From Edgy Night Church to Sacred Chant: What Lutheran Worship Taught Me about Formation

I first heard the call to pastoral ministry while assisting with communion. As I offered the good people of Trinity Lutheran Church in Dallas, Oregon, the blood of Christ, I heard God whisper to me, “You could do this forever.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant. My pastor, in his wisdom, slow-rolled the conversation. Over the course of several months, we talked about the call I was feeling. At the same time, the congregation was piloting a Wednesday night contemporary service. I led on guitar and vocals, singing Christian praise music with a band. We found a corner of the sanctuary we could light up with DJ lights and set up chairs for an intimate setting. We sang. The pastor preached. It was good.

Younger Ollie leading "Edgy Night Church"

Around the time we launched that service, two things happened at once: I began the lengthy ordination process, and my pastor moved to a new congregation.

In the meantime, I became the one preaching at those Wednesday night services. I had no idea what I was doing. I only knew that I wanted to preach the Word and play my guitar. My friends humored me, coming to listen to my paltry sermons and sharp singing. They thought it was neat—“edgy night church,” they called it.

Edgy night pastor Ollie. I liked the sound of that. It fit my gifts, too. I was a theatre major; I knew how to put on a show. I had played in a punk band once. I was a failed stand-up comedian who kind of knew what nightlife was. I was going to be like Nadia Bolz-Weber—the only Lutheran pastor I had ever heard of—so I got a bunch of tattoos and prepared to revolutionize what it meant to be a pastor.

Older Ollie, presiding at communion, chanting the Eucharistic Prayer.

What does it mean to be Lutheran?

But as I began my studies to become the edgy night pastor, I ran into the question every Lutheran pastor must eventually grapple with: what does it actually mean to be Lutheran?

That question would shape the trajectory of my understanding of worship and worship leadership, and it would guide the steps I took next.

At its core, to be Lutheran means that your chief dialogue partner after the Bible is the Augsburg Confession. The Augsburg Confession, for those unfamiliar, is the Lutheran church’s primary attempt to publicly articulate the gospel. As a Lutheran pastor, I vow to teach in accordance with this confession, so I wanted to know it well.

There, we read: “Falsely are our churches accused of abolishing the Mass; for the Mass is retained among us, and celebrated with the highest reverence” (CA XXIV). Okay, this is strange. Isn’t the “mass” something that Catholics do? Clearly, to understand the Augsburg Confession, I need a little more context.

I first learned that the early Lutherans still referred to the weekly gathering of Word and Sacrament as “the mass,” even if that terminology fell to the wayside over time. From there, I turned to Luther’s writings on the Mass for clarity. There I encountered a reform rich with symbolism: Luther sets the chanted melody of the Words of Institution (that bit that goes “on the night in which he was betrayed”) to the same melody as the Gospel reading, so that people might recognize that the Words of Institution are nothing other than a proclamation of the Gospel itself.

All of this was fascinating. But it was also surprising. The pastor at my church didn’t sing the Words of Institution at all. He didn’t sing any of the liturgy. Yes, it seems I had more to learn. That curiosity led me to study the practice of chanting the liturgy.

I discovered that in Luther’s day, nearly the entire service was sung—not even as special music! Singing was how things were done. Even things I would never have imagined being sung—the Scripture readings, the Prayer of the Day—were often chanted. No wonder the Lutherans were known for their singing!

So I asked myself: why was the liturgy chanted? There are several ways to answer that question.

In Scripture, whenever someone catches a glimpse of heavenly worship, it is saturated with song. It almost seems that angels do not speak in the presence of God; they sing.

Moreover, the primary place Scripture teaches us how to pray is the Book of Psalms—150 prayers given to God, clearly meant to be sung. Saint Paul confirms this when he instructs the church: “Be filled with the Spirit as you sing psalms and spiritual songs to one another, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts” (Eph. 5:18b–19).

Worship as God's Work

Notice that Paul begins with the Holy Spirit. Liturgically speaking, worship is not something humans do; it is something God does. That might sound counterintuitive—after all, isn’t worship something we give to God? But as Lutherans, we remember that all theology begins with justification by faith, not by works—even our theology of worship. If worship is something we do, it ceases to be gift and becomes another way we justify ourselves before God. Worship is something God does in us, but that doesn’t mean we’re passive; rather, we should notice that our worship is a response to the gift of God in us.

