Product Updates | Lutheran Service Builder Blog

Now that churches are streaming more than ever before, they are turning to different ways of sharing the bulletin with members at home. We're excited to announce one more way of doing that: a read-only Web View.

This idea just came up and our team worked hard to get it out in time for Easter. Watch the video below to see how it works.

[UPDATED - MAY 18, 2020]

With restrictions on sheltering in place being lifted across the country, Concordia Publishing House has announced that the Lutheran Service Builder Limited Promotional License will end on June 30, 2020. If you are using this license and would like to subscribe after the expiration date, please contact a software consultant today at softwaresales@cts.cph.org or (800) 325-2399.

When the online Lutheran Service Builder was released last summer, the ability to import .LSBX files was included. These special files were part of Lutheran Service Builder 2 and allowed users to share service elements with other users. Most of the time, those files were shared in the same church, and that was no longer necessary since the new Lutheran Service Builder is online.

However, there was no way to export .LSBX files in cases where users wanted to share elements with other users at different churches. To help with that process, we are excited to announce that we have added the ability to share services and elements with other Lutheran Service Builder users.

Creative Worship for the Lutheran Parish provides ready-to-use worship services that are completely planned out, with preselected music and custom worship elements that follow the theme of the service. The format of these materials has changed over the years, from being printed in a book, distributed on a CD-ROM, available as .lsbx files for use with Lutheran Service Builder, and, most recently, available online with a subscription.

Today, we are excited to announce the next way you can access Creative Worship materials: directly inside the online Lutheran Service Builder!

Lutheran Service Builder provides access to all the worship elements within Lutheran Service Book, but we understand that our users want to create their own worship elements. That’s why My Worship Resources is included.

My Worship Resources has more options for customizing content than most people need, but using the feature is a very manual process. To create a new element in My Worship Resources, users have always had to start from a blank canvas. This is no longer necessary with the introduction of a new feature: the ability to copy and edit existing worship elements in My Worship Resources. With this new feature, any existing element can serve as a starting point for a new worship element.

Gone are the days of tracking down the desired Prayer of the Church, manually exporting a .LSBX file, and then importing it into Lutheran Service Builder thanks to the new LetUsPray subscription. All you have to do to take advantage of this time saving feature is change an account setting once and you're done; Lutheran Service Builder takes care of the rest!

We've recently received several requests from our customers about including The Great O Antiphons of Advent in Lutheran Service Builder. Knowing that they start on December 17th, our team hustled and added them just in time.

Lutheran Service Builder 2.0 and the new, online version of Lutheran Service Builder have both made it easy to place a rite within a worship setting. Now, for users of the online Lutheran Service Builder, this task has gotten even easier!

LetUsPray is a weekly prayer litany published by the LCMS for both the three-year lectionary series and one-year lectionary series. Written to be used during the Prayer of the Church in the Divine Service, LetUsPray assists the congregation in its worship life. The prayers not only add variety through their use as a Proper, but also bring the worshiper back to the assigned readings for the day.

Projecting a slide deck during a worship service is not an easy thing to do. The slides need to have the right information, the timing of the presenter has to be spot on, and the design needs to be attractive and readable. For the times when a PowerPoint just isn’t enough, you can now export your service presentation to MediaShout 6 from the new, online Lutheran Service Builder.

My Templates is a list of templates that can be applied to readings, psalms, prayers, and other elements in the bulletin and presentation views to change the responsorials and various speaking parts. The templates allow you to save the responsorials’ formats for future use.

Planning a service typically doesn’t start with creating a bulletin or a presentation slide deck. In most congregations, it starts with the lectionary, and the plan expands from there. The new Lutheran Service Builder introduces the concept of service plans, a high-level view of a service that can be determined days, weeks, or months in advance.

We are proud to introduce the new, online version of Lutheran Service Builder! This popular worship-planning software has helped thousands of congregations streamline their service planning.