're not intended to sing, you know, 25.

We didn't have any direction, so. So I think that was seven verses. And some of the people sang straight down, so they didn't do the skip after the second instructions, which is really small. But then, then Pastor Carm went over and called an audible, but she didn't let anybody know what her audible was other than the pianist. And so we sang like. We sang like six and a half verses. It sort of just ended in the middle of everything. So. So yeah, whoever's our church historian should, should keep track of that, but I. I don't think we have one. Let's see. So. So wanted to hit some of the common complaints and misunderstandings about this book. We already did. Already did some like that. It's stodgy that the hymns are old. Right. And. And to be fair, I mean. Yes. I mean, it doesn't, it doesn't have anything by Eminem in it. You know, it's. It was published in, well, not, not in the last 10 years. So. So it's. It's gonna. Going to have some, some stuff that's not brand new, but it's a book. But that doesn't mean stuff isn't. Isn't relevant and singable and fun.

Right? Exactly. I mean, one of the fun things that I've done when I, when I've had opportunities to work with youth or had youth around is, you know, introducing them to songs that are, gosh, like, you know, 600 years old. The tune is five, 600 years old. And how fun they are. Like, some of the, some of those are the most, like, dancy, upbeat tunes you're gonna get. And it's, it's just one of those things. Like, you know, I had an experience with a group of people who loved contemporary Christian music and they had like, like I said before, you know, each congregation essentially has their own songbook that they pull from for those services. Right. And some of those songs are in elw. So I'd be like, this is in here. And they'd be like, oh, I don't want to sing it because it's from elw. If I gave it to them and was like, this is. This looks different. It's from a different resour pre ELW resource. They're like, oh, yeah, it's great. I'm like, okay. It's just one of those things, like, there are such a wide variety of style of song, and it's.

It's overwhelming.

Yeah, it is. It is overwhelming.

And I mean, I can sort of read music, right? I mean, I did start in a music conservatory, but I can't open it and tell you what the song is. You know, I. I really need to pluck it out on piano, and I'm not going to do that in the middle of church. So. So I. I see why it's a problem. So how do we get around that?

Right. So a lot of that is up to your leadership. Is. Are they. Are they t. I mean, it's. I feel like it's part of my job to know what's in there. You know, I don't expect the average person to know. And sometimes. Not that I ever would get frustrated with a pastor that I work with sometimes.

Especially Baldwins.

Especially Baldwins. You know, sometimes people actually, you know, Pastor Farrah is one of the better ones. But in this, they. They've never taken the time to look at the hymnal. They make assumptions about it, just like everybody else does, and they never look in it. So if you're not looking in it and your musician isn't looking in it, or your worship and music team or worship and music committees aren't looking at it, then of course you're not going to know. You need to take the time to listen, to look at that. And, like, going back to Sundays and seasons, they have audio. I mean, it's, you know, midi, like, terrible audio, but they'll pluck out the tune for you. If you're like, I've never sung this hymn. How does it go? My husband does it all the time because he, too, can't. He can't, you know, sight read the music. So he'll click on a hymn, he'll play the audio and be like, oh, I know that one. Or, oh, that's really pretty. Or that seems singable. I mean, there's. There is a responsibility that leadership has to take to know about these things, and then you can introduce them in careful and supportive ways to your congregation.

So one of the things that was pointed out to me is that Mary Munson played every single song in the ELW and has it on YouTube. So if you look up this. So all you have to do is on YouTube, put in ELW and then the hymn number, and she. And there are probably several other people that have done all of them. If not, you know, Some. Most, I'm guessing. But. But they, they have them in, you know, their particular style with, With a. Some. Some. The. The recordings are with. With pipe organ. Mary does. Does piano. And so it's real easy. You get. You get a verse of it, you can hear it, you can decide if it's singable for. For your thing, or sometimes it just reminds you of what the hymn is. And so if you've got one that looks interesting because it's got some good text in it and you want to suggest it, give it a listen on YouTube, it's. It's real easy. I think that's. That's kind of fun.

Yeah. And I think, too, some of the preconceived notions are like anything else that your parents, you know, when you think about, oh, well, my parents and grandparents always do such and such, so therefore it must be old and stodgy and out of date. And that's just one of those things that, again, is like. Well, you know, the books have, as I said earlier, become more and more expansive and more and more inclusive. So the service book in hymnal that your grandparents or great grandparents used is nothing like the elw. You know, it's not the same collection of hymns. It's not the same style. Worship has changed dramatically since the 1950s. And speaking to, like, the new. And where are all the new songs, I was, like, pointing out that there are a lot of hymns in ELW that are much newer than some of the favorite contemporary songs.

Right.

You know, their favorite contemporary song, Christian songs that are older than me. You know, I'm 37. And they came out with a new supplement, much like they did with. With One Voice, there's now an even newer supplement called All Creation Sings.

So, and, you know, when. When, you know, say in the 90s, the. The hymn supplement was the contemporary version. Right. Or. Or Chicago Folk Song should. The Chicago Folk Service. Or. Or. Or Holden Evening Prayer. Right. Those were considered contemporary.

Yeah.

