Worship Notes Notes

Worship Notes is a 25 year project that evolved over that time.
I started working on (what I have come to call "Worship Notes") in an attempt to create a Sunday School curriculum. I wanted the children in Sunday School to have a better understanding of the Worship Day and the Lessons used for that Day.

The Sunday School lessons expanded into a short explanation of the Propers for the Day along with an object lesson by the teacher and a project that emphasized the main theme of the Day. These were repeated and improved during the six years they were used.

Some of the Sunday School teachers commented on the fact that they were learning things about the various Lessons and Days that they had never known. This caused me to publish the Notes on the lessons from 2012-2014. I also added the page that includes the Chant Tone, Introit, Collect, Gradual and sometimes the Verse. I added this page because the 2008 LSB does not have the information.

I personally refer to these pages as, "Show Notes" because of my years in theater, but that seems to have an odd connotation over against Worship. I now refer to them as "Worship Notes" except in my head.

I have offered up the Worship Notes (that existed) on my website from their creation in 2012. However, there were more Sundays than notes because we didn't use all of the available Sundays. I was a substitute preacher for the major part of a year in 2017. I used the Worship Notes during that time, and had to create several of the missing Sundays.

About that time I decided to create a page for every single Sunday of the three year cycle of readings. This was a bigger effort than I expected. I established the current format during this two year revision. Now the Notes include (what I call) the "Entrance Prayer," a comment about the day and “Prayer of the Church." These are personal creations that go all the way back to my first days of leading worship.

BIG THANKS
First I thank God for my life and the limited talent He has given me to create these notes.
Second I want to thank all the people involved in assisting me to fulfill the call from God to pursue the vocation of Parish Pastor, especially the faculty of Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Indiana. Their effort to mold someone with as little talent as I have into a parish Pastor was above and beyond their calling.
Lastly, I am indebted to three sources for the creation of "Worship Notes." First is the faculty of Concordia Seminary Saint Louis. They publish the "Concordia Journal." For several years they published notes on one of the lessons for the day. This gave me a ton of background information. The second is Matthew Henry and his "Complete Bible Commentary." When I was lost in how to best present the information I would read his presentation and was slightly better able to explain what I had learned. John Peter Lange and his, "Commentary on the Holy Scriptures" translated by Philip Schaff. Occasionally I would get lost in a word or phrase and Lange takes some serious deep dives into words and phrases.

Blessings,