National Conference on Worship, Music, and the Arts – July 2005

Plenary Address III

Paul A. Rydecki

The Changing Music of the Liturgy

Introduction — An Example of the Liturgy
Well that was a different kind of service, wasn't it? Did somebody make a mistake? I mean, this conference is supposed to be focusing on the liturgy, but I have to be honest, I've attended Lutheran worship every Sunday for 32 years, and I've never heard or sung anything like the music we heard and sang this morning. Are we sure that was the liturgy? Well, did we review the standard gospel truths of the Ordinary? We did. Did we focus on a specific gospel truth through the songs and texts of the Proper? We did. Did we celebrate Christ's meal? We did.
Ordinary, Proper, Meal. By all definitions, what we just celebrated was the liturgy. Or maybe we should say it was one example of how the liturgy can be done, just as we’ve seen other examples here at this conference.
Most of us have a pretty limited experience with the liturgy, page 15 in The Lutheran Hymnal, pages and 15 and 26 in Christian Worship. That might lead us to conclude that the liturgy is what's contained on those pages. But those pages, too, offer only a few more examples of how to put the liturgy into practice. What we call the liturgy is actually a set of texts: words, sentences, paragraphs. When any group of Christians adds music to those texts — melodies, harmonies, instruments — they're adapting the liturgy for their time and place, to glorify God with his gift of music, to carry the Scriptural texts to their hearts and to give expression to their gospel-inspired response.
We might be surprised if we witnessed the wide variety of liturgical examples around the globe today. We might not recognize much of what we would see and hear. But variety in liturgical music isn't a recent development. Let's think about what the Church has done from the beginning.
The Music of the Roman Rite
As Professor Tiefel reminded us, the early church was completely agreed on the essence of their worship. Scriptures and Sacrament. Word and Meal. But the truth is, we don't have the slightest idea what the earliest Christian music sounded like. Did they borrow some tunes and styles from the synagogue? Some probably did, but we've lost any hope of recovering the original melodies. We do have a pretty good idea that some of the Gregorian chants were based on chants that were already being sung in many Christian churches. But early on, there was no one to say, “This is how it should be!” Every performance was the first one, and each region was coming up with its own music. Eventually, churches began bringing together the best of what each region was doing into several similar rites. These rites, in turn, were brought together into the Roman Rite, which became the prevailing form of worship in the West by about the year AD 1000.
Still, we shouldn't imagine that the Roman Rite sounded the same from week to week and from church to church. The Latin texts were identical throughout the world, and Gregorian chant was the prevailing musical style, but there were thousands of different chant melodies, with new choir arrangements and harmonies being developed constantly. One text. One style of music. But countless musical settings and adaptations within that style.
The Roman Rite's insistence on Latin and Gregorian chant had many advantages, but it had some disadvantages too. The priests, monks and choirs were the ones taking part in the liturgy, not the people. Besides that, this one language and one musical style tried to serve people from dozens of countries and cultures around the world, who mostly knew Latin as a second or third language, if they knew it at all. Most people could accept the Gregorian chant as beautiful, “churchly” music, but for many people, that's all it was. Beautiful, reverent music, while the message of the texts sailed over their heads and right past their hearts.
The Music of Luther's Versions
Luther saw the problem: Worship isn't supposed to be done for God's people, but by God's people. With its Latin language and chant-style music, the Roman Rite had become a hindrance to the participation of a large number of people. So Luther committed himself to preserving the liturgy, while at the same time returning it to the people.
To accomplish that, Luther first created a Latin service, for the people in the city churches who knew Latin well, and where the practicing choir and trained musicians could learn the chants and carry the bulk of the music in the service. Luther hated the errors that plagued the Roman Rite, but at the same time Luther loved the liturgy. It represented the faith, wisdom and worship of hundreds of thousands of Christians. So except for the doctrinal errors that had crept in, Luther kept the entire Roman Rite, but introduced a German sermon and German hymns so that all the people could participate in some way.
For the smaller towns and villages, where most people didn't understand Latin and there was no practicing choir, Luther developed another version of the liturgy, a Mass entirely in German. For these Christians, Luther developed German versions of the Proper and the Ordinary, using, of all things, a popular musical style, a kind of music the German people could relate to and were already singing in their homes. Of course, it was done carefully, always making sure that the music was compatible with the texts that were being sung.
