"Sung, Spoken, Lived": Worship As Communion and Mission in the Work of Wilhelm Loehe‪.‬

For Lutherans, Wilhelm Loehe, the nineteenth-century German pastor and renewer of the church, is a seminal figure in the recovery of liturgical practice. The Lutheran confessions make clear that word and sacrament are the means by which the Spirit of God creates faith in Jesus Christ, the faith that justifies (Augsburg Confession, art. 5), and that the church is an assembly gathered around the means of grace (AC, art. 7). There is among us, then, solid confessional ground for a liturgical and sacramental understanding of how faith happens and how the assembly of the faithful gathers for worship. Loehe was concerned that this be something more than a doctrinal commitment, more than a theological idea written on paper or even inscribed in our hearts and minds. He wanted this claim to be carried by and manifest in the patterns and practice of worship, evident in all that we do with our bodies at worship--our speaking, singing, praying, washing, and eating and drinking in Jesus' name. So, among his many initiatives in liturgical practice, he worked to enrich the reading of Scripture and its proclamation, sought to restore and renew the Eucharist at the center of Sunday worship, and encouraged practices of confession and forgiveness. All of this was about fashioning the church, first, as a distinctive community in the face of its institutional and cultural captivity and, second, as a responsive community in the face of real human needs. (1) Loehe was a practical theologian who understood that practices--in this case liturgical practices--bear and shape theological claims and that theology is at root a reflection upon the practices of the faith.