Welcome to All the Household, our blog for Lutheran liturgical living! We’re glad you’ve found us. We’d like to take a moment to tell you what we’re about and invite you to join us in leaning into our liturgical heritage.
As Lutheran women, we both have a deep and abiding love for our liturgical heritage. We know that our Church has a multitude of lessons to teach us about Christian faith and life through traditions old and new.
We love all the ways that these traditions direct our gaze toward our Lord Jesus, and we want to learn more about all the many traditions that our ancestors have used through the ages to teach the faith.
The Problem
But we’ve run into a problem: our Church may have a wealth of beautiful, Christ-centered traditions, but we often don’t know where to find them!
And for the average Lutheran layperson—busy caring for a family, working, studying, and generally serving their neighbor—there just isn’t the time to dig through all the scattered resources to learn how the Church has passed on the Christian faith through her traditions throughout the ages.
Perhaps the average Lutheran will notice in their daily devotions that it’s Candlemas or the Annunciation or St. Martin’s Day, and they’ll wonder if there’s any way that they could observe the day. But then daily tasks come to distract and before long the day is over, and the cycle begins again.
Our Solution
Our Church has all these edifying traditions spread out in a myriad of books, but we haven’t found a centralized resource for Lutherans to learn about them. That’s what we hope to provide.
We want to collect our Church’s traditions from all the various resources that exist and combine them into one easy-to-find, easy-to-navigate website: a one-stop shop for Lutheran traditions.
What You Can Expect
So how do we want to fill that gap?
- First, we want to put out a post every Monday on one of the Church’s feasts or festivals. The post will be in three parts: an introduction to the day, the day’s historic propers (Bible readings and a prayer), and a list of resources where you can learn more about it.
- Then, on Wednesday, we’ll plan to post traditional recipes or other activities that individuals and families can use to celebrate the day. We’ll start off posting on most of the major feasts and festivals throughout the liturgical year, and we’ll try to add in the smaller feast days over time.
- Most importantly, though, for the ease of the busy Lutheran, we’ll put out all of these posts two weeks in advance to give you time to plan your own celebration!
Distinctively Lutheran
We’ve seen projects like this for laypeople of other Christian traditions, but we’d like to put out a resource specifically for our own. While it’s true that our traditional practices often have some overlap with those of the Roman Church, Eastern Orthodox, and other denominations, we are striving to put together a collection of traditions that are proper to the Church of the Augsburg Confession in order to pass them on to other Lutheran women and their families.
Sound Interesting?
We would like for this blog to serve other Lutherans who want to know more about the Church’s year and provide a place for us to find others who share our passion for liturgical living. We hope that you can take these resources and use them to observe the Church’s feasts and festivals with your own churches, families, and households.
Why “All the Household”?
As we were trying to think of a blog name to express what we’re trying to do here, we looked to one of the staples of Lutheran living: the Small Catechism. Towards the end of the Catechism, the Table of Duties ends, surprisingly, with a little rhyme:
“Let each his lesson learn with care, and all the household well shall fare.”
As we looked at that couplet from our Confessions, it resonated so well with our goals for this blog: finding ways for all the household to live into the Church’s traditions so that we can learn all the lessons that they have to teach us.
This confessional inspiration also met a biblical one: in his Epistle to the Galatians (6:10), the Apostle Paul describes the whole Church as the “household of faith.” Every household has its own ways of living, its own ways of shaping its life as it goes through time. And so as we manage our own households, what better model could we find for them than the whole household of faith, the Christian Church.
This is our project. These are our goals. We hope that you’ll join with us as we begin this journey together. As we lean together into liturgical living and learn more about the Church’s traditions, we pray that the Church’s Lord would use them to center our lives, our homes, and our families around him.
When he does that, we know that “all the household well shall fare.”
References:
1. F. Bente, ed., Concordia Triglotta (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1921) 563.
Images:
1. Grace Before Meal, Franz von Defregger, England, 1875
2. Luther im Kreise seiner Familie musizierend, Gustav Spangenberg, Germany, 1875