Both of Luther's services are most definitely adaptations of the ancient liturgy, two different musical settings for two different subcultures that lived side by side in 16th century Germany. Luther was very much aware that the two services he proposed were only his ideas. His suggestions. He expected them to be two among many. He never meant for them to be used for long or in other parts of the world, and he certainly didn't mean for them to be the only services in use.

Worship in Post-Reformation Europe
The years following the Reformation were difficult years. The Roman Catholic Church battened down the hatches on the Mass and demanded the almost exclusive use of the Old Roman Rite. The Reformed churches of Holland and Switzerland reformed the liturgy, but in many cases abandoned a great many of its texts. Lutheran churches began to produce a variety of liturgical services, but were soon hampered by battles with the Reformed, the devastation of the Thirty Years War, and the diminishing supply of church musicians.
Not that musical creativity didn't take place. Hymns were written in this period like “Now Thank We All Our God,” “Oh, Dearest Jesus,” “Jesus Priceless Treasure,” along with all 123 hymns of Paul Gerhardt. Musicians like Dietrich Buxtehude, Michael Praetorius, and especially J.S. Bach all had a hand in enhancing the musical variety within the churches during those years.
The Music of the Common Service and The Lutheran Hymnal
Both Tiefel and Schroeder mentioned the problems with Pietism and the loss of the Lutheran liturgy. But there were voices in the United States that wanted to restore the liturgy. More conservative Lutherans on the east coast eventually conducted an extensive study of 16th century Lutheran liturgies, and brought them together into a Common Service in 1888. The Common Service was a text, not a music book, but since the English used in the Common Service was taken mostly from the English Book of Common Prayer of 1549, most churches opted for Anglican or Gregorian chants for the canticles of the liturgy. 
The Lutheran Hymnal of 1941 also included the Common Service. The original hymnal committee actually decided not to include any musical settings. Surprise! We're all aware that a musical setting was included, a setting from 1901 based mainly on Anglican chant, a setting so popular that it made its way into the Common Service of our own hymnal, Christian Worship, over 50 years later.
Stagnation and Renewal
For most of us who grew up hearing and singing the same chants of The Lutheran Hymnal Sunday after Sunday, year after year, the liturgy became synonymous with page 15 of The Lutheran Hymnal. For us, The Lutheran Hymnal wasn't just an example of how the liturgy can be done. The service on the pages of our hymnal is the only right way to do the liturgy, we thought. Even the Thee's, Thy's, and Thou's were sacred to many people.
That mindset began to create some problems. One problem was the outdated English that became harder and harder to understand. The other problems were music-related. The music that had worked in 1901 or even in 1941 seemed behind the times as we approached mid-century. Maybe it would've been fine as one option among many. But with the lack of healthy variety, many Lutherans began to feel excluded from the liturgy, especially with the growing cultural diversity within our country.
Similar problems were affecting the Roman Catholic Church. The Mass was still in Latin, the music was mainly Gregorian chant, and the people didn't just feel excluded from the liturgy. They were excluded! At least Lutherans had a solid tradition of hymns to sing! In the early 1960's, the Second Vatican Council returned the liturgy to the people, in their own language, with music from their own cultures. This led to a huge outpouring of new musical settings of the liturgy — some better than others — that were more accessible to the different cultures around the world.
When Lutherans saw their service stagnating and thus becoming counterproductive to their gospel proclamation, many began to ask if the liturgy couldn't be updated. After studying the liturgy and its history, we began to understand that the gospel-proclaiming texts are the constant in the liturgy. The music is a variable. Lutheran churches began to update the English in their services. Lutheran church bodies in the United States began to produce new hymnals and hymnal supplements. Our own synod produced Christian Worship, and recently New Service Settings. Among these Lutheran hymnals and supplements there are dozens of new musical settings for the liturgy.
I don't mean to say that these hymnals are all interchangeable. They're not. But there's a reason why the universal texts of the liturgy have managed to weave their way through the centuries and across the nations of the world: they speak universal, fundamental Biblical truth that all Christians everywhere must confess and believe, or they can no longer be called Christians. That's why we're able to glean liturgical ideas from Catholic publishing houses like Oregon Catholic Press or GIA Publications. That's why, in our service today, we could borrow the Prayer of the Church from another Lutheran hymnal, and songs like “Glory to God” and “Holy, Holy” from Donna Peña's Mass of the Nations.
