Lutheran Liturgist

From a censer swung by a thurifer, the sweet smoke of incense coiled heavily into the church. In a chasuble of blue and gold, the church's Pastor Arthur Carl Piepkorn stood at the epistle side of the altar. At the gospel side, flanked by taper bearers and the thurifer, Pastor Robert Mohrhardt chanted: "Make not My Father's house an house of merchandise."

Except for the fact that it was in English, this service one day last week, in Cleveland's Faith Lutheran Church, much resembled a Roman Catholic Mass. It was Martin Luther's Formula Missae et Communionis, a liturgical service which the great Reformer instituted in 1523. To most U. S. Lutherans, more averse to incense, tapers and vestments than Luther was, this Mass might have seemed abhorrent--although its language still informs the Lutheran Common Service.

But Cleveland's Pastor Piepkorn, a Lutheran prodigy who was a Ph.D. and a pastor before he was 23, is a convinced liturgist. Alone (so far as he knows) among U. S. Lutherans, he revived the Luther Formula last year, repeated the service to a packed church last week. The occasion, dear to Lutherans: Reformation Day. Pastor Piepkorn wound up his service by reading the 95 Theses which Martin Luther, 422 years before, nailed on the door of the church in Wittenberg.

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