Two settings of the Divine Service

Anyone who worships at Our Saviour through a full year will notice that the music of the Sunday service changes with the seasons. The order stays nearly the same, and most of the words do too, while the melodies and some of the wording change. We use two settings of the Divine Service from our hymnal, Lutheran Service Book (LSB): Setting One, which begins on page 151, and Setting Three, which begins on page 184. Our page on the liturgy explains why we worship with a fixed order. This page explains when we use each setting, tells the story of each, and walks through the service from beginning to end.

On this page:

One liturgy in two settings

Earlier hymnals numbered their orders of worship as separate services: “Divine Service I,” “Divine Service II,” and so on. When Lutheran Service Book appeared in 2006, its editors changed those names to “Setting One,” “Setting Two,” and the rest. The change teaches something true. The church has one Divine Service, which God uses to give His gifts in Word and Sacrament. The hymnal offers it in several musical forms. Setting One and Setting Three share the same parts in nearly the same order. The differences lie mostly in the music, in the English of the sung texts, and in a few choices of canticle.

Setting Three: the Common Service

Setting Three is the older of the two. Its text is the Common Service of 1888, the first order of worship shared by nearly all English-speaking Lutherans in North America.

In the nineteenth century, American Lutherans were divided among several church bodies, and their English services varied widely. In 1876 the General Synod South proposed that it join the General Synod and the General Council in preparing one service book for all of them. In 1879 the General Council set down the rule that would guide the work, and all three bodies adopted it: “The common consent of the pure Lutheran Liturgies of the Sixteenth Century, and when there is not an entire agreement among them, the consent of the largest number of those of greatest weight.” A joint committee, chaired by Beale M. Schmucker with Edward T. Horn as secretary, met from 1884 to 1888.

The committee did not invent a new service. It compared the church orders of the Reformation era, including those of Brandenburg-Nuremberg and Wittenberg (both 1533), the order Justus Jonas prepared for Albertine Saxony (1539), and the orders of Mecklenburg, Lüneburg, and Pomerania, alongside Luther’s own Formula Missae (1523) and German Mass (1526). Where those orders agreed, the committee followed them. For the English of the ordinary texts, such as the Gloria and the Sanctus, it borrowed the translations of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. The three church bodies approved the Common Service in 1888.

The Missouri Synod’s English-speaking congregations received the Common Service in the Evangelical Lutheran Hymn-Book of 1912. In 1941 The Lutheran Hymnal printed it as “The Order of the Holy Communion” on page 15, and for the next sixty years “page 15” was simply the Divine Service to most Missouri Synod Lutherans. Many of our members learned the faith through its words.

Lutheran Worship (1982) carried the service forward as “Divine Service I” with modernized language throughout, melody-only music in place of the familiar four-part harmony, altered notes in some melodies, and a new Nunc Dimittis by Paul Bunjes. Many congregations did not accept those changes. When the committee that prepared Lutheran Service Book field-tested the service in congregations still using The Lutheran Hymnal, it decided that every sung text would keep its older English, since some of those texts could not be updated without changing the music. The four-part harmony of 1941 returned. Spoken parts that belong to the pastor or to the whole congregation, such as the Confession and Absolution, the creeds, and the prayers, received gently updated language. That is why Setting Three sings “And with thy spirit” while the pastor speaks the Absolution in modern English.

The music of Setting Three has deep roots. The melody of the Kyrie is the one Luther provided in his German Mass (1526), drawn from the first Gregorian psalm tone, and the Agnus Dei is the German Agnus Dei that Luther named in the same order. The Gloria is sung to “Old Scottish Chant,” a tune of uncertain origin whose earliest known use with this text is in William Smith’s The Churchman’s Choral Companion to His Prayer Book (1809). The triple Alleluia comes from the Psalmodia of Lucas Lossius, a Lutheran schoolmaster of the sixteenth century. The Nunc Dimittis is a chant on the fifth Gregorian tone found in Reformation church orders such as that of Pomerania (1535). The melody of “Create in me” comes from Johann Freylinghausen’s hymnal of 1708 and is probably the work of Christian Knorr von Rosenroth. The origin of the Sanctus is unknown; it appears in Friedrich Lochner’s Der Hauptgottesdienst, a Missouri Synod guide to the chief service. It is the only part of the setting written in full harmony rather than as a chant, and it ends on the dominant chord rather than the home chord, as though the song of the angels could go on without end.

