Living in the Kingdom Revised: Reflections on Luthers Catechism (Lutheran Voices)

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Living in the Kingdom

Alvin Rogness's pastoral clarity. Mature believers and young seekers together may let the light of these reflections illumine your lives with God's gentle strength. Tiede, President Emeritus of Luther Seminary. For Dad, the matters of faith were always a give-and-take between truths we held and questions that swirled. Dad's study was a room of warmth in our house, not simply because of the ever-present pipe smoke, but because the minute any of us would wander in and plop ourselves down on the couch, he was ours, ready to muse and listen and wonder with us.

This was the faith—the questions and mystery and unknown-ness of it So it's fitting this little volume is written largely in question-and-answer format. The commandments provide the boundaries and freedom for relationship with God and one another. For those of us eager to cross those boundaries, God promises consequences on the other side. To keep up the analogy, the consequences are those unknown sharks that will be on the others side of the rope, it's just that we don't know what they are and how they will affect us.

As we journey through Lent, studying the Ten Commandments through a financial stewardship lens provides a way for us to order and orient our lives first toward God and then into the world while at the same time the stewardship practices of giving, saving and spending offer a similar structure for ordering and orienting our financial stewardship, putting God first. New Revised Standard Version. Stewardship of the Lord's Prayer y Tom Struck. Christian Education , What Is Stewardship? Newsletter What Is Stewardship? Stewardship as the management of all of life with Christ at the center includes our relationship to creation.

Today's article begins a four-week focus on the Stewardship of Creation. We know that Stewardship embraces Today's writer addresses the question of what motivates Lay Leaders in their participation in the congregation's Center for Stewardship Leaders. How can we respond to our call as stewards following what God commands? Stewardship Reflections from Luther's Catechism This article takes a look at how the commandments come to us to give order and in that order we are offered freedom. Kristin Foster Author Rev. Erica Kennedy is the Asst. Author information was updated as of the article's post date.

Author profiles may not reflect author's current employment or location. In Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, and Germany, the creation of multiple missionary societies signaled widespread interest as well as conflicts over methods, theological warrants, and biblical interpretation. The first Lutheran missionary to China, Karl Gutzlaff, received financial support from both Swedish Moravian societies and the Swedish Missionary Society during the s, leading to consternation in Swedish church circles over the perception that their own theological approach to mission had not been honored by this missionary.

Martin Luther and the Rise of World Christianities - Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion

The mission debate in Sweden reflected a much larger discussion about the nature of the church which occurred within the several mission societies in Germany and across Scandinavia as a reaction to voluntary initiatives, free-church ideals, biblical interpretation, and the use of lay people in mission work. The 19th-century cross-cultural missionary enterprise affected the self-understanding of Lutheran churches, and in that context of reimagining the mission of the church, Luther became a subject of renewed interest on the part of European churches.

Even new immigrant Lutheran churches in the United States, soon after their founding, began to support missionary work by sending out their own missionaries. American Lutherans respected the work of European Lutheran societies, but they also had become more attuned to the American approach to missions and sought to infuse that spirit into Lutheran missionary work in foreign lands.

Differences between English and American approaches to mission and those that came from Continental societies emerged starkly at missionary conferences, where the urgency of American efforts contrasted with the thoroughness of German work. Lutheran missionaries would be thorough.

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Lutheran missionaries concentrated on the importance of in-depth catechization, extensive theological education of ministers and evangelists, and patience in the cultivation of a deep-rooted piety within congregations. Anglo-American approaches to mission were more practically oriented, setting up schools and clinics first, and placing the preaching and catechetical work alongside work of organizing.

A famous German theologian of mission at Halle, Gustav Warneck, spoke stern words to an international conference on mission in , almost huffing at the hurry and scurry of missionaries from the Anglo-Saxon world: By the end of the 19th century, the increasing complexity of missionary encounters on the ground, the multiplication of methods and approaches, and the resulting conflicts had the happy result for missiologists that mission studies could be promoted as a separate academic field within the theological faculties of the universities of Europe and North America.

At this point it becomes possible to identify attempts to describe and define the uniquely Lutheran theological approach to mission work, as a response both to the experience of missionaries and to the necessary task of explaining to university faculties and boards why the new field had to be supported. The German mission scholar Julius Richter became an important interpreter of Lutheran missionary theory, and a compiler of the history of German and Lutheran missions and methods; he was an important voice for the small numbers of Lutherans at the famous Edinburgh Conference on World Missions in It made a more prominent impression on viewers through the skillful moderating by John R.

Mott, but the small numbers of actual representatives from the missionary churches in India, Japan, and China were mostly supplied through selecting theological students as delegates who were already studying in European universities, and the conference made African American mission society delegates stand in for Africans, giving only a small sense of the potential worldwide expansion of Christianity.

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Heady stuff, but hardly a substantial or significant theological exploration, nor any satisfactory counterpoint to the activist model of Christianity of the Anglo-Saxon organizers. The Edinburgh conference formed a continuation committee to investigate the way that mission societies and the churches could together address the challenges involved in the spread of Christianity around the globe, and this institutional move was widely viewed as having launched the ecumenical movement. Conferences and ecumenical gatherings were incapable of solving all of the problems they sought to address, but they did foster ways to educate, to assemble, to communicate, and to inspire missionaries and increasing numbers of students and emerging leaders, who embarked on planning and increasing the capacity of their own churches and people to respond to their own challenges.

Lutheran conferences were places to learn how to become self-sufficient, to strengthen church work, and to increase evangelical effectiveness. In Lutheran mission strategies, capacity building was an important element in their evangelical work. Differences in confessional orientation or biblical interpretation divided Lutherans, but educational structures, diaconal involvement, and organizational approaches were similar. The crucial test of missionaries and mission boards, and of the emerging local churches, was the training and ordination of African or Asian candidates for ministry, the development of an indigenous leadership for the churches.