This distinction becomes clear in how people describe the word liturgy. It is often translated as “the work of the people,” which is close etymologically. A more accurate rendering, however, would be “public work.” A public work is something provided by a larger entity for the common good. God provides worship for us, giving himself to us through Word and Sacrament. That is why the German reformers translated liturgy as Gottesdienst—the God Service, or in English, the Divine Service. All this tells us is that worship is something done for us more than it is done by us.

From here we can see that chanting is not merely an aesthetic choice but an outgrowth of Scripture’s theology of worship. Chant proclaims that something more than ordinary speech is taking place. Just as God unites divinity and humanity in one flesh through Jesus, song unites divinity and humanity in the voice—the instrument God himself created.

Perhaps this is confirmed by the fact that nearly every religion in the world chants its prayers in some form. Many Americans are familiar with Jewish Hanukkah prayers, the Muslim salat, or the Sikh mool mantra. Across religious traditions, prayer is most often sung. To me, this tells me that there is something innate in the human condition that connects chant to prayer.

Formed Against Preference

By now, I hope it’s clear that I didn’t arrive at chant because I like it. I don’t. I don’t listen to chant on Apple Music—I still prefer my T-Pain tracks. Few people readily accept chant, and I’ve received more angry words about chanting than about anything else in my ministry. Most of my colleagues aren’t particularly enthusiastic about it, and my own wife is lukewarm. Chant makes my life harder and my job more difficult.

And yet I keep returning to it. I keep trying to sneak in elements of chant because I believe it can form us more deeply than almost anything else in contemporary Christian America. My spiritual ancestors found wisdom in it, and I want to learn from those who know better than I do.

The challenge with all liturgy is that it takes time—years, even—to take effect. Liturgy settles into our bones slowly. Chant does the same, yet few communities are willing to give it the time it requires. We treat worship as a product to be consumed rather than a practice by which God forms us, and we assume we already know what’s best for ourselves.

Still, we must be realistic about liturgy. American Lutheranism—especially on the West Coast—is largely unfamiliar with chant. Is chant necessary for salvation? Of course not. But neither is washing your hands after using the restroom. Many churches, my own included, aren’t ready for it. Yet we can’t simply dismiss chant as “contextual” and move on, because our contexts are often misinformed or malformed.

The clearest sign of malformation is thinking about liturgical style merely as aesthetic preference. Unfortunately, we’re formed to look at worship as a preference. As I said above, we’re trained to be consumers, and we know our tastes better than we know the living God. Taste can’t be the deciding factor when it comes to worship: we can do better by reaching deeper into our Lutheran liturgical heritage.

Chanted liturgy, I believe, should be the goal of every congregation’s worship leaders. While such a claim is lofty, it reflects a sanctification in our understanding of worship. We should not allow worship to only be a practical matter. Chanted liturgy dramatically reveals what is happening on Sunday morning: God comes to us through Christ and the Holy Spirit to transform us. As we prepare for our eternity with the Lord, that formation begins in our voice, as we sing our worship together.

But let it be said that it is a process of formation. One of my members made a very good point: singing the Lord’s Prayer doesn’t feel like praying it. When we learned to pray a certain way, it’s hard to pray another. I am convinced now more than ever that apostolic patience is needed, but the art of pastoral practice is figuring out how to nudge a people towards liturgical maturity—and I still have a great deal to learn.

And what of Edgy Night Pastor Ollie? Does he still exist? I’m not sure. The world has no shortage of edgy people saying revolutionary things. What I’ve learned in my short pastoral career is that what people most lack is sincerity. We can say radical things endlessly, but the most profound words someone can hear are simple and sincere: “Jesus forgives you. He will not let your suffering be in vain.”

Perhaps God will call me back to that edgy night pastorate someday. But for now, I believe he is asking me to offer a sincere word—a word shaped less by my personality and more by the Gospel—and yes, that sincere word can, and perhaps should, be chanted.