Unfortunately there is a flaw in the recording from this week and I haven't managed to transfer the recording onto the computer, so this will be a little late. I think I can get it transferred tonight.

Kind of lost this week's edited service. Back to the drawing board. Sorry it's late. Save your edits frequently.

As of right now, we have 1016 downloads of our services and bulletins, with a good majority of them going to services. This is since we started in March - three months. The first 10 days of June have also yielded 273 downloads; if we continue at this rate we will have over 800 for the month of June. And of course we have five services this month.

I'm most pleased but not terribly surprised that members and friends are interested in listening to a full liturgical service filled with the scriptures and supporting sound doctrine. I've looked at a lot of podcasts out there in promoting our service on iTunes and other podcasting sites, and full services are quite rare. Bethany's certainly seems worth it to me. And of course the price is right - free!

Oh, feel free to review us on your favorite podcasting site. Reviews can be quite helpful both in rankings and in getting people to understand what makes the services worthwhile.

Thanks be to God!

I have been "printing" the bulletins to pdf with two pages up. To me this makes it most like the bulletin as you would see it during church. Would you rather see it printed as single pages, giving a larger image? Or do you prefer it this way?

You may comment to this post and let me know your preference.

Are you enjoying listening the podcasts of Bethany's services? Is there an ineffable je ne sais quoi (translation: an indescribable something or other) to them that you would like to describe to the world? Do you need peripheral practice producing perfectly polished prose? Perhaps I ought to pull the plug on this painful paragraph?

What I'm trying to say is: you can both review and rate us on iTunes and on other podcast listing services. For iTunes you will need an iTunes account. Go to iTunes, search for "Bethany Naperville" (I find this the most direct route), and in the bottom you will find a link for Customer Reviews.

Reviews and ratings are helpful in a number of ways. Along with subscribing through the iTunes store, these can improve our search ranking so that we will show up higher on salient searches. Ratings and reviews also provide prospective listeners the opportunity to see if this is really what they are looking for - some may be looking for full, liturgical services from a confessing church but others may be looking instead for inspirational, purpose-driven, call-to-action sermons without the peripheral trappings of a church service. Proper reviews can help each steer in the correct direction.

So if you're literary minded, go to your favorite podcast directory and review us. If you're more up to "chicken or fish?" today, iTunes and other directories will let you do a quick 1-to-5 star rating.

We will be publishing the special 11:00 service - the confirmation service - real soon now. Haven't had a chance to finish it yet.

Wow. The last few days have been a marathon. We added upload bandwidth for the podcast - pretty much necessary due to libsyn's idiosyncratic upload accounting techniques if we ever wanted to catch up. And then we ripped. And edited. And recorded. And pestered the cantor with questions. And uploaded. We also rendered bulletins to .pdfs, and uploaded them. And waited for libsyn's servers to come back on line for uploading.

Anyway, it's done and we're caught up. The good news is that I can now go to bed. The better news is that nobody will come up to me after church and ask me "when are you going to get caught up." The best news, of course, is that Jesus has taken on the consequences of our sins so that without meriting it we can experience God's pleasure for eternity rather than his wrath.

Thanks be to God!

We're going to try uploading the bulletins. Because they normally fall into a booklet format, they may look a little funny.

There seem to be two ways that the bulletin can be useful.

First, because the services are liturgical, they are highly interactive. The congregation is often singing or speaking in counterpoint to the cantor or pastor. In some circumstances, having the bulletin available can allow you to participate more fully with the congregation, I suppose. I find myself singing the congregational parts as I walk the streets of Chicago while listening to the service. But softly.

More importantly though, the service is built on the Bible. The confession, the psalms, the scriptures, the hymns - these are usually straight from the Bible, and when they are not, they are built on doctrines which are simply the systematization of the Bible. There is nothing that feeds us like hearing the pure word of God, and nothing that comforts us more than hearing God's word that in Christ we are rescued from our sins. Reading the words of the songs and scriptures as listed in the bulletin both feeds and comforts us.

You may be wondering why we podcast the full service rather than just the sermon.

I wondered the same thing. I'm from a non-Lutheran background and am used to listening to Todd Wilkin, John MacArthur, and sermons from other Lutheran churches where the speakers are the audio equivalent of talking heads. When the cantor said we wanted to podcast the whole service, I thought, "okay, then people will just skip to the sermon, the meat of the service." I think I understand better.

Bethany makes use of the liturgy. Liturgical services have a quality that is unique among church services. Most obvious is the musical nature of the service - much of it is sung. But more importantly, most all of the service is taken from the Bible. Everything from the confession to the benediction is taken, largely word for word, from the Bible. In addition to this, we normally sing a Psalm, and have readings from the Old testament, the gospels, and the epistles - not just a verse or two, but significant wholes. Even our prayers, though not word for word copies of prayers from the Bible, are generally based on Biblical injunctions to pray for or about certain things. And so a liturgical service is like Biblical immersion, with the congregation taking a significant part. And so the divine service becomes much more than just a sermon.

Our church is also deeply blessed musically. We have a cantor with a wonderful voice, a variety of musical talents within the congregation, and an organ to which the podcast cannot do justice.

I have the joy of editing the recordings. It is a great blessing to be able to go through the whole service once again with the congregation, and to engage in those parts of the liturgy that I remember, quietly of course when walking through Chicago.

For examples of our music, listen to the Maundy Thursday, Good Friday or Easter recordings.

Holy week and Easter pretty much used up our upload bandwidth. We should be able to upload the post-Easter services on the 17th or 18th of April, and I don't anticipate running out of uploads... until next Easter!

See you after tax day.

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