The painstakingly slow approach of some of the Continental mission societies meant that indigenous pastors did not begin to serve parishes until German missionaries were forced to leave during World War I. Dietrich Westermann, a professor at Berlin with long missionary experience in Togo, West Africa, said it this way at a conference in Le Zoute, Belgium in While conferences provided an important venue for the academic discussion of missionary methods, they also provided, at least in theory, the structure through which a particularly Lutheran approach to missions could be articulated and explored in some depth with an audience of both Western Christians and Christians in Africa and in Asia.

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Lutheran churches in India had been established before the formation of the African missions, but the dominance of missionary leadership there also seemed to stifle the development and maturing of a fully Lutheran and Indian identity. The Lutheran theologian J. The reemergence of Chinese Christianity today and its rapid growth have been a surprise to observers in the West, but a strong testimony to the way that Chinese Christians have made the faith their own in the midst of struggle. Facing the world after World War II, Lutheran churches that before the war had participated in the Lutheran World Convention recognized that a stronger federation was necessary.

German, Scandinavian, and American church leaders convened to grapple with the challenge of reconciliation among themselves, as they recognized the catastrophe of the Holocaust, the nuclear bombing of the Christian city of Nagasaki, and the refugee crisis in a war-torn world plunged into a cold war. The Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, issued on the part of pastors and churches in southwestern Germany, paved the way for the Lutheran churches to gather in in Lund, Sweden, to form the Lutheran World Federation. The Lutheran World Federation was formed against the resistance of leaders of Continental and Scandinavian churches who argued that a broader ecumenical council of the Christian churches would be a stronger instrument for and witness to peace.

American church leaders, especially Abdel Ross Wentz, who chaired the work of drafting a constitution for the Lutheran federation and also served on the committee doing the same for the World Council of Churches, actively argued and forcefully lobbied for a federation of Lutherans that would, on a Lutheran confessional basis, participate in the formation of the World Council of Churches.

American and Canadian Lutherans faced the challenge of a broad national Protestant diversity that would not allow a robust Lutheran witness within a World Council composed of a mixed delegation. The national churches in Scandinavia would automatically be Lutheran; in the North American context, they would only rarely include Lutherans. Another important reason for promoting a Lutheran World Federation LWF founded on a confessional basis was the hope that the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod might become a partner in international Lutheran work and witness.

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The formation of the LWF has made possible extensive collaboration among the Lutheran churches in the world, and has given attention and support to the Lutheran churches in Africa and in Asia, as well as providing the structure and institutions through which a more representative global Lutheran identity can be fashioned. Study of Luther would unite the Lutheran churches and better inform their own confessional identity, thus also providing a more concerted witness for the Lutheran churches who joined the World Council of Churches established in These international channels for the churches became especially important as churches became independent of their missionary sponsors, anticipating the national independence that occurred throughout the world as the colonial establishments were dismantled.

Within the context of the LWF, the independent member churches around the world faced the task of decolonializing the theological discourse, leadership ideals, liturgical practices, and diaconal work of the churches. This has at times put into reckoning the theological ideas inherited from Martin Luther. A number of important discussions were recorded in the official record of the meeting, but stories from that gathering still told today reveal also that Africans themselves found the conference to be a stimulating moment, when new initiatives were taken, when independence spilled over the boundaries of established missionary procedure.

One of the principal speakers at that conference was a professor from Uppsala, Sweden, Bengt Sundkler, who had served as a missionary in South Africa with the Zulu people in the s and who had also come to Tanzania during that time to fill in for the German missionaries who had to leave the country during the war, since they were serving in a British colony.

In the s, as the churches as well as the colony were preparing for independence, Sundkler knew he was a foreigner, but he was a friend. His talk addressed the important transitions that the African churches were experiencing as they were now challenged to be in their communities as independent, African churches.

He provided an image of the nature of the church, and drew from the experience of the people of Israel on their exodus journey. The discussion after the presentation brought many comments, specifically about how the church as a tent should incorporate African hymns, worship, rhythm and movement, into the Lutheran church experience. At the communion service held during the Marangu conference, after all had communed, another incident long remembered from the conference still circulates in oral history.

The participants from South Africa came forward to ask the presiding ministers from Tanzania if Lutherans always communed together this way, since at home in South Africa communion was given to white worshippers first, and only after they were finished were the black worshippers asked to come forward. The meeting also brought changes for Tanzanian church leadership when young students responded to the challenge issued by the Wa Chagga chief, Thomas Marealle II, who asked the official Lutheran leaders gathered there why it was that the Lutherans in Tanzania did not have bishops.

Martin Luther and the Rise of World Christianities

Was it because they did not think that the Tanzanian churches were mature enough for that step? So it was that at the next election of the leader for the Bukoba district, normally an uncontested renewal of the term for their superintendent, became an upset. These students unexpectedly voted for Bengt Sundkler, with whom they had communicated in the meantime. When Sundkler surprised the mission authorities and accepted the offer to come in , he was installed as a bishop according to the Church of Sweden rite, but with the understanding that he would serve only a short while, meanwhile working to prepare the first Tanzanian to become a bishop for that church.

Josiah Kibira had been a confirmation student when Sundkler was first a missionary in Bukoba, and Sundkler knew how talented he was and helped him study at Boston University. When Sundkler agreed to serve another term as bishop in he requested Kibira as his assistant, and a few months later he returned to Sweden, his assistant obviously ready for the job.

Josiah Kibira then became the Lutheran bishop in Bukoba in

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