Our Present Understanding — Textual Conformity with Artistic Variety
Today we can appreciate more than ever our heritage in the liturgy. What we have inherited from the generations of believers who have gone before us is not a musical style, but a set of texts, a set of texts that has strengthened and enriched the faith and worship of Christians for over a thousand years, a set of texts that by their very nature encourage artistic and musical variety because they represent the real worship of real worshipers. And the fact is that real worshipers, around the globe, express the same objective truths in different ways. 
Today the five song texts of the Ordinary can be found in dozens of different musical settings in every language. In English there are settings from Gregorian chant, to African-American style, to American folk style from the '60s and more contemporary settings, like the one we heard today. Christian Worship: New Service Settings offers a new setting of the Common Service, along with contemporary settings of Morning Praise and Prayer at the Close of Day. Some melodies are more upbeat, others are more meditative. Some would sound great sung a cappella, others would benefit from a wide range of different instruments. 
The song texts of the Proper, like the Hymn of the Day and the Psalms, offer their own opportunities for weekly variety. I'm pretty sure that our inability to recover the original music of the Psalms wasn't an oversight on God's part. We can apply to our liturgy the same principle that God applied to his inspired Psalms: Preserve the texts, but let the music change.
The texts of the liturgy are the liturgy. They preach the gospel. They express the gospel-inspired response of all believers of all times. They remind us that we, too, occupy a space, a small space, in the grand structure that is Christ's holy temple. The texts of the liturgy are timeless and do not require change. 
The specific music and artistic styles applied to the liturgy might be called examples of the liturgy. They help a limited number of people to understand the gospel and to express their gospel-inspired response according to their own place and their own time. The music of the liturgy can and should change.
Adapting the Liturgy for World Mission Settings
If we're looking for real life examples of other cultures that have taken the liturgy and made it their own, we might as well look to the world mission fields. 
Let's look at Africa, especially Zambia and Malawi, where Africans did major work on their liturgy about the same time we were producing Christian Worship in the States. These Lutherans from Central Africa had used The Common Service from The Lutheran Hymnal since the 1960's, but there was no point in trying to cram African speech patterns and rhythms into those chant settings. What a shame that, as Kathie Wendland puts it, “a people that breathes and lives music was speaking the liturgy in their church services.” So in 1993 Ernst and Kathie Wendland organized a workshop on music for pastors and laypeople in Central Africa. The missionaries sat back and watched as, within two days, the African members themselves had come up with their own melodies and rhythms for the texts of the liturgy, melodies that make sense to African worshipers. They sing their entire liturgy a cappella, sometimes adding drums and shakers, and many times dancing as they sing. You won't find anybody more at home with the way they worship.
In Latin America, the liturgy isn't something new. Unlike Africa, the Roman Catholic liturgy has been a part of Hispanic culture since the arrival of the first conquistadores around the time of the Reformation. But the Latin and the Gregorian music made the Roman Rite just as foreign to Mexicans and Puerto Ricans as it did to Germans. 
After Vatican II, various Catholic hymnals were produced in Spanish, and other Lutheran synods have produced hymnals with songs that are more accessible to Hispanic culture and more fitting for the Spanish language. Our churches throughout Latin America are experimenting with songs from several different hymnals. But just as some musical settings of the liturgy fail to consider culture, sometimes the cultural music fails to consider the meaning of the liturgical texts. The compositions I've done for the liturgy in Spanish were done mainly because, to me, many of the newer liturgical songs in Spanish seem to be music composed purely for culture's sake, rather than cultural music composed to fit the liturgical texts.
Adapting the Liturgy for WELS Congregations
We can apply similar principles to adapt the liturgy for the multi-generational, multi-cultural situation of our WELS churches in the United States. Not all people crave different or contemporary styles. But some do, both young and old. They don't have to abandon the liturgy to find them. The liturgy can be adapted, even to forms of Jazz or Gospel or folk music, depending on the circumstances.