And they were. They were sort of resisted, and now they're, like, considered old and that I, in this conversation, I'm. I'm constantly reminded of Lausen found playing old Lutheran hymns really fast, you know, in their style. And it would. It would be like. I mean, it's like listening to the Ramones Merry Christmas. That, that It's. It's the style. Right. And so if you want. If you want your service jazzed up, then jazz it up. Yeah, it's a tune and, and all that. So, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, it is. There. There's no limit to imagination. So there's no limit to how you can do these things, and which is why there's been a lot of contemporary groups or writers who have taken old hymns and done exactly that. They've jazzed them up, they've changed the meter, they've changed the rhythm, they've added a chorus, they've, you know, reimagined the chord structure.

So, yeah, off to find a hymn that can go to take five.

Yeah.

Be fun.

That would be amazing.

Yeah.

You should just write one. I think that's what you need to do.

Well, there you go. I'll give it a shot. All right. Well, I think we've tapped out.

I'm going to throw in one. One more thing. There was. And we kind of hinted at this a little bit, but one of the complaints I remember hearing about the ELW early on in my first call was that you can't. It was no longer designed, despite the fact that it's got so many different settings of the Communion service in it. It wasn't really designed that you could just open the book up and do an entire Sunday service liturgy and all from there. There are too many places where, say, you're going through setting five, and this example may not be true in setting five, but you're going through setting five. And when it comes time for, I don't know, the offer toward. It doesn't have one. It just says, here are some options and points you someplace else in the book.

Yeah.

Or it doesn't have the. It doesn't even list the Creed in the place where you would say it in the service. And so if you were a congregation that was used to, you know, maybe you had a bulletin that told you what the hymn numbers were and helped you to kind of keep track of where you're going in the service, but it didn't actually have the whole liturgy in it. You were frustrated by no longer being able to follow along in the book for that. For that purpose. Because when this one was produced, as we've already discussed, Augsburg was completely moving towards the future at the time and making these things available online and presuming that most congregations were either going, we're going to be moving away from doing worship in that way, holding the book in their hands, they were either going to be printing everything in the bulletin, putting everything on the screen, or at least putting the whole spoken liturgy and liturgical music in those places and only cracking open the actual hymnal for singing the hymns. And that was. That was a big paradigm shift for especially a lot of smaller congregations. Who weren't prepared to do that yet. And so that was a big growing edge.

Yeah, I mean, that is absolutely true. The only settings that are fully complete are the first two, which were two of the new ones. So they weren't even ones that people knew from LBW or even. We have service book and hymnal had two settings in it. One of those settings moved to LBW and is still an ELW now. But yeah, that is absolutely a complaint that people had. One of the churches that I worked in previously, when I got there, they had Pew Bibles and a bulletin and elw, and the bulletin only had numbers in it, page numbers in it for everything, like, including the Bible readings. So if you wanted. But which was so frustrating to me because I'm like, seriously, by the time I find the page in the Bible, the reading's over. Like, it's already over. And now I'm going to it. So, like, to see people juggle all three things was just ridiculous. Which is why I think Augsburg Fortress and the elca, frankly, gave that kind of not, maybe not so subtle push to be more accessible and to make worship a little easier, which is to put it all in a. In a booklet of some kind or to have it projected or combination thereof. Yeah.

So close that close out with a hint if your congregation does not have the multi. Bookmark things that fit into the spine of the book. Do you guys have those? I mean, I don't know that I do.

Yeah.

But I know at Unity all of them have those. And I don't know that there's a. I haven't been to a church in our synod that doesn't. But so it's got little ribbons in different colors. And so you can sit at the beginning of the service and mark out all your hymns so that you are automatically flipping to the right page. And that's fun. It makes things a lot easier when you depend on the hymnal. Maybe fewer people are using that, but remember those days. But very helpful. All right, so we are onto our catechism questions of this now, Meg, you haven't been part of this part before, so. So we reprise last week's or the last episode's catechism question and we just get caught up on weeks, which was what psalm inspired Martin Lutheran's hymn? Martin Luther's hymn A Mighty Fortress. Was it Psalm 17? And these were kind of fun. That one's the guard. Me is the apple of the eye. Psalm 23 is the good shepherd. Right. And Psalm 46, God is our refuge and strength. A very present help in Trouble or Psalm 163. It's a big, big house with lots and lots of rooms. The correct answer there is Psalm 46 God is our refuge and strength. The very present help in trouble. We once again have no winner. Nobody's been emailing us the answers to their questions. You guys should do that. Yeah. Because you could be a winner. Everybody wants to be a winner these days. So it's real easy. So, Keith, what is our question for this episode?

Our question for this week, and if you were listening closely, you will have heard the answer or you can perhaps look it up yourself. But the question is how many worship settings does the ELW Hymnal have? How many worship settings are there in Evanescence Evangelical Lutheran worship? Your answer options are 1, many lots or 10. You can respond to us by emailing us or reaching out on the social media platforms and phone number that Ben's going to give to us now.

Well, Main Street Lutherans is hosted by Keith Fair and Ben F. And the show is produced by Fote Media Productions. You can find all of our contact information, including that phone number, links and a transcript in the episode notes. Until next time, go in peace. Serve the Lord.

Thanks be to God. And again, once more, thank you to Deacon Martin for joining us today.

Yes, thank you so much.