Hmm. The bulletin didn't seem to end up in the announcement. Here's the bulletin for April 29, 2008, 9AM, the sixth Sunday of Easter.

We have a certain hope in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and must be prepared to give a sound defense of the faith to all who ask.

Pastor Schumacher preaches on 1 Peter 3:13-22.

The bulletin.

The fifth Sunday of Easter, April 20, 2008. Pastor Rossow preaches on Milk, Stones, and Royalty from 1 Peter 2:2-10.

Reposted.

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!

Here is the bulletin for the fifth Sunday of Easter, April 20, 2008. The recorded service is the 9:00 service.

Here is the bulletin for the fourth Sunday of Easter, April 16, 2008

Full service from the fourth Sunday of Easter, April 16, 2008. Pastor Schumacher is preaching.

The bulletin for the Third Sunday of Easter, April 6, 2008.

The third Sunday of Easter, April 6, 2008.

Our guest this morning is the Rev. Dr. James Lamb, executive director of Lutherans for Life.

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.

Pastor Rossow speaks on doubting Thomas.

Here is the bulletin from that week.

As mentioned, there's only 12 MB left of uploads left for the next few days. Not enough to upload a service, but enough to provide 11 minutes of really great music from our Good Friday and Easter services. We have Oh Sacred Head, one that I assume is called This Lamb is Christ, and the Alleluia Chorus.

I hope you will enjoy this as much as I do.

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.

The easter service, March 23, 2008, 8:30 AM. Pastor Rossow delivers the sermon.

The Good Friday service of March 21, 2008. Stunning.

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