Worship at ULu

Since we are a congregation of The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, we follow the teaching and practice of the Lutheran Church with regard to Holy Communion.  We joyfully confess the Word of Jesus (Matthew 26:26-28; Mark 14:22-26; Luke 22:14-23; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26), that everyone who eats the bread and wine also eats Jesus' true and holy Body and Blood--the same Body and Blood that Jesus had in the womb of Mary, in which He lived, was crucified, raised from the dead, ascended to the right hand of God the Father, and in which we will see Him when He comes in glory to judge the living and the dead.  

Everyone who eats and drinks the Supper–even if the person does not believe–receives bread, wine, Body, and Blood.  For this reason, we take very seriously every person's participation in the Sacrament at our altar.  To encounter without faith the Jesus who is present in the Supper is a fearful thing--as fearful as encountering Jesus without faith at any moment.  

Since we believe that the Lord's Supper is both a confession of faith in the Words of Jesus--that He is truly present where He says He will be--as well as a confession of the unity granted by the Holy Spirit in those same words, we look for two things before we join together at the altar.  

First is simply faith in the Words of Jesus.  We confess that we eat and drink Jesus' true Body and Blood under bread and wine, as He says.  Whoever believes those words--Body and Blood, given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins--has in the Supper what they say.  

Second is the public confession of unity (see, for example, 1 Corinthians 10:15-17).  If someone desires to share this Holy Supper with us, where does that person currently receive Communion?  Because neither the pastor nor anyone else knows--or can know--an individual's heart, the public confession can only be seen by where a person communes.  If a person communes in a church with which the LCMS is not currently in altar and pulpit fellowship, then that person is not yet (or no longer) in fellowship with us. Because the Sacrament is a visible, public sign of unity in confession, such an individual would want to understand and confess what we teach and believe prior to receiving the Supper at our altar.  Conversely, if a person receives the Supper at our altar, by definition that person enters fellowship with us and has severed fellowship with any congregation of a different confession with which we are not in fellowship.  In other words, communion fellowship equals church fellowship, and vice-versa.  

We want you to know what you are confessing when you receive the Lord's Supper at our altar, and to be able to confess that unity with full knowledge and joy.  For this reason we ask that, prior to communing, you speak to the pastor and if you are not already a member of a congregation in fellowship with us, he would be happy to talk with you about receiving the Supper at our altar in the future.  

You may also want to look at the following resources for more information:

Joel D. Biermann, "Step Up To the Altar: Thinking about the Theology and Practice of the Lord's Supper."

The LCMS Commission on Theology and Church Relations, "Admission to the Lord's Supper: Basics of Biblical and Confessional Teaching."

And for a more in-depth discussion of the practice of the Church throughout time, see Werner Elert's book Eucharist and Church Fellowship in the First Four Centuries, which shows that our practice follows the universal practice of the early Church.

If you visit with us for the first time, you may well wonder, “What is going on here?”

If you are unfamiliar with Lutheran worship, it can seem strange and hard to follow. We hope the following will help you understand what's going on, and don't hesitate to ask for help from those who look like they know what's happening!

We call our worship the Divine Service because the main reason we are here is for God (the “Divine”) to serve us with His Word and Gifts (“Service”). In the Divine Service there is a constant conversation happening between God and the people. The pastor is there to speak God's Word of peace and forgiveness to the people, and the people speak that same Word to each other and back to God. This conversation is called the liturgy. That also means “service”: the service in which all the people participate. You are the liturgists!

While it may seem like the liturgy is made up of a bunch of unconnected pieces, there is an order to it that has been developed and refined for almost two thousand years. The basic outline is this: Word and Sacrament. No matter which Setting of the Divine Service we are using, there is a Service of the Word and there is a Service of the Sacrament. The center of the Service of the Word is the reading of the Scriptures and the preaching. The center of the Service of the Sacrament is the Words of Jesus (also called “The Words of Institution,” because they instituted the Holy Communion) and the eating and drinking of Christ's Body and Blood with the bread and wine.  

