A Message from Don Bauer, Music Director:
Hello! If you're "church shopping", you might wonder what role MUSIC plays in our worship. Music is VERY important to the worship experience in Lutheran churches. In our church, we use a very wide variety of musical styles. Our hymnal contains the "best of the best" of time-honored traditional hymns as well as many of the most popular "contemporary" songs that have emerged in the last few decades.
On a typical Sunday morning, you will hear the glorious sound of carrilon bells playing hymns of the season as you walk across the parking lot. Once inside, after being greeted and seated, we invite you to spend a minute in quiet reflection or prayer as I present an organ prelude of 3 to 5 minutes.
The Lutheran Liturgy is very music-oriented, so once the service starts, we will sing 3 hymns throughout the service, as well as parts of the "liturgy" that are sung rather than spoken. These sung parts represent everything from prayers to praise. We also have inspirational hymns during Holy Communion. Sometimes we sit, sometimes we stand, and you are invited to sit and sing during the weekly communion distribution. I lead the hymns from the console of our wonderful 3-manual Allen digital Pipe organ.
We have an adult choir of about a dozen voices, and we sing "special music" about twice a month (September through May). New singers are ALWAYS WELCOME! If you can read music...that's GREAT, but as long as you can follow and "learn by doing", you are welcome. We rehearse at 7 p.m. on Thursday nights , September through May. We don't claim to be the "Mormon Tabernacle Choir"...we're more like the "Norman Fishin-tackle choir", but together we do a great job of making a joyful noise to the Lord! On weeks the choir doesn't sing, we might have other church members offering special music, perhaps accompanied by me on piano or organ, or on guitar.
During the summer months, we move our worship OUTDOORS to our beautiful park/shelter behind the church. We have one service in the summer at 9 a.m., and people park drive-in-style and stay in their cars, or sit on lawn chairs or at one of the picnic tables. It's a glorious way to worship in the beauty of God's creation. (In case of rain, we move indoors.)
Once a year, in September, we have an Oktoberfest POLKA worship service where I've set all the music to German Polka and Waltz tunes, reflecting our German heritage, and I play the service on Accordion rather than Organ or Piano. Afterwards, we have a German-style "church picnic" in our shelter.
Our worship follows what is called the "liturgical calendar", so our services celebrate the "seasons" like Advent (preparation for Christmas), Christmas, Epiphany (season of Light), Lent (preparation for Easter), Easter, and Pentecost.