The origin of stained glass is lost in history. The oldest surviving examples were found in Roman homes built at the time of Jesus and the apostles. Use of stained glass in church windows began as early as the 900’s. It served three purposes which remain just as useful today as hundreds of years ago. These are the educational, the aesthetic, and the practical. Pictures and symbols in stained glass can teach Bible stories and Bible truths. They can beautify the interior of churches. They can also shield worshipers from direct heat and blinding rays of the sun.
A Bible story in stained glass may explain itself if the story is known. Symbols serve in several ways. They shorthand Bible truths. The cross, the crown of thorns, the vine and grapes are well known. Symbols teach Bible truths that may be difficult to illustrate with a story. Examples would be the Triune God, justification, and even faith. Some symbols, such as the Chi Rho on the cover of our hymnal, are abbreviations of our Savior’s names.
The calendar year from January to December follows the seasons caused by the path of the earth around the sun. The church year or Year of our Lord, by contrast, is determined by the seasons in the life of Jesus and the life of the church. The first or festival half of the church year begins with Advent, four weeks before Christmas, and closes with Pentecost and Trinity Sunday, fifty and fifty-seven days after Easter. The other or non-festival half of the church year begins a week after Trinity Sunday and closes on the Sunday before Advent. The twenty-three windows in the nave of our church illustrate selected messages from the fifty-two Sundays in the church year. Their story begins at the back on the south side and proceeds counterclockwise around the front to the back on the north side. The three windows above the main entrance at the west picture messages of the church in her warfare. The auxiliary windows at the south entrance and in the pastors’ sacristy, together with two above the stairway leading to the balcony, illustrate messages from the Psalms. The designs, together with the color schemes, were carried out by Reinarts Stained Glass Studios in Winona, Minnesota, and were purchased at four intervals. Installed first were the three windows above the main entrance, second; those on the south side of the nave; third, those on the north side. All these were done by one artist. The auxiliary windows installed later were executed by a different artist.
At our worship services on Saturdays and Sundays, the minister normally reads Scripture selections from the Old Testament, from the New Testament Epistles, and from the Gospels. The commonly used sets of readings over the fifty-two weeks of the church year are called pericopes (accent on the ‘ric’). The story of the church year is based on the pericope from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Since the middle of the last century, three new pericopes on the Old Testament, Epistles, and Gospels were devised. These are printed as Years A, B, C on pages X-XXIII at the front of Christian Worship. Before these came into use, a single pericope (page XXIV-XXV) had been in use in the church for over a thousand years. Following the scheme of the church year, the windows in our nave show selections from the ancient pericope.