Everything else that surrounds either of those central parts is in place to support either the Word or the Sacrament. The Word is surrounded by things such as the Introit (which means “entrance,” or the true beginning to the Divine Service); the Collect (a prayer that “collects” all the prayers and concerns of the people and summarizes them with the theme of the day); the Gloria in Excelsis (“Glory in the highest,” a song that begins with the song of the angels at Jesus' birth and ends with praise of the Trinity); and the Creed (either Apostles' or Nicene, where we speak God's Word back to Him as our faith's confession).

The Service of the Sacrament is surrounded by things such as the Agnus Dei (“Lamb of God,” where we sing the words of John, confessing that Jesus is the Lamb of God, sacrificed for our sins); the Sanctus (“Holy,” where the song of the angels in Isaiah 6 is combined with the words of the crowds on Palm Sunday; here we welcome Jesus as God, but coming humbly to us hidden in bread and wine); Nunc Dimittis (“now dismiss,” where we sing with Simeon and thank God for allowing us to see by faith Jesus our Savior in the Supper and confessing that we can now go peacefully to death).

Even though the order or the formality may seem foreign to you, there is a very good reason for using the liturgy that has been handed down to us. Throughout the entire history of the Church, this form of Christian worship has kept the central thing central: the good news that Jesus has taken all of your sin to Himself on the cross, died under the weight of sin and God's wrath, that He is alive, and—here and now—delivers to us all His forgiveness, life, and salvation. The intent of the liturgy is that the people of God receive all His gifts of mercy, in both Word and Sacrament.

Not only that, but the liturgy has been used in all cultures, all languages, by every sort of people. That means that even if we didn't speak the same language, people who use the basic form of the liturgy would recognize their faith given expression, from Cyril in Jerusalem, to Athanasius in Alexandria, Egypt to Ambrose in Italy to Augustine in North Africa to John Chrysostom in Constantinople, to Bernard of Clairvaux in France, to Luther, Chemnitz, Loehe, and Walther in Germany, to our own grandparents in the United States. The liturgy is not bound to any one time or place, so it can be used in all times and places. We pray that with this introduction, you might begin to enter a little more deeply into what's going on here on a Sunday morning. And if you have any questions, the pastor would be happy to speak with you about them.

There are obviously many other songs–many good songs–written by Christians, and many of them are used in churches.  The first thing to say is that there is no rule or law about this.  It is a matter of what best builds up the congregation "until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine" (Ephesians 4:12-14).  

This is the goal of all the public teaching of the Church for the sake of those who have been joined to Christ: unity in the Faith, an increasing knowledge of the Son of God and His work for us, to maturity in Christ.  And all of this is for the purpose that we be increasingly grounded in Christ so that no believer would be moved from that sure foundation.  There are many teachings floating around, and we do not want to be like children in this sense: that we believe everything anyone tells us.  We want to be those who listen only to the voice of our Good Shepherd, Jesus.  

Hymns, like the liturgy and the sermon, are public teaching that we sing to one another.  In other environments, such as in our individual devotions, other songs can and may be beneficial.  But in the worship of the Church as one Body, with one Lord, one Faith, and one Baptism, not everything is beneficial for "corporate" (literally, as the Body) worship.  So, for example, the hymns are very often going to be sung in the plural: "we," "our," "us."  More individualistic songs are not bad, and can be very meaningful, but in our worship together they are not the best.  Especially in a society that is individualistic to the extreme, we all need to be reminded that the Church isn't simply a bunch of individuals collected in one place, but the Body of Christ called together and joined together by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  

This is also why we are very careful about using hymns and songs from other traditions: because the services of the Lord's House shape and form us toward the attaining of full unity in the Faith (the teaching Jesus has given us).  We will never attain that full unity here on earth because sin interferes, but that doesn't mean we give up on or despair of unity altogether.  The hymns that teach what we confess and believe from the Scriptures should be front and center, because melodies help us remember words that we might otherwise forget.  Therefore, we do our best to make sure that the words that stick in our brains (because of the music) confess the full counsel of God in the Scriptures concerning Christ.

