Carl Flentge Schalk

Carl Flentge Schalk (1929–2021) was an American Lutheran composer, church musician, author, editor, and teacher whose work had a major influence on twentieth-century Lutheran worship. Born in Des Plaines, Illinois, he graduated from Concordia Teachers College in River Forest and later earned graduate degrees from the Eastman School of Music and Concordia Seminary in St. Louis.

Schalk served as a teacher and parish musician in Wisconsin, directed music for The Lutheran Hour, and joined the faculty of Concordia University Chicago in 1965. He helped develop the university's Master of Church Music program, edited the journal Church Music from 1966 to 1980, and participated in the Inter-Lutheran Commission on Worship that produced Lutheran Book of Worship. He also wrote extensively on the theology and practice of church music and was named a Fellow of The Hymn Society in the United States and Canada.

His output includes choral music, books, and more than one hundred hymn tunes and carols. STANLEY BEACH, composed in 1987 for “We Meet You, O Christ,” became one of the hymn's best-known North American settings and was published in The United Methodist Hymnal in 1989.