Setting One: from Lutheran Book of Worship

Setting One is a twentieth-century setting. In 1966, at the invitation of the Missouri Synod, representatives of the Missouri Synod, the American Lutheran Church, and the Lutheran Church in America formed the Inter-Lutheran Commission on Worship to prepare common worship materials. The commission tested its work in a series of paperback booklets called Contemporary Worship, and the second of these (1970) introduced a new order of Holy Communion. Its texts used modern English translations prepared by the International Consultation on English Texts, a group of scholars from many church bodies.

The commission’s work produced Lutheran Book of Worship (1978), which offered one order of Holy Communion in three musical settings. The music of the first setting was written by Richard Hillert (1923-2010), a Missouri Synod composer who taught for many years at Concordia in River Forest, Illinois. Hillert composed every part of it: the Kyrie, the Gloria, “This Is the Feast,” the Alleluia and Verse, the Offertory, the Agnus Dei, and the post-communion canticle “Thank the Lord.”

The Missouri Synod did not adopt Lutheran Book of Worship, since it had doctrinal concerns about parts of the book. It prepared its own revision instead, Lutheran Worship (1982), which kept Hillert’s music intact and revised the texts. The confession of sins became part of the service itself, with a stronger confession of guilt and an absolution spoken by the pastor. The historic Introit and Gradual returned as options. Hillert’s setting became “Divine Service II, First Setting,” and it became the regular Sunday service of many Missouri Synod congregations.

Lutheran Service Book (2006) renamed it Setting One and revised it lightly. The offertory “Let the vineyards be fruitful” was dropped, since its text was only loosely based on Scripture, and “What shall I render to the Lord” became the offertory. The historic “Amen” returned as the congregation’s response to the Pax Domini. The book also added an alternate order for the prayers around the Words of Our Lord.

Two features of Setting One stand out. Its Kyrie is a litany, an extended prayer with petitions for peace, for the church, and for all people, each answered by “Lord, have mercy.” This form comes from the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, the chief service of the Eastern churches. Its second feature is “This Is the Feast,” a canticle that may be sung in place of the Gloria. John W. Arthur, a pastor of the Lutheran Church in America and a member of the commission, wrote its text for Contemporary Worship 2 (1970), drawing on an older canticle built from verses of Revelation 5 and 19 that had appeared among the canticles of The Lutheran Hymnal. Hillert wrote his music for it in 1975. His setting has since been printed in more than a dozen hymnals of other church bodies, including Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Roman Catholic books.

A walk through the Divine Service

What follows is the service in order, as a visitor will experience it. Where the two settings differ, the difference is noted.

Preparation

Invocation. The pastor begins, “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” and the congregation answers, “Amen.” These are the words of Holy Baptism (Matthew 28:19). God put His name on each of us at the font, and we enter His presence under that name. The medieval Mass had no public invocation; the words came into the service from the priest’s private preparation before the altar, and Lutheran church orders later made them a public beginning.

Confession and Absolution. We confess our sins together, and the pastor forgives them in Christ’s name. In the medieval church this preparation was a private prayer of the priest and his assistants. Luther did not include a public confession in his orders of 1523 and 1526, since he expected communicants to go to private confession beforehand. Later Lutheran church orders placed a general confession at the start of the service.

In Setting One, the pastor begins with 1 John 1:8-9 (“If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves”), the congregation confesses together, and the pastor speaks the Absolution: “As a called and ordained servant of Christ, and by His authority, I therefore forgive you all your sins.”

