There's an App for That: Lutheran Missal and Breviary app on iOS and Android

For the last few years, we’ve been testing The Lutheran Missal materials with a limited field testing audience, first the temporal lectionary, then the sanctoral lectionary, then the gradual texts, after that the collects, and now the complends (post-communions) and super populums (for weekdays in Lent).

We’re happy to announce that now anyone can access the mass texts for every day of the year in the new app for The Lutheran Missal, available for iOS and Android. While much more remains to be done, nearly the entirety of the temporal calendar is complete and available — orations, lections, and gradualia. In addition, the lections and gradualia for the sanctoral are also largely complete. Major remaining items that are currently or will soon be underway include the common, votive masses, and distinctive rites, such as those of Ash Wednesday and Holy Week. A new hymnody endeavor is also in the beginning stages, seeking to compile a list of Hauptlieder and supplementary hymns drawn from hymn lists in Sehling’s Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts and later Lutheran hymnals and church orders. New data on all of these fronts will periodically be added to the app as it is compiled and/or translated. A desktop web app will soon also be available, complete with an export function to export texts for your service leaflet in the same way that you might from Lutheran Service Builder.

While The Lutheran Missal will utilize the Common Service, the application includes various other options, including the Bugenhagen Liturgy, as found in The Lutheran Hymnary (1913) and Evangelical Lutheran Hymnary (1996), as well as various possibilities for Exhortations, and a large number of other texts from varying sources that will not find their way into the printed volume, but may prove to be of interest to the user. These are noted at the top of the Settings tab, along with a convenient option to view the propers alone, or to view the propers in the mass ordinary. A myriad of font and display options are provided, with eight themes (including dark mode), six fonts, and five text sizes to suit every user. Another tab in the app also includes a preliminary version of the vesting prayers, still also subject to change.

In addition to the missal texts now readily available, the app also includes a beta version of The Lutheran Breviary. The offices of Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline are now all available, arranged as they appeared in late medieval and Reformation-era breviaries and chant books. Our research in this area is still very preliminary, so some changes are to be expected in the coming months and years, though the heart of the office, the psalter arranged to be prayed over the course of a week, will remain unchanged. The office is, at this point, largely the ordinary only with no propers, but we hope to have more of the proper antiphons added to the daily office for the season of Advent, and hopefully also the majority of the traditional Matins lectionary.

Many, many thanks for all of this are due to the app developer, Mr. Seth Kasten. Seth is a father, software engineer, and subdeacon in the LCMS. He runs the Confessing Lutheran blog and co-owns the Scholastic Lutherans YouTube channel. His published work includes Against the Invocation of Saints: An Apology for the Protestant Doctrine of Prayer over and against the doctrine of the Eastern Orthodox Church and Philip Melanchthon's Sketch of Theology, The Argument of the Epistle to the Romans, and A Theological Introduction to Paul's Letter to the Romans. Seth also has forthcoming work in liturgics, hymnody, and scholastic political theology.