Reflections on the 2002 theme for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Copyright (c) 2001, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Used by Permission Theodore W. “Ted” Schroeder “Making Christ Known” has been the ongoing theme of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) for several years. It expresses in just a few words the overall […]

The Purpose-Driven Church: Growth Without Compromising Your Message & Mission by Rick Warren, Zondervan Publishing House, 1995. Reviewed by Wayne R. Cowell Every Sunday the traffic streams up the four-lane half-mile entrance to the seventy-four acre campus of Saddleback Community Church in Orange County, California. Ten thousand people will attend “seeker” services at this fastest growing […]

In my last column I asked, “What do we expect of our bishops?”  To answer, I simply laid out the job description of an evangelical episcopate in the Augsburg Confession, Article 28.  Since I wrote that article, we have elected and installed a new Presiding Bishop of the ELCA and installed our own Synod Bishop.  […]

On October 20, 2001, Chicago area Lutherans gathered at Gloria Dei Lutheran Church in Downers Grove for a Metropolitan Chicago Synod Faith Development event. The featured speaker was Stanley Hauerwas, the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University. He spoke of Death and Marriage, and that is the sort of juxtaposition/pairing for […]