Lutherans: A Glass, Not a Chalice

A major trend among Protestants is a denomination-crossing liturgical renewal that has restored much ceremony to Sunday services, and is elevating the sacrament toward equality with the preaching word. But to many churchgoers, the idea of candles, vestments and more frequent Communions still smacks of Romanism, and last week in Pittsburgh the nation’s largest Lutheran church resolutely voted in favor of the low road in liturgy.

One key issue facing the 670 delegates to the biennial convention of the Lutheran Church in America (3,227,000 members) was a proposed new, uniform order of worship drawn up by eight of the nation’s top Lutheran liturgists. They favored Holy Communion services at least every Sunday and the use of the chalice rather than prefilled individual Communion glasses. They also recommended that every church should have facilities for private confessions, and that Lutherans should be “increasingly urged to avail themselves of this spiritual habit.”

All this was just too high church for the delegates, who resolved to stick with hygienically superior individual Communion glasses, changed all references to the minister as “celebrant” of Holy Communion to “officiant,” and refused to encourage private confession. “I was taught that confession is to God,” said Florida Layman Edgar Armstrong. “It isn’t necessary to confess to anyone else to receive forgiveness if I am truly penitent.”

In other actions of the week-long convention, the Lutherans: > Elected the first Negro, New York Lawyer William Ellis, ever to serve on the church’s executive council, backed a civil rights statement defending civil disobedience “if and when the means of legal recourse have been exhausted or are demonstrably inadequate.” >Grimly accepted the Supreme Court decisions banning school prayer and Bible reading, but warned that “they open an era in which Christianity is kept separate from the state in a way that would have been repugnant to the minds of our ancestors at the time the Constitution was written.”