About Our Site

The Open Sourcebook is a collaborative project that aims at creating useful, plain-language resources for worship. Our goal is to create contextualized and comprehensible prayers, confessions, and readings that are easily understood by both insiders (those who have actively participated in church life for a while) and outsiders (those who are new to church life and unfamiliar with church language).

Recently, there has been a renewed interest in liturgy and in liturgical worship. Born out of a hunger to reconnect with history and a longing for depth, it provides us with the opportunity to add a rich, theologically balanced diet of prayer to our churches’ worship services. But the answer to the need for depth is not going to be found only in how we structure our services. Our congregations will find depth when our worship equips them well with language and ideas that adequately respond to the circumstances of life.

We believe that worship is formative - that that practices we engage in together as the church gathered have deep impact on how we live our lives as the church scattered. It is our hope that in the rhythms of worship - in a regular practice of remembrance of the Gospel - our churches will be able to “weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice”. Where else but in worship do we have the opportunity to put words in people’s mouths? It is our hope that if those words are conversational, if they fit with the dialogue of every-day-talk, then when trials come, they will still be there.