Setting Three opens with an exhortation from Hebrews 10:22 (“Beloved in the Lord! Let us draw near with a true heart”) and two sung versicles from the Psalms: “Our help is in the name of the Lord” (Psalm 124:8) and “I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord” (Psalm 32:5). The hymnal then offers two columns. One is a confession followed by a declaration of grace, which the Common Service took from the Mecklenburg church order of 1552. The other is the older confession “I, a poor, miserable sinner” followed by an absolution in which the pastor forgives sins “in the stead and by the command of my Lord Jesus Christ.”

The Service of the Word

Introit. The Introit (Latin for “entrance”) is a psalm verse with an antiphon, ending with the Gloria Patri (“Glory be to the Father”). It announces the theme of the day. Pope Celestine I (d. 432) is traditionally credited with introducing a psalm at the entrance of the clergy, and over the following centuries the full psalm was shortened to a verse and antiphon. Many Sundays take their names from the first Latin word of the Introit, such as Laetare and Quasimodogeniti. The Introit is the same in both settings; in Setting Three the Gloria Patri keeps the older words, “world without end.”

Kyrie. “Lord, have mercy” is the cry of the blind men and the Canaanite woman who called out to Jesus (Matthew 15:22; Mark 10:47). The Kyrie came into the Western Mass from the litanies of the Greek-speaking church, which is why its name remains Greek. Here the two settings differ most plainly. Setting One sings the Kyrie as a litany: the pastor prays “In peace let us pray to the Lord,” “For the peace from above,” and further petitions, and the congregation answers each one. Setting Three sings the short threefold form, “Lord, have mercy upon us. Christ, have mercy upon us. Lord, have mercy upon us,” to Luther’s melody.

Hymn of Praise. The Gloria in Excelsis begins with the song of the angels at Bethlehem (Luke 2:14) and continues with praise of the Father and of Christ, “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” It began as a morning hymn of the Eastern church in the fourth century and entered the Western Mass by the sixth. Luther kept it in Latin in 1523, and Nikolaus Decius’s German paraphrase, “All Glory Be to God on High,” became a favorite Lutheran hymn. Setting Three always sings the Gloria, in the words of the Book of Common Prayer: “Glory be to God on high: and on earth peace, good will toward men.” Setting One offers a choice between a modern translation of the Gloria and “This Is the Feast.” The Gloria is omitted in Advent and Lent, as it has been for centuries.

Salutation and Collect of the Day. The pastor greets the congregation with “The Lord be with you” (compare Ruth 2:4 and 2 Timothy 4:22), and the congregation answers, “And also with you” in Setting One or “And with thy spirit” in Setting Three. The exchange marks the pastor and people as one body about to pray. The pastor then prays the Collect of the Day, a short prayer that gathers (“collects”) the petitions of the church. Many of our collects are fourteen or fifteen centuries old and come from the early sacramentaries of the Roman church.

The readings. We hear an Old Testament reading, an Epistle, and the Holy Gospel, appointed by the historic one-year lectionary. Between the first two readings, a Gradual or psalm is sung or spoken. Its name comes from the Latin gradus (“step”), since it was once sung from the steps of the reading desk.

Before the Gospel, the congregation stands and sings “Alleluia” (“praise the Lord”). In Setting One, Hillert’s Alleluia surrounds a verse from John 6:68: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” In Setting Three, the congregation sings a triple Alleluia from the sixteenth century, and a choir may sing the appointed verse of the day. During Lent, when the church does not sing “Alleluia,” a Lenten verse takes its place; in Setting One it is “Return to the Lord, your God” (Joel 2:13).

The congregation greets the Gospel with “Glory to You, O Lord” (Setting One) or “Glory be to Thee, O Lord” (Setting Three), and after the reading answers “Praise to You, O Christ” or “Praise be to Thee, O Christ.” We stand for the Gospel since in it we hear the words and deeds of our Lord Himself.

