About Life Together

Life Together is a family of lectionary-based resources that brings the various strands of congregational life together and makes connections between daily life and the Christian community. While Life Together includes Sunday school resources at its center, Life Together is much broader than a Sunday school curriculum. The program is designed to work powerfully together to create a unified experience on Sunday, weaving together a rich tapestry of ministries: faith and prayer in the home, Sunday preaching and worship, and weekly learning opportunities. Become a Life Together congregation.

Help Others Get to Know the Resources

Life Together provides resources for pastors, educators, and church musicians, as well as children and adult learners. Share the Starter Kit and related resources with your colleagues. Suggest a joint meeting between the worship and education committees within your congregation. (Visit our Web site for additional Starter Kits and other information). Go through the Starter Kit together and discuss how this integrated approach to Sunday morning and weekly faith formation could change the life of your congregation.

Get Your Congregation Involved

Get members of your congregation involved in learning about Life Together. This is more than a curriculum, it's a way of "being church," of understanding how members of your congregation live in community and spread the Word to each other and to the world.

Spread the Word

Let others know you intend to be a Life Together congregation. Spread the word in your community about the powerful connections between daily life, Christian faith formation, worship, and a life of service. Invite others to join in this exciting process of living Christian life together.

Download this Year at a Glance Chart to see the Bible text, Driving Question, and Heart of the Matter for each week of the church year.

chart_handout_2006_07.pdf 43.00 KB (Less than 1 minute on 56 kbps modem) Adobe PDF (Portable Document Format)

Are the resources dated?

Most of the components within the Life Together family carry a specific calendar date. This makes them easy to use and allows the church year and secular calendar to intersect in relevant and helpful ways. One component is undated: LifeSongs children's songbook is applicable to all three cycles of the lectionary.

Life Together: Usage and Availability

About the Lectionary

The lectionary sets forth many of the stories, images, and actions through which the living Word sustains the Christian community gathered in public worship during the seasons of the year. The Revised Common Lectionary (RCL), upon which Life Together is based, is a lectionary with broad ecumenical acceptance, and it is approved for use in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The use of the lectionary "serves the unity of the Church, the hearing of the breadth of the Scriptures, and the evangelical meaning of the church year" (Use of the Means of Grace, App. 7A). The lectionary is ordered around the first reading, psalm, second reading, and gospel reading in a three-year cycle.

How the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) Is Arranged

The basic structure is a three-year cycle: Year A (Matthew), Year B (Mark), Year C (Luke). Gospel readings are semicontinuous over a three-year period, which means that many of the respective gospel passages will be heard in order each year.

Use of the Gospel According to John

The Gospel According to John is read each year, especially around Christmas, Lent, and Easter, and also in the year of Mark. Even though John is not given a year of its own, its use at festival times gives it prominence in a different way.

Relationship of the Gospel and First Reading

From the First Sunday in Advent to Trinity Sunday of each year, the Old Testament reading is closely related to the gospel reading for the day. From the first Sunday after Trinity Sunday to Christ the King Sunday, provision has been made for two patterns of reading the Old Testament:

• Paired readings in which the Old Testament and gospel readings are closely related.
• Semicontinuous Old Testament readings.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America follows the first pattern of correspondence between the Old Testament reading and the gospel. In this pattern, the Old Testament reading is perceived as a parallel, a contrast, or as a type leading to its fulfillment in the gospel. Many other church bodies who have adopted the Revised Common Lectionary, including the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, follow the second pattern of semicontinuous Old Testament readings, in which many of the stories of the Old Testament are read in their entirety.

Priority of the Gospel

The reading of the gospel is the high point of the liturgy of the word. "[The gospel] is the paschal mystery of the saving death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus that is proclaimed through the lectionary readings and the preaching of the Church" (Revised Common Lectionary, 12).

Easter Cycle

Gospels for the Sundays in Lent are related to Easter. This is especially visible in Year A, where the baptismal emphasis is strong. These Sundays relate closely to the primary Lenten theme, preparation for the joy of Easter, rather than to a penitential note. Following an ancient tradition, the Old Testament is not read on the Sundays of Easter, readings being selected from the book of Acts instead. Meanwhile, second readings in the Easter season are taken from 1 Peter, the letters of John, and the book of Revelation.

Christmas Cycle

The structure of the Christmas cycle presumes an Advent that is basically eschatological (looking forward to the return or second coming of the Lord Jesus and the realization of the reign of God), rather than a season of preparation for Christmas. The gospels of the first Sunday in each year are all apocalyptic; those of the second and third Sundays refer to the preaching and ministry of John the Baptist. On the Fourth Sunday in Advent the annunciation of the birth of Christ is proclaimed. On the Epiphany, the gospel of the sages from the East is read. The Sunday after the Epiphany has the Baptism of the Lord as its theme.

