Copyright: © 2002 Paul F. Bosch.
This document may be freely reproduced for non-commercial purposes with credit to the author and mention of the Lift Up Your Hearts web site http://www.worship.ca/ as the source.

Even the printed guide-to-worship represents an important "sign" among us; indeed, it's the one "sign" that worshipers may take away with them when worship is over. As I used to tell students in my Campus Ministry days, "Mail it to your mother on Monday."

It's worth noting, however, that printed worship bulletins are a distinctly First World, upper-middle-class phenomenon. Lively and authentic Christian worship is possible without a printed guide-to-worship. Hence the following guidelines for preparing the weekly Sunday bulletin.

1) Those who prepare for worship in every parish do well to recall that worship, at its best, is "pre-literate". When worshipers must depend on a sheet of printed text for full participation in worship, we have lost something precious: the engaged attention focused "up front" where the ritual action is taking place. Worship is at its best when the assembly's attention is centered "where the action is". It is the death of lively worship to insist that worshipers keep noses pressed into a page of printed text.

2) Suffice it to say, if there is a bulletin for the day's worship, it should be neat and well-designed, with the needs of two classes of people firmly in mind in its layout: a) parish musicians, that is, organist and choir, and b) strangers and visitors. In an attempt to make the guide-to-worship as useful as possible to a) musicians, I like to include the full "pedigree" of each hymn: hymn number in the hymnbook, the first words of the text, and the tune name. At the end of this Essay you may find a sample bulletin outline page.

Note there my preference for what is called a "gutter" margin, that is, a system of page layout that features "generic" items margined to the right and their specific references margined to the left, on the same line, so as to provide a "gutter" down the middle of the page. This type of layout is familiar to readers of movie credits, and is easier to read than the reverse, that is, a layout where the generic items are margined to the left and their references margined to the right, sometimes with a long line of white space in between, making them all but impossible to match up.

Note there also my preference for a brief (half-line!) quotation from each of the scripture lections. It's amazing how useful these can become when, months or years later, you come upon this guide-to-worship and immediately are reminded "Oh, yes, that's the place in Jeremiah where...". I seldom find sermon titles to be worth the trouble of inventing them. But I do find, year after year, those quotations from the Sunday's lections invaluable.

3) And the printed bulletin will normally utilize the precise designations of the Lutheran Book of Worship. The LBW speaks of "Holy Communion", for example, not "Eucharist"; the worship leaders for Holy Communion are "Presiding Minister" and "Assisting Minister", not "Liturgist". Again, our concern here is not so much with issues of "right" versus "wrong", but rather an attempt to "feel into" the LBW's liturgical sensibility, which in turn represents a Lutheran version of the current ecumenical consensus.

Here's a simple Guide to Worship in PDF format.