I can hardly describe how awesome it was to attend the WELS National Conference on Worship, Music, and the Arts. Words don’t fail me because of the Christian fellowship I enjoyed with pastors, teachers, musicians, and lay leaders from across our national church body; nor do they fail me because the conference was so well organized and so helpful for my own ministry at St. Stephen Lutheran. Words to describe the conference are hard to write because a large part of the conference is spent in worship of our Lord and Savior Jesus, and Christian worship expresses the unutterable groans of our soul.
In worship, we approach God as humble sinners, shocked at our capacity to sin and stunned at the frequency we forsake our God through sinful thoughts and words and actions. The confession at the start of Christian worship puts these thoughts on our lips. Simply speaking this honest truth is a cleansing experience, but it pales in comparison to the true cleansing that follows. After our confession we receive equally shocking and stunning news: “You will not surely die. The Lord has taken away your sins.” The calm and comfort that wash over each of us when we hear those words and digest what they truly mean makes our hearts alive with faith! The rest of God’s Divine Service becomes a rich feast for the baptized Christian hungry for more of this good news. We read lessons. We sing psalms. We proclaim grace through our hymns. We hear the sermon on God’s Word. We celebrate the sacrament. We pray in thanksgiving. All of it revolves around God’s Word, through which we believe and are saved. It is, without exaggeration, the centerpiece of the Christian life.
Photograph by Caleb R. Bassett
The Excellence of Worship
At the worship conference there were four services (Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Easter Morning, Easter Evening) and two sacred concerts (Festival Concert, Hymn Festival). And so there were six opportunities to meditate on the power of God’s grace in my life. And the fact that each of these six opportunities were adorned with all the musical, visual, and preaching talent our national church body of 400,000 souls can muster only magnified the impact of God’s Word in my heart and in the hearts of the approximately 1000 people who attended each service.
Will any of our congregations in WELS celebrate Easter with a full orchestra, a world-class brass ensemble, and a 100-voice choir as we did at the conference? Will we at St. Stephen Lutheran do this? Not likely. Some might wonder what’s the point of adorning the services of the National Worship Conference with such glory if we cannot bring that same impact to our own congregations.
The answer is simple. No one congregation could do what the combined strength of all our congregations can do. But the high standard set in front of everyone inspired each of us to return to our congregations and do all we can possibly can do with the resources God has given us to beautify the reading and studying and proclamation of God’s Word among us.
A powerful Divine Service is focused on the Word. And a beautiful Divine Service is usually the sum of many parts. By bringing small improvements to our worship over time we can use God’s good gifts to drive the message of grace home more and more each month and year. I returned from the conference with a number of excellent ideas for worship. Each of them are small ideas and relatively easy to implement. Over time they will become another part in a total sum of worship here at St. Stephen Lutheran.
What Did You Actually Do?
Let me now get to some specifics about the worship conference itself. The conference began on Tuesday, July 19 and ran through Friday, July 22. Members of the large choirs actually arrived at the conference on Sunday, July 17 to rehearse for all the worship and concerts that would happen. I did not sing in a choir, and so I arrived on Tuesday.
The conference is held at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, MN. Gustavus Adolphus is a college of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). We are unable to host the event at our own WELS college due mainly to the sheer number of attendees. Our college’s facilities, for as large as they are, do not have the capacity to host a conference of this size.
The conference agenda looked something like this each day:
- Morning worship (a full service to model worship at a certain part of the church year)
- Plenary address
- Morning workshops
- Lunch
- Afternoon workshops
- Dinner
- Evening worship
- Fellowship and visiting
My Presentation
I was honored to be one of the 46 workshop presenters for the National Worship Conference. I presented a 75-minute workshop based on the documentary film I produced during my senior year at Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary. The documentary film is a feature-length, professional-quality film telling the story of the beautiful chapel organ at Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary. The presentation was designed to show attendees how the film could be used to inform, motivate, and education congregations and schools about the benefits of excellent musical instruments in leading God’s people in their proclamation of the gospel.
The presentation went very well, and I greatly enjoyed the feedback I received. A few attendees knew nothing of what goes into selecting a good organ (or any good worship instrument for that matter!) and were quick to catch onto the principles presented in my film. I was glad to see one of the goals I set out to accomplish through the film project being fulfilled in the presentation.
For more information about the project, visit http://opus54.com.
Other Workshops I Attended
I attended a number of other helpful workshops. I made a deliberate effort to sign up for workshops that would allow me to bring new ideas and music into practice at our congregation. The workshops I attended focused on three main areas:
- Renewing the singing of psalms in worship
- Review of contemporary liturgical music
- Using worship to guide the Christian through the teachings of scripture
Each of these workshops gave me direct, practical ideas to put the principles of Christian worship into practice. Some of the changes we can make soon. Others require funding to purchase music, materials, and instruments. Our current budget includes $75 for congregational music for the year. This is enough to purchase maybe one or two new music resources, but nothing more. We will work to improve this budgeted area next fiscal year since this total will not support a vibrant worship program in the long term.
