Lutheran Service Book (LCMS)

Lutheran Forum on the new LCMS and ELCA worship books:

Reforming the Daily Office: Examining Two New Lutheran Books
by Philip H. Pfatteicher — August 31, 2007

The creation of Evangelical Lutheran Worship (ELW) by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, as I understand it, was generated by the convergence of two factors. One was the fervent desire on the part of a relative minority in the church to end the use of masculine pronouns (“he,” “him,” “his”) to refer to God. The other was the increasingly serious financial situation of the church’s publishing house, Augsburg Fortress...

The creation of Evangelical Lutheran Worship (ELW) by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, as I understand it, was generated by the convergence of two factors. One was the fervent desire on the part of a relative minority in the church to end the use of masculine pronouns (“he,” “him,” “his”) to refer to God. The other was the increasingly serious financial situation of the church’s publishing house, Augsburg Fortress. A new worship book would make congregations pray and talk about God in ways that the influential minority considered essential and would at the same time be a big seller to bail out the publisher. And so it has happened.

Concordia, the publishing house of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, also with a keen eye to marketing, could not countenance a book that could possibly draw off some of its own source of income, and so the 2004 convention of that church approved a “new hymnal,” Lutheran Service Book (LSB)...

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GJ - Someone questioned whether a new hymnal could bail out a Lutheran publishing house. I read elsewhere that ELCA's Augsburg-Fortress finally got out of the red when the new hymnal began selling.

I have experienced the new LSB twice. It is probably the best new Lutheran hymnal. WELS' CW (Charismatic Worship) is doubtless the worst. CW is also the only new hymnal to avoid the word Lutheran. The national magazine of WELS defenestrated Lutheran from its title years ago. Now people see nothing wrong with avoiding almost any connection with Lutheran.