I like to say that I am an 'intuitive' learner, which I think is an excuse for not reading books (especially textbooks) cover-to-cover. But since I will be instructing students in the performance of liturgy, it seems to me to be high time to read Lutheran Book of Worship: Manual on the Liturgy straight through.
I, along with an entire generation of Lutherans, was taught to pray by LBW. It was published in 1978, and I was six years old when my childhood congregation adopted it. As a boy I played pastor using its service music and texts. I learned its hymn-texts (some by heart) and became upset when as a know-it-all teenager (what's changed?) I heard A Mighty Fortress sung to different lyrics. Later as an adult I learned and grew to love its daily prayer offices and, of course, its rites and rubrics shaped my ministry to Word and Sacrament.
As I read, I am gratified to learn that I am not an impostor for not having (yet) read this handbook through. I'm doing things (pretty much) according to the Manual. But by the time I began seminary in the late 1990s, Lutherans had been either preparing or using LBW for three decades. I had the advantages of being around good liturgists in my liturgical studies, my field-work, and in the beginning of my ministry; also, the hard work of implementing LBW's insights had been done by predecessors in both the congregations I have served as pastor. My education in voice performance allows me to execute and adapt LBW to take advantage of its musical possibilities.
The Manual is mostly written by Phillip Pfatteicher, who arguably became the authoritative interpreter of the entire work. Pfatteicher also wrote the Commentary on the Lutheran Book of Worship and the Commentary on the Occasional Services. His presentation of the Daily Office, The Daily Prayer of the Church, is based on LBW.
LBW (published 1978) came into being at a time of convergence - Lutheran convergence, ecumenical convergence. It was also written at a time of great societal change. As such, the manual's ruminations on its contemporary moment are of historical interest, not read without a touch of wistfulness for the innocence of the past and the road not taken. Pfatteicher seemed confident that LBW's updates in language - both the eschewing of Tudor English for the language of the twentieth century and the advances in inclusive language and in avoiding words that could possibly lend themselves to racial stereotype - was meeting the needs of the present moment.
The present moment, however, is short-lived by its very nature. Pfatteicher spent much of his later career arguing that future 'advances' in Lutheran liturgy of both revisionist and traditionalist bent went too far in either direction. Meant to be a forward-thinking, progressive document, LBW, for many of us, has become a guardian of tradition. This perpetuates its many insights, but also ossifies its flaws.
ELCA Lutherans have (mostly) abandoned the LBW for Evangelical Lutheran Worship and subsequent works, in which inclusivity and not orthodoxy seem to have become the litmus test for content. The Missouri Synod, the denomination that invited the others to start working together on a new book in the 60s, never actually adopted the book, and their subsequent Lutheran Service Book has been accused of focusing on the specific needs and emphases of their own iteration of Lutheranism. Which leaves a small number in the North American Lutheran Church (plus some holdouts in both larger denominations) still using the book. And yet if we are not led by the Zeitgeist, this book which is the product of a certain time still resonates even in our time. It represents a Lutheranism open to ecumenical convergence, appropriating the insights and gifts of the liturgical movement which found agreement in the pre-Nicene tradition, rigorously orthodox in its language for the God in Trinity, and constantly reminding those who use it of their baptismal identity in Christ.
