VERSION: 8 May 2002
INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND TO THE LCA WORSHIP RESOURCES
The LCA Worship Resources material has been prepared by the Commission on Worship of the Lutheran Church of Australia (LCA) at the request of the General Church Council. Funded by the Lutheran Laypeople's League (LLL), this project originally covered the first three years of use of the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) in LCA congregations, that is, from Advent year A in 1998 to the end of the post-Pentecost period year C in 2001. Every pastor in the LCA was sent three computer disks of material each year. Hard copy print-outs were also available. These resources have now been revised and updated for continued use in the future and put on to this CD-ROM, again with generous funding from the LLL.
CONTENTS AND USE
Please look carefully at the list of contents included on this CD-ROM (the document 'Contents' in this folder). The material is arranged into the following 14 folders plus appendix folder.
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Readme (contents and introduction)
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General and seasonal (background notes and resources)
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Rites and services (mainly for special occasions)
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Year A, Advent to Epiphany (notes and resources for each Sunday and festival)
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Year A, Lent to Trinity (notes and resources for each Sunday and festival)
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Year A, Time after Pentecost (notes and resources for each Sunday)
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Year B - three folders as above for year A
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Year C - three folders as above for year A
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Minor festivals and other days (including Mother's Day etc)
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Modernised Lutheran Hymnal hymns (list and texts)
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Appendix (a largely unedited collection of various useful extra materials, including the revised ‘All Together’ index, and a biblical index to the Revised Common Lectionary)
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Within the documents for the Sundays, the material consists of ideas and resources for liturgy, hymns and songs, visual and dramatic ideas, and ideas for involving children. For convenience, the Sundays are dated for the coming years up to the end of year C in 2016.
This project provides a wide range of practical material to assist in the conduct of public worship in the congregations of the LCA. We have tried to provide ideas, best practices, and materials for parts of the service, rather than full orders of service. The resources are intended to be used selectively and flexibly.
In each of the original floppy disks of the LCA Worship Resources, there was a drama folder containing material for a dramatic presentation for every Sunday. These have now been collected together and published in book form by Openbook Publishers under the titles of Mega Drama 1, Mega Drama 2 etc, with the subtitle Reproducible Christian Drama Resources, in six volumes. So references to these, rather than the actual dramas, are now given in these resources.
Similarly, references are given to the Music Packages; no actual music is contained here. Nor are there any other graphics.
Copyright permission is given for congregations to reproduce the material here for non-commercial worship purposes. But please acknowledge any relevant authors or sources mentioned in these resources.
From time to time in the LCA Worship Resources regular liturgical parts are given in contemporary ecumenical form, as prepared by the English Language Liturgical Consultation. These texts may be reproduced provided that they are accompanied by this acknowledgment:
The English translation of (text) prepared by the English Language Liturgical Consultation (ELLC), 1988.
CONTENTS OF 'GENERAL NOTES AND RESOURCES' DOCUMENT
When using these LCA Worship Resources, you could go straight to the relevant Sunday's document and look at the part you are interested in. However, if you are the sort of person who actually reads introductions like this one, you may prefer to first read some background material on the particular part of the liturgy or the church year season, or perhaps you want to look also at suggested general or seasonal variations. To do this, you would go to the documents in the folder 'General and seasonal'. To give some idea of what is in these documents, below is a list of contents of the large overall document ‘General notes and resources'.
GENERAL
Which service(s)?
Using the LCA Worship Resources
Headings for the liturgy
Inclusive language
LITURGY
Opening the service
Sentence
Confession and absolution
Introit
Lord, have mercy
Hymn of adoration (Glory to God in the highest)
Prayer of the day (collect)
Readings
Psalm (and introit)
Alleluia verse / verse
Highlighting the gospel
Gospel acclamation
Gospel procession
Response after the gospel
Order of service after the gospel
Creed
Offering
Offering prayer
Prayer of the church
Seasonal preface
'Christ has died'
Eucharistic prayer
'Through him, with him, in him'
The 'great amen'
Lamb of God
Communion invitation
Post-communion
Blessing
Dismissal
HYMNS AND SONGS
Sources
Guitar chords
Selecting hymns/songs
Location and function of hymns/songs
Lord, have mercy
Hymn of adoration
Alleluias
Creed
Offering hymn
Prayer of the church
Holy, holy, holy
Lord's Prayer
Lamb of God
Post-communion song
Taize songs
Iona Community songs
Canticles
Hymn for the celebration of music and song
NOTES ON THE READINGS
MUSIC
Music Packages
Settings
Some organ music resources
Liturgical material (instrumental/choir/congregation)
General music resource
Cantors
What if you don't have an organist
VISUAL ARTS
Principles of visual arts in worship
Colours, flowers and displays
Visuals for the readings
DRAMA AND MOVEMENT
Blessings of people
Dramatising the readings
How to do a procession
Kneeling
'Mega Drama' resources
INVOLVING CHILDREN
OTHER MATERIAL
Responsible communion practice
EDITORIAL DECISIONS
The material collected here comes from a variety of sources and draws on a range of styles. In the parts to be spoken, we have aimed at a style of English which is contemporary, crisp and direct, and at the same time dignified and suitable for speaking aloud. The language, as is true for all our worship, is firmly based on Scripture, without being tied to only one translation. And we have used inclusive language throughout in referring to human beings - as in the recommended Bible versions.