Other Notes
There were a number of other highlights from the conference I haven’t mentioned yet.
Passing the Torch
The theme of the whole conference was “Passing the Torch.” Many of the workshops and the plenary address focused on the importance of passing our Christian and Lutheran heritage on to our children.
To help emphasize this, a number of new worship materials were commissioned for the conference. New congregational prayers, new liturgical songs, and new hymns were all created and made their worldwide debut at this conference. Many of the compositions were made by young musicians and pastors, some of whom were my own age! I’m pursuing a number of these new songs for possible use in our services in the future.
New Chapel at Martin Luther College
Another highlight of the conference was the one day we spent at Martin Luther College, our own college of ministry. As I mentioned before, the college is not big enough to host the conference attendees for the whole week, but, happily, we were able to conduct one day of the conference on our own campus.
I had the joy of taking part in what was probably one of the most anticipated events in recent WELS history.
It’s an odd and sad fact, but for years the college that trains all our pastors and all our teachers has not had it’s own chapel in which to worship. Instead, chapel was always held in a dimly-lit theater auditorium. God’s altar shared a space with sets for dramas and musicals.
Our national church body had been saving for a proper chapel at our college for a number of years. The project was plagued for years by economic downturns and mission offering shortfalls. During my years at the college, the chapel was in the planning stages, but was not even close to construction.
Finally, thanks to God’s grace moving generous hearts in our congregations and some wise planning at the college, the long-desired house of the Lord became a reality. It’s been in use for about a year now at the college, but this was the first national event our church body held in this new jewel of a worship space. One person remarked to me before the Easter Festival service held in the chapel, “A lot of people have waited a long time for this day.”
The service was emotional for many. We all enjoyed the beauty of the message of Easter (always good to hear that again), the magnificence of the brass and choirs, and the joy of the shared ministry we all take part in as members of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod.
Our church body has a bright worship future now that every pastor and teacher we train will see excellence, beauty, and the absolute centrality of God’s Word modeled for them day after day all through college.
What Comes Next?
So, how can we harness the benefit of this conference in our own worship?
First, the Psalms
The first goal I’m setting out to accomplish is to renew the singing of the psalms in worship. The psalms, quite literally, are the Bible’s hymnal. God himself encourages us to sing psalms in worship. The method of singing the psalms that we have in our hymnal is the simplest way to convey the biblical text of the psalms. However, it is not the only way, and added variety in this area will make our singing of these comforting and uplifting biblical texts better.
We are purchasing some resources for psalm singing and will hopefully implement them soon. We will likely employ a monthly children’s choir to sing the psalms, in addition to a monthly soloist. This takes care of two weeks out of the month. The third week could be a congregational psalm. And the fourth week could be a spoken psalm with a musical interlude. This effort fits into one of our plan of ministry goals as well. We are working to add special music to 75% of all Sunday services.
Next, the Future
Further improvements in musical variety will require us to spend money. I have a long list of recommended musical resources for our organists, pianists, singers, and other musicians. We would do well to purchase our own small instruments like tambourine, handbells, cymbals, and hand drums. We’ll work on making these things a reality over the coming years in our annual budget. Our efforts to reduce debt and free up funds for ministry through the Forward in Faith program will also allow us to make further worship improvements.
Another chorus you will hear me repeat many times over the coming few years is the desire to send more of our members to this conference the next time it is held. The conference occurs every three years, so that would put the next conference in 2014. Ideally we would send the following people to this conference:
- The school principal, since many workshops speak to the ways elementary schools can teach music and worship to the next generation.
- The children’s choir director, since many workshops specifically address the matter of children’s choirs and effective directing.
- Our organists and pianists, since many workshops teach things like how to lead worship from a piano, and also give lists of new music and techniques for church musicians.
Continuing education opportunities like the National Worship Conference are valuable tools to improve the ministry of Lutheran congregations like ours. Avoiding the expense of sending our people to these conferences tends to hinder our ability to pursue excellence. The effects may not be noticeable at first, but over time, the stagnation can become a stark and difficult reality. We have three years to ramp up to the next conference, and I’ll be personally encouraging all our leaders to work toward the goal of sending three or four individuals from our congregation to this conference in the future.
My goal is to bring as much improvement to our public worship as possible. I won’t stop pushing us forward with the goal of focusing our attention on the public proclamation of grace with as much beauty, art, music, and excellence as we possibly can. The gospel is worth such an effort, wouldn’t you agree?