How can the music of the liturgy be adapted for different cultural groups in America? Part of the answer is for each cultural group to study what thoughts and emotions each liturgical text means to communicate, and then to analyze how those thoughts and emotions are expressed in their cultures. It's called “dynamic equivalence.” For example, the liturgy uses white to symbolize purity. But in some Asian cultures, white symbolizes death. What color symbolizes purity for those cultures? The texts of the liturgy convey certain thoughts and emotions: repentance, expectant trust, exuberant joy, peace, overwhelming love, reverence and awe, unbending faith. We're familiar with how some American and German composers have expressed those thoughts and emotions. How would a Hispanic or African-American or Asian composer express them? Maybe in the exact same way. Maybe differently. 
So let's get to work! In the end music is rather subjective, and that scares a lot of us. But maybe we can agree on some guiding principles for liturgical composition: Is it for everyone to sing? Keep it simple. Is it for the choir? Make it more challenging. It can be sorrowful, but not a dirge. Joyful, but not ecstatic. Moving, but not manipulative. Sober, but not somber. Strong, but not noisy. Beautiful, but not gaudy. Music fit for a king, who is also our Father, our Savior, friend and brother, but not our jammin' buddy. Music that is reflective of our own cultural expression, but not music from every corner of our culture. Remember, it's not music for music's sake. It's music with a purpose: to carry God's message to our hearts, and our response to God's throne of grace. 
Even with lots of new options at our fingertips, the best answer for our American WELS churches, where so many cultures come together in worship, almost has to be a blend of different styles of cultural expression, with a lot of patience and love on all sides and a firm commitment to work together, because, in the end, the liturgy is about unity. It's not about division. When we decide to use a common set of texts for worship, when we decide to care about what our brothers and sisters in the universal Church have done and are doing, when we decide to take each other's preferences into consideration, we deal a deadly blow to our sinful nature that thinks only about me, me, me. What I like, what I want to hear, what I want to sing, what I think, what I feel. Through the liturgy we discipline ourselves to set aside self for awhile and focus on Jesus, and through Jesus, on that holy temple of which we are a part. It's a weekly opportunity to recall and to rejoice in the unity of the body of Christ, within our own congregations, within our synod, among our world missions, and even among Christians in other denominations, with whom we can't join in worship in any other way. That is a lesson we can hardly afford to be without.
WELS at a Crossroads in Liturgical Worship
So, we're back to the question: What are we going to do with the liturgy? Three choices stand before us. We can keep doing what we're doing right now. We can set the auto-pilot and stay with the orders of service provided in Christian Worship indefinitely. That will work for some churches in some communities for awhile. But in others, it may mean that we'll lose touch with a growing number of members and seekers alike who find especially the music of these services to be limiting or foreign and, therefore, sometimes inadequate styles for communicating the gospel.
Of course, a second option would be for us to leave the past in the past, drop the liturgy and move on to adopt the worship style of contemporary Evangelicals and other non-liturgical denominations. A new “order” of service every week, a few testimonials, some light-hearted praise songs, maybe a band to liven things up. The world wouldn't end because of it. But that type of service carries with it some long-term implications. What would replace the quantity of gospel content that now nourishes our souls every week in the liturgy? What lesson would we really be communicating to our people if we simply discarded the worship wisdom of countless generations of Christians that have gone before us? Have human needs and divine solutions really changed that much in our time? How long would it take before our worship of God and our religion itself became as superficial as most of those praise songs?
The third choice for WELS, and, obviously, the choice that this conference recommends, is to retain the liturgy, but to adorn it with music and variety that is fitting for the place where we serve. We can put in the time and the effort necessary to do our present orders of service well. We can learn about the cultures and the subcultures in our church areas and search for existing music that might work for everyone. And those who have the talents can start composing. Tim Helmen’s setting of the Kyrie and the communion hymn, “We Remember” are wonderful examples of how we can adapt the liturgy in our time and circumstances. 
These and other new musical compositions are modern day examples of the changing music of the liturgy, living illustrations of how a given group of believers combines the best of their God-given talents to join with the millions of Christians on earth and the hosts in heaven who have chosen to worship their Savior-God by means of the liturgy. To him alone be the glory.   u
See also Rite Worship for North American Outreach by Jon Schroeder, and The Liturgy by James Tiefel – additional plenary addresses from the 2005 worship conference. All three addresses may be found in the file Plenary Addresses.