In producing the LCA Worship Resources we tried to provide for a variety of computer systems and word processing programs to cater for as many users as possible. In some cases there was a loss of punctuation and formatting, and we tried to minimise this. One way of doing so was to avoid using certain more sophisticated punctuation marks which sometimes disappear. Thus we used hyphens instead of en rules (short dashes to indicate spans of figures etc), asterisks instead of bullet points, plus signs instead of proper cross symbols, and straight quote marks and apostrophes (foot and inch symbols) instead of smart quotes (the proper turned marks). It is better to have less sophisticated quotation marks than to have them vanish, as sometimes happened originally. We chose a sans serif font so that these quote marks look better. We are not sure whether all these measures are still necessary now, but we felt it was better to continue to play safe.
To make the material easier for you to use and to find your way around, we have repeated some material and have freely used cross-referencing, indicated by underlining. Generally the cross-references give the document name, the name of the relevant section within the document (underlined), and the folder name.
For parts of the service to be spoken, we have often broken up the material into shorter 'sense' lines, as in verse, to make them easier to read. This is especially the case for parts which may be said by the congregation. However, we realise that for reasons of space congregations sometimes want to print these out as continuous prose, particularly collects. To make this easier to do, we have used 'soft' rather than 'hard' returns ('ends of lines' rather than 'paragraphs') in these cases.
The following reference abbreviations have been used in these resources.
Bible versions
NRSV: New Revised Standard Version
NIV: New International Version (inclusive language edition)
TEV: Good News Bible: Today's English Version (revised edition, inclusive language with Australian usage text)
NKJV: New King James Version
CEV: Contemporary English Version
LCA-approved hymnbooks and songbooks
LH:Lutheran Hymnal
LHS:Lutheran Hymnal with Supplement
AT:'All Together' books
ATN:All Together Now
ATA:All Together Again
ATE:All Together Everybody
ATO:All Together OK
ATW: All Together Whatever
TIS: Together in Song: Australian Hymn Book II
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Commission on Worship is grateful to the LLL for its generous funding of personnel, equipment, and distribution. (Donations to LLL to help offset this expenditure would be welcome.) In addition to this provision, many people have freely donated material and time to the project, and provided feedback and encouragement. They cannot all be thanked by name, but the Commission on Worship of the LCA acknowledges:
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David Sch¸tz, for managing the project while the original disks were prepared, being responsible for compilation
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David Schubert, for editing and some compilation
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Alan Collyer, for coordinating music resources, and all musicians who contributed music to the Music Packages
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Verena Johnson, for originally coordinating the drama resources, and all drama script writers
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Claire Kleinig, for coordinating the selections of hymns and songs, and all who assisted
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Jeffrey Silcock, for liaising for the first years (coordinating funding and distribution)
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Jenny Wagner at the LCA National Office, for attending to inquiries and distribution, and for keying in material in the first years
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Grace Bock, for keying in corrections and additions, and formatting
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Greg Pietsch, for coordinating the production of the CD-ROM, and Nathan Hedt for assisting
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John Kleinig (as chair of the Commission of Worship), for overseeing and encouraging the project
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Members of the Commission on Worship, and members of the commission's departments, for their contributions
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Contributors of new hymns and songs and translations
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Kevin Zwar, Fraser Pearce, and Marco Vervoorst, for contributing some prayers of the church
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Robert Thiele, for providing notes on the readings
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Jan Pietsch, for providing suggestions for flower and other visual displays
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Maree Waldhuter, for designing the CD-ROM label
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Adelaide Business Bureaux, for reproducing and distributing the original disks
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Adelaide Tape Distibutors Pty Ltd, for producing this CD-ROM from the files provided
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LCA National Church Office staff, North Adelaide, for distribution of materials and other miscellaneous assistance, and the immediate past and the present LCA presidents, Lance Steicke and Mike Semmler, for their goodwill.
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IT'S NOW UP TO YOU . . .
In these LCA Worship Resources, we have provided ideas and texts, but you have to put them to use. You won't be able to use everything provided, and probably wouldn't want to, so select and adapt according to your circumstances. How well the materials work will depend largely on how they are put into practice. May the Lord of the church bless our worship of him!
April 2002
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