Hymn of the Day. This hymn, chosen to match the Gospel, is a gift of the Lutheran Reformation. Luther wanted the congregation to sing the faith in its own language, and his German Mass gave the people a hymn in the midst of the readings. The Hymn of the Day is the chief hymn of the service.

Creed. We confess the faith in the words of the Nicene Creed, or on some Sundays the Apostles’ Creed. The Nicene Creed was written at the councils of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381), and it became part of the Sunday Mass in Rome around 1014. The settings place it differently. In Setting Three the Creed follows the Gospel directly, and the Hymn of the Day and the sermon come after it. In Setting One the Hymn of the Day and the sermon come first, and the Creed follows the sermon.

Sermon. The pastor preaches on the appointed readings, proclaiming both the Law, which shows us our sin, and the Gospel, which gives us Christ. Preaching had been neglected in much of the late medieval church, and the Reformation restored it as a regular part of every Divine Service.

The offering and the prayers

Offertory and Offering. After the sermon, the congregation sings a verse from the Psalms while the offering is gathered and the altar is prepared. The medieval Mass had surrounded this moment with prayers that offered Christ to God as a sacrifice for the living and the dead. Luther removed those prayers, saying they “smack and savor of sacrifice.” The Common Service restored a sung offertory drawn from Scripture alone.

Setting Three sings “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me” (Psalm 51:10-12), in the melody many members learned from page 15. Setting One sings “What shall I render to the Lord for all His benefits to me?” (Psalm 116:12-13, 17-19). The order also differs slightly. In Setting Three the Offertory is sung and the offering follows, then the Prayer of the Church. In Setting One the Prayer of the Church follows the Creed, and the Offertory is sung after the offering is gathered.

Prayer of the Church. The pastor leads the congregation in prayer for the church, for the nation and all in authority, for the sick and the suffering, and for all people, as St. Paul directs in 1 Timothy 2:1-2. Prayers of this kind were part of Christian worship in the second century. They faded from the Roman Mass in the early Middle Ages, and the Lutheran reformers restored them.

The Service of the Sacrament

Preface. The pastor and congregation sing a dialogue that has opened the Lord’s Supper in nearly every Christian liturgy since the third century: “The Lord be with you.” “Lift up your hearts.” “Let us give thanks unto the Lord our God.” In Setting One the congregation answers, “It is right to give Him thanks and praise.” In Setting Three it answers, “It is meet and right so to do,” an older English phrase that means “it is fitting and right.” The pastor then sings or speaks the Proper Preface, a short thanksgiving that changes with the season.

Sanctus. “Holy, holy, holy” joins the song of the seraphim in Isaiah’s vision (Isaiah 6:3) to the greeting of the crowds on Palm Sunday (Matthew 21:9). As we sing it, the church on earth joins the angels and the whole company of heaven, and we welcome the Lord who comes to us in His Supper. Setting One sings “Lord God of pow’r and might.” Setting Three sings “Lord God of Sabaoth,” which uses the Hebrew word for “hosts,” the armies of heaven.

Lord’s Prayer and Words of Our Lord. In Setting Three, the Lord’s Prayer follows the Sanctus directly, and then the pastor speaks or chants the Words of Our Lord: “Our Lord Jesus Christ, on the night when He was betrayed, took bread.” The chant tone for these words is based on the one Luther wrote for his German Mass. In Setting One, the pastor first prays a short Prayer of Thanksgiving; the Lord’s Prayer and the Words of Our Lord follow. Setting One also provides an alternate order, in which the Words of Our Lord come before the Lord’s Prayer.

The Words of Our Lord are the heart of the Sacrament. In the medieval Mass they were whispered in Latin within a long prayer called the Canon, which spoke of the Mass as a sacrifice that the priest offered to God. Luther removed the Canon and had the Words of Our Lord sung aloud, so that everyone present would hear Christ’s promise: “This is My body, which is given for you. This cup is the new testament in My blood, which is shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.” By these words Christ gives His true body and blood under the bread and wine.