Here are some other aspects of the Church's song that we consider as we are gathered in the Lord's House as one Body: 

• A Lutheran hymn is not really about creating the right atmosphere or mood for worship, but it is a vehicle for the Spirit-filled Word of God.

 “The Word of Christ—not the word of man—richly dwells within the Church in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. And where the Word of Christ is, there Christ Himself is, doling out His blood-bought gifts. So it is vital not just that a congregation sing hymns which are technically error-free, the hymns must proclaim Christ and His benefits—in a word, the Gospel.” 

• A Lutheran hymn is not entertainment but proclamation.

“The purpose of Evangelical-Lutheran hymnody is not to amuse the crowd or to put on such a grand performance that the congregation jumps to its feet with feverish hand-clapping. The hymns proclaim a divine message which is not entertaining but sustaining, given to feed the sojourning Church as she makes her way through the world, but is not of the world. … The music and song of entertainment aim to gratify the emotions of man but the music and song of the Church aim for something far, far more important: to give voice to the Gospel of salvation which alone satisfies man's deepest need: communion with the incarnate God.” 

• A Lutheran hymn is shaped by the theology of the cross.

“The God who hides and reveals Himself in His crucified Son also hides and reveals Himself in the ways and means whereby this crucified Son comes to us. ...The God who is hidden in the 'foolishness' of the cross is hidden in the 'foolishness' of Baptism's water, the Eucharist's bread and wine, the Absolution's human voice and touch. The offense of the cross now rests within the pulpit, upon the altar, in the font, at the confessional chair. Everything that belongs to God must be crucified, that is, it must hide God so that only those who heed His Word will find Him there, revealing and giving Himself. … Whatever the given subject of the Lutheran hymn—be it the Epiphany, the Church, missions, prayer, or praise—the singer will hear who God really is: the God who reveals Himself and gives Himself to us in His Son. Such hymnody, like the cross itself, will always be a stumbling block to those who seek God apart from where He hides, reveals, and gives Himself. But to those with eyes of faith, eyes enlightened by the Gospel of a crucified Christ, Evangelical-Lutheran hymnody will not be a stumbling block, but an immovable rock of refuge.” 

• A Lutheran hymn does not only paraphrase Bible verses; instead, it interprets the Scriptures in reference to Christ.

“[The] primary purpose of hymnody [is] that it is by nature a preaching-song, a poem that proclaims the Word of God to man, and only secondarily prays to or praises God. … Christ-centered exegesis fathered Christ-centered hymnody. There was no hesitation to preach poetically what was likewise preached in prose. The Word made flesh became the poetic flesh wrapped around the skeleton of any biblical text, whether or not it contained an explicit reference to the Messiah.” 

• A Lutheran hymn is bound to no culture save the culture of the catholic (universal) Church.

“Rather than filling sacred space with 'the kinds of music people listen to all week long,' the Church fills that space with her own music, a melody of beauty and dignity that mirrors her own beauty and dignity as the Bride of Christ. Rather than constantly marrying and divorcing one musical style after another in the ever-changing secular culture, the Church has nurtured her own music in her own culture. Perhaps in days long gone, when Holy Mother Church held great sway over her surrounding culture, her sounds and the world's sounds were not in such disharmony. But today, the sway has vanished. The Church's culture is a counterculture, a culture whose ideals, beliefs, and purposes are at loggerheads with the vast array of secular cultures in which she sojourns. But be not misled: this is not a static and stagnant culture, but vivacious, throbbing with life, for hers is the culture of real, abiding life in the living God. Each generation carefully adds a few fresh strokes to the portrait she has been painting for millennia, but they do not scrap it all to begin anew.”

[The quotations and the outline are from Chad Bird's book, Why Lutherans Sing What They Sing]