AUGUST UPDATE FROM PASTOR MARK

The 2025 Churchwide Assembly of the ELCA is gathering in Phoenix, AZ, July 28-August 2 under the theme “For the Life of the World.” As you can imagine, since we only meet as a churchwide assembly triennially (every three years) there is a full agenda! Items for action or information include (among many other things): Memorials Concerning Palestine & Israel, Recommended Proposed Edits to “Human Sexuality: Gift & Trust Social Statement” (from 2009), Recommended Proposed “Faith & Civic Life” Social Statement (some of us worked carefully through the draft of this social statement last fall), and the 2026-2028 churchwide budget. It is likely that by the time you receive and read this edition of Our Redeemer Reaching Out, we will have elected a new Presiding Bishop of the ELCA and Secretary. (A bit off topic: the weekend Mark Hanson was elected bishop, back in 2021, I was supply preaching in a small, rural  LCMS congregation in northwest Indiana [Their vacationing pastor knew I was an ELCA rostered minister; supply pastors have been hard to find for a while!]. Anyway, here they were / here we were – praying for the new presiding bishop of the ELCA.)

              The year’s Assembly theme is drawn from two sources. First, the Nicene Creed. You may recall that 2025 is not only the 75th anniversary of Our Redeemer; it is also the 1700th anniversary of the Creed of Nicea (325)! This statement of faith, which we recite during worship at various times throughout the year, closes with these words: “for … the life of the world to come.” Second, early on in her tenure, Presiding Bishop Eaton (who is retiring after serving 12 years in that office) shared her own understanding of who we are as members and congregations of the ELCA (our identity), and what our mission is (our purpose, why we are here). She used these 4 statements: We are church. We are Lutheran. We are church together. We are church for the sake of the world.

I wonder how we might find inspiration and direction for our next 75 years in these words. 1) In what new ways might we see ourselves as “the church,” as the body of Christ – his hands and feet and heart – at work in the world? 2) How might we draw on our robust Lutheran theological tradition – grounded in the Word, and in the gift of grace – to (re)shape our existing and future ministries? 3) How might we grow in the sense that as Lutheran Christians we are “church together?” What new partnerships – within and beyond our La Crosse Area Synod and the ELCA – might this self-understanding encourage? 4) And how might we, always, return to an understanding that who we are as Jesus’ disciples, and our ministries; that our life’s work; is not for ourselves alone but for the sake of the world, and for our neighbors of every kind (people, to be sure; but also animals and plants and the air, water, and soil)?

Perhaps the Lutheran theologian, pastor, and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer can be of help in encouraging us both forward and outward in faith. While in a Nazi concentration camp, shortly before he was hanged, Bonhoeffer wrote in notes to his best friend, “The church is the church only when it exists for others.  . . . The church must share in the secular problems of ordinary human life, not dominating but helping and serving. It must tell men [sic] of every calling what it means to live in Christ, to exist for others.”

Now is not the time for us to recoil in upon ourselves, to withdraw behind walls of our our own making from “the secular problems” that are all around us. With Bonhoeffer, we are called to “share in” them; and to help and serve those who are most impacted by these problems and by what are offered as solutions.

Another presiding bishop of our church (and one time president of Luther College, down the road in Decorah,  IA), H. George Anderson (1995-2001), penned a little book bearing the title, A Good Time to Be the Church. It is still “a good time to be the church.” And to be church, together, for the sake of the world, is not only what that world needs us to be; it is our high calling from God.               + Pastor Mark