Sundays During the Year
("Ordinary Time")

In the seasons after Epiphany and after Pentecost, a semicontinuous pattern of readings occurs week by week for the second reading and gospel reading, but the Old Testament track used here provides readings that correspond in some way to the gospel reading.

The Revised Common Lectionary Is Chiefly a Eucharistic Lectionary

The word is broken open within the assembly that is also gathered to celebrate the Lord's Supper. The Roman Catholic lectionary, upon which the Revised Common Lectionary is based, is a Lectionary for Mass, which is indicated by the comparative brevity of its readings. The committee responsible for the Revised Common Lectionary nonetheless did understand that many churches using its lectionary would be doing so regularly in a service of the word only, so the RCL often provides for longer readings than do other lectionaries. The word leads to the eucharistic table; the eucharistic meal leads to mission in daily life.

People encounter the word of God in worship, preaching, and learning.

God is encountered through the audible and visible word: in reading and teaching, in meal and bath, and in the worship of the gathered community of believers.

Faith is fostered through our encounter with this Holy One who is God-with-Us. This encounter is the core of Life Together, reflecting the vision of the ELCA's The Use of the Means of Grace: A Statement on the Practice of Word and Sacrament (Minneapolis: Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 1997):

Proclamation of the Word includes the public reading of Scripture, preaching, teaching, the celebration of the sacraments, confession and absolution, music, arts, prayers, Christian witness, and service. The congregation's entire educational ministry participates in the proclamation of the Word (App. 5A).

Summary: Learning, worship, and preaching are related encounters with the same Word of God, Jesus Christ.

Christian formation is based in our relationship with God and in the relationships we have with other people.

At the heart of the Christian faith is the primary belief that God loves the world so deeply that Jesus was sent to live and die in our midst in order to renew God's relationship to all creation (John 3:16).

This relationship between God and creation pervades the entire biblical witness of God's activity in the world — and is the heart of our Christian life together.

Life Together provides structures and opportunities for our encounter with the word of God and response to the gifts of God — events that can happen:

• In the learning environment itself.
• In the community at worship.
• In other gatherings of Christians for support, service, and witness.
• In the various contexts of daily life.

Summary: All Life Together learning resources for children, youth, and adults build upon relationships that enable participation in God's joyful exchange.

Formation of the individual Christian and growth of the whole body of Christ are interrelated.

Christian formation emphasizes:

• An organic model of growth rooted in lived experience more than an academic model of cognitive achievement.
• That growth happens in multiple environments (home, school, workplace, relationships), not only in specifically designated learning settings.
• That growth happens through the practice of faith and through natural experience within the Christian community as much as it does through designed learning activities.
• That the cultivators of growth go beyond teachers and learners in structured settings to encompass the whole community, across generations, in formal and informal settings.

Summary: The growth of both the individual and community happen together in many and various ways, both in the context of the Christian community and in service to the world.

Holistic Christian formation calls for a strategy of integration.

The objective of holistic Christian formation calls for a corresponding strategy of integration. These learning resources support a broadly inclusive proclamation of the word through integration of:

• Structured learning settings with the assembly at worship through:
  • Telling the Christian story in coordination with the word in worship.
  • Exploration of images and experiential links drawn from the readings.
  • Learning about the actions and words of worship and sacraments
• Song and other artistic expressions shared in both settings.
• The church's time and seasons with the secular seasons and the passages of the individual life.
• Sunday and weekday, of worship and learning with daily life.
• Generations and traditional groupings.
• The church's faith story with the individual's life story.
• Various senses, learning styles, personality types.
• Various age-appropriate strategies for approaching shared content/experience.

Summary: The integration of a person's fragmented experiences of God and life provide a sound foundation for continued Christian growth and maturity.

A variety of learning styles and techniques support Christian formation.

Life Together learning resources for children, youth, and adults use a wide variety of learning styles that incorporate the following methods and human experiences: seeing, moving, hearing, speaking, touching, relating, smelling, feeling, tasting, and choosing.

Summary: The formation of faith occurs in a variety of patterns and methods, and to assist the Holy Spirit, Life Together embraces active learning, engaging worship, and imaginative preaching.

The life experience and story of the learner are brought to God's story, and, as a result, are transformed.

This approach to the formation of faith begins by engaging a person's experience. Once interpersonal relationships are formed and one's story is honored, a person grows in trust and community by connecting his or her particular human story to God's saving story, resulting in a new understanding of one's experience.

This model often engages a life to Bible to life methodology: a person's personal story is responded to with the biblical story in order to transform life experience based both on one's unique story in relationship to God's story.

Summary: By beginning with a person's experience of life and the world, Life Together provides "hooks" on which the Holy Spirit can attach God's saving story in order to grow in relationship with God and others.