Teresa Chow and Hermon Cage talk about the importance of making the ELCA multicultural.
Posted on 08/09/2007 4:53:52 PM PDT by SmithL
Evangelical Lutherans announced plans to revolutionize the way they communicate their identity to the public as a denomination.
In an effort to turn the tide on shrinking membership, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) – the nation's largest Lutheran denomination – is slated to unveil next month a branding campaign that will run ads in newspapers, billboards, bus shelters and websites with the tagline "God's Work. Our Hands."
"We've seen a decline in membership and in average worship attendance. We, together, intend to reverse these trends not by becoming something we are not but by revolutionizing the way we communicate who we are," said the Rev. Mark Hanson, ELCA’s presiding bishop, at the Aug. 6-11 Churchwide Assembly in Chicago, according to the ELCA News Service.
Hanson, who was re-elected to serve a second term, is confident that simple and powerful communication will help grow ELCA's evangelical outreach and help the denomination "step forward as a public church."
Each ELCA leader is also being urged to have at least one mentor and to serve as a mentor to at least one other person by 2012 – the year of ELCA's 25th anniversary – in hopes of growing membership in the 4.8 million-member denomination.
The ELCA is also moving forward in its Evangelism Strategy – a vision for the new century that was adopted in 2003. The strategy includes 172 new congregation starts – 53 percent of which are among people of color and/or people with primary languages other than English.
Continuing efforts to diversify the pre-dominantly white church, Hanson called leaders to double the number of ethnic persons and those whose primary language is other than English in the next five years. The latest call to diversify aims toward increasing ethnic membership to at least 10 percent of the denomination, which is about 97 percent Caucasian.
"The church's failure to become multicultural in our increasingly diverse society means we are not heeding God's call to be a sent church," said Hanson.
Ahead of the growth initiatives, ELCA is first pointing Lutherans back to the Bible.
Tackling the issue of biblical literacy, the churchwide assembly adopted a five-year initiative, titled "Book of Faith: Lutherans Read the Bible," to boost Scripture reading and studying throughout the denomination.
Hanson called on the church to become one that shows "growing evidence that [its] members are becoming fluent in the first language of our faith, the language of Scripture," he said Wednesday, according to the ELCA News Service. "How are we going to lead a church sent to be about God's mission in a multi-religious world if we do not know our sacred story?"
The "Book of Faith" is "designed to remind us of the power of God's Word. Join the conversation that God initiates," explained the Rev. Stanley N. Olson, executive director of the Vocation and Education unit.
The 2007 biennial Churchwide Assembly is being held at Navy Pier's Festival Hall with about 2,000 people, including more than 1,000 voting members. This year's theme is "Living in God's Amazing Grace: Thanks be to God!" and participants will acknowledge ELCA’s 20th anniversary.
ELCA ping.
God didn’t call the Lutheran church to be anything...He didn’ even call for its existance, Martin Luther did...and he was wrong!!Perhaps the declining membership is due to the fact that people are looking at the “protestant” concept to be without merit.....Let’s see, Christ founded a church on His apostles, it is almost 1,600 years old, and Martin Luther decides that he can do a better job explaining Christianity than could the church fathers....duh, that doesn’t seem to me to make any sense at all......does it to you???
Actually, Martin Luther took the church back to the early church fathers. He had very strong regard for them. He was an Augustinian monk, and was strongly influenced by Augustin. Specifically, Luther reintroduced the Pauline concept of justification by faith, and he protested the sale of indulgences as a way to earn one’s way out of purgatory (a place with no Biblical support, BTW). Paul was very, very clear about justification by faith. Martin Luther never meant to found a new denomination; he wanted only to return the Christian Church to Biblical practices.
The only thing Martin Luther called for was to have his bishop stop selling indulgences as if they were discount tickets to Heaven. The fact that the church as then established depended upon the income from the sale of the indulgences speaks to its weakness, not Dr. Luther’s.
“Ahead of the growth initiatives, ELCA is first pointing Lutherans back to the Bible.
Tackling the issue of biblical literacy, the churchwide assembly adopted a five-year initiative, titled “Book of Faith: Lutherans Read the Bible,” to boost Scripture reading and studying throughout the denomination.
Hanson called on the church to become one that shows “growing evidence that [its] members are becoming fluent in the first language of our faith, the language of Scripture,” he said Wednesday, according to the ELCA News Service.”
*And how do they square this with pushing homosexuality?*
How can the ELCA point back to the Bible when they dont believe in it? ( i.e. gay unions, abortion ).
Need I say more?
All kinds of sense...Martin put the bible into the language of the people...People could see for themselves what God had to say...
And what God had to say was that there was no such thing as indulgances...Your church made that up...And you still wouldn't know that if Martin would not have provided his translation...
>> “God’s Work. Our Hands.” <<
Speechless.
>> (a place with no Biblical support, BTW). <<
The name “purgatory” is a Latin word, used, like “trinity,” to express a thoroughly biblical concept. There are dozens of references to an afterlife existence for those who are not destined for Hell, but who are not yet in Heaven.
>> Paul was very, very clear about justification by faith. Martin Luther never meant to found a new denomination; <<
James was as clear about the necessity of works as Paul was about justification by faith. Luther failed to reconcile Paul and James (or at least he publicly exploited the apparent contradiction), so he tossed James (as well as 13 other books) out of the bible. The Catholic church has endorsed the way to reconcile Paul and James that has been accepted by the major branches of Lutheranism.
>> he protested the sale of indulgences as a way to earn one’s way out of purgatory <<
Had he merely protested the abuse of the sale of indulgences (”Go ahead, do whatever, and just pay money.”), he would be an honored Catholic saint. But the notion of expressing a desire for atonement for sins through a pius act is well-established in the bible, although Luther removed the most explicit example: The 2nd book of Maccabees recounts how victorious warriors mourned that their fallen comrades had been outside of God’s protecting grace because they had practiced superstition. They offered to the Temple their booty, in hopes, explicitly reaffirmed by the author, that their sacrifice would atone for their fallen comrade’s superstition. The author even states that such atonement would have been foolish, since it does no good to atone for those who will remain in Sheol, but because they had done so in the hopes of the Resurrection, it was holy.
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