Pax Domini. Holding the consecrated host, the pastor turns to the congregation and says, “The peace of the Lord be with you always,” and the congregation answers, “Amen.” The words echo the greeting of the risen Christ to His disciples (John 20:19). Luther regarded this greeting as a public absolution spoken from the altar just before communion.

Agnus Dei. “Lamb of God, You take away the sin of the world” repeats the words of John the Baptist (John 1:29). Pope Sergius I (687-701) added this song to the Roman Mass, where it accompanied the breaking of the bread. We sing it to Christ, who is present on the altar in His body and blood. Setting One sings a modern translation to Hillert’s melody. Setting Three sings “O Christ, Thou Lamb of God, that takest away the sin of the world” to the German melody that Luther named in 1526.

Distribution. Communicants come forward to receive the body and blood of Christ. Before the Reformation, the laity received only the bread; the Lutheran reformers restored the cup to all communicants, as Christ commanded. At Our Saviour we practice closed communion, which our page on closed communion explains. Visitors who are not communing are welcome to come forward for a blessing or to remain in the pew and pray. The congregation sings hymns during the distribution.

Post-communion canticle. After communion, the congregation sings the Nunc Dimittis, the song of Simeon, who held the infant Jesus in the temple and said, “Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, according to Thy word: for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation” (Luke 2:29-32). Having received Christ in the Sacrament, we can say the same. This canticle belonged to Compline, the church’s night prayer, and several Lutheran church orders of the sixteenth century placed it after communion. The Common Service made that use standard among English-speaking Lutherans. Setting Three always sings the Nunc Dimittis. Setting One offers a choice between a modern translation of it (“Lord, now You let Your servant go in peace”) and “Thank the Lord,” a canticle drawn from Psalm 105 and 1 Chronicles 16.

Thanksgiving and Post-Communion Collect. The pastor sings “O give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good,” and the congregation answers, “And His mercy endureth forever” (Psalm 107:1); Setting One uses modern wording. The pastor then prays a collect of thanksgiving. The most familiar of these was written by Luther for his German Mass: “We give thanks to You, almighty God, that You have refreshed us through this salutary gift, and we implore You that of Your mercy You would strengthen us through the same in faith toward You and in fervent love toward one another.”

The close of the service

Benedicamus. In Setting Three, the pastor and congregation exchange a final greeting, “The Lord be with you,” and the pastor sings “Bless we the Lord,” to which the congregation answers, “Thanks be to God.” In the medieval Mass this verse ended services at which the Gloria was not sung; Luther made it the regular close of his Latin Mass. Setting One moves from the Post-Communion Collect directly to the Benediction.

Benediction. The pastor blesses the congregation with the words God gave to Aaron and his sons: “The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make His face shine on you and be gracious to you. The Lord look upon you with favor and give you peace” (Numbers 6:24-26). The Roman Mass did not use this blessing. Luther suggested it in 1523, and in his German Mass of 1526 it became the blessing at the end of the service, as it has remained in Lutheran churches ever since. God places His name on us at the end of the service as He did at the beginning. In Setting Three, the congregation answers with a threefold “Amen” sung in harmony; in Setting One, with a single “Amen.”

Learning the service

A visitor does not need to know either setting to worship with us. Everything we sing and say is printed in the hymnal or the bulletin, and the page numbers are announced. Children learn both settings by ear long before they can read the page, and members who grew up with page 15 often sing Setting Three from memory. Over time, the words of both settings become the congregation’s own prayer.

When we use each setting

The settings alternate through the church year.

Season Setting
First Sunday in Advent through the Transfiguration of Our Lord Setting Three (p. 184)
Septuagesima through Palm Sunday (Ash Wednesday uses Setting Three) Setting One (p. 151)
Maundy Thursday through the end of June Setting Three (p. 184)
First Sunday in July until the Festival of the Reformation Setting One (p. 151)
Festival of the Reformation through the end of the church year Setting Three (p. 184)

The bulletin gives the page numbers each week, so a visitor never needs to guess which setting is in use.