LUTHERAN
EDITORIAL
Editor Lisa McIntosh
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e lisa.mcintosh@lca.org.au
Executive Editor Linda Macqueen
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LUTHERAN CHURCH OF AUSTRALIA
The Lutheran informs the members of the LCANZ about the church’s teaching, life, mission and people, helping them to grow in faith and commitment to Jesus Christ. The Lutheran also provides a forum for a range of opinions, which do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editor or the policies of the Lutheran Church of Australia and New Zealand.
Chilling out before a busy year
Australian Lutheran College (ALC) Principal Tim Stringer recently took the chance to escape Adelaide’s summer heat and catch up on some essential reading before a game with the Adelaide Vintage Reds in the Old Timers Ice Hockey Australia Network. Dr Tim and the staff at ALC are looking forward to a busy and exciting year, with the largest number of new pastoral ministry enrolments in more than a decade set to begin studies towards pastoral ministry. Read more on page 25.
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People like YOU bring love to life
Austin Gogel
St Mark’s Lutheran Church, Mount Barker, SA Aerospace engineering student
Most treasured Bible text: Matthew 7:7,8
‘Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you ...’
Fiona Wagenknecht
St John’s Lutheran Church, Esperance, WA
Office manager/financial officer
Most treasured Bible text: Colossians 2:6,7
‘ … just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.’
Graham Pfeffer
Bundaberg Lutheran Parish, Qld Parish pastor
Most treasured Bible text: Proverbs 3:5,6
‘Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.’
Let the light of someone you know shine through their photo being featured in The Lutheran and LCA Facebook. With their permission, send us a good quality photo, their name and details (congregation, occupation and most treasured text) and your contact details.
As I write this, the new year is only a couple of weeks old but 2025 already seems to be flying by. And I wonder how many of you, like me, have begun it with some good intentions about making changes for the better this year.
If you have made a New Year’s resolution, is it about getting fitter and losing weight? Perhaps you’ll aim to read more and watch less TV … or drink more water and less alcohol. You might plan to cease being a slave to your work emails. Or maybe your goal is to buy fewer things you don’t need and to give more to charity instead.
But whatever you hope and intend to change about yourself or your life in 2025, do you think you’ll achieve it for the whole 12 months? I hope you do and that this year is a happy and healthy one for all our readers. But will it be devastating or merely disappointing if you lack the discipline and the willpower (or should that be ‘won’t-power’?) to keep going with your commitment? If you fail, will you try again or throw in the towel until 1 January 2026?
We can put a lot of thought, time and energy into making promises to ourselves about our physical and mental wellbeing. Don’t get me wrong, both are important and indeed our creator God wants us to take good care of our physical, mental and emotional selves, as we are reminded in 1 Corinthians 6:19 (Don't you know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit?).
But what about our spiritual fitness? Do we make as many resolutions about that? And what can we do to improve it? Is it simply a matter of making prayer, worship and Bible study greater priorities in our lives? Or do we need a spiritual personal trainer to show us how to build some spiritual ‘muscle’ and make the improvements we need to sing with gusto that beautiful hymn ‘It is well with my soul’?
Of course, there’s nothing we can actually do to make ourselves fit for heaven or right with God. He’s already done everything through Jesus’ death and resurrection. But God does want us to know the abundant blessings of a spiritually ‘fit’ life.
So, in this edition, we are pleased to share stories from our LCANZ family about some of the spiritual disciplines that may encourage growth in our faith life and our relationship with God. Some of these already play a familiar and frequent role in our Lutheran tradition, while others might be new to us. I hope you will be challenged and encouraged by reading them, as I have been.
Also, our popular regular columns are back and there are wonderful resources to discover and explore and plenty of news to catch up on.
May God bless your reading,
Getting spiritually fit
Blisters and blessings – on the road with the body of believers
Sabbath as a gift of grace
Uplifted by family and faith on ancient paths
Retracing the steps of ancestors
What does is mean to dwell in Scripture
Diving deep into the word
Because we bear your name: Bishop Paul’s letter
Dwelling in God’s word
Congregational Life (formerly Go and Grow)
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that the following pages may contain images of people who have died. Our cover: iStock.com.
BISHOP PAUL’S LETTER Because we bear your name
Lutheran in All Lands: The Wonderful Works of God – that was the title of a hardback book I purchased at a sale of old theological books way back in 1980. That was my first year at seminary. The book was written in 1894 by Dr J Lenker in the USA and told amazing stories of the mission of God in Lutheran communities around the world. I remember being inspired reading the pages. Dr Lenker wrote of Christians of our Lutheran confessional witness in all corners of the globe, including in our own backyard here in the Asia-Pacific.
Little could I have imagined at the time, that I would one day be in Hong Kong, representing our LCANZ at a gathering of Lutheran leaders from those many lands, particularly from our region. This was the November 2024 Asia Church Leadership Conference attended by representatives from India, Indonesia, Japan, Myanmar, Taiwan, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Nepal, Bangladesh, Papua New Guinea, Thailand, Cambodia, the Holy Land and, of course, Australia. I attended with our Interim Assistant to the Bishop for International Mission, Erin Kerber.
In Dr Lenker’s book, he included a table listing the number of ‘baptised members’ of the Lutheran churches of the different regions. Many of those numbers of our Asia-Pacific region in the 1894 table were in their hundreds and thousands. Today they are numbered in their hundreds of thousands and millions.
well as destruction of property. They ask us to pray, to speak out and to visit. They ask especially that we do not forget them, nor turn a blind eye.
Theological education for mission is a vital concern for Lutheran leaders in our region. Our Australian Lutheran College continues to be held in very high regard and a number of regional scholars are interested to discover more about the approach to the distributed learning model that has been developed at ALC.
There were two key words spoken over and over during the days of the leadership conferences in Hong Kong, that Erin and I attended on your behalf. These two words were: evangelisation and discipleship. What are new ways to reach out to the neighbour with the hope-filled good news of Jesus Christ? What are the tried and tested ways to evangelise others with the joy of salvation? How do we purposefully and creatively disciple our Christian people to live by faith as salt and light in the world?
THE REGIONAL CHURCHES OF OUR MISSION PARTNERSHIPS EARNESTLY WANT YOU TO HEAR OF THEIR THANKSGIVING FOR THE MISSIONARY HEART OF THE LCANZ.
These sisters and brothers of our Lutheran Confession cherish you, their sisters and brothers of the Lutheran Church of Australia and New Zealand. A number of the leaders have studied here among us, like the president of the India Evangelical Lutheran Church, Rev Dr J Priestly Balasingh. A number maintain strong mission partnerships with us, such as Rev Keov Sreyleak Touch, Bishop of the Lutheran Church Cambodia. Our Lutheran neighbours receive the Lutheran Church of Australia and New Zealand as a confessional and evangelical conservative neighbouring Lutheran church. In particular, the regional churches of our mission partnerships earnestly want you to hear of their thanksgiving for the missionary heart of the LCANZ.
At the leadership gathering in Hong Kong, we also heard about suffering. In our region there is significant persecution of Christians in some places, including violence toward people as
At the end of my inspiring time among our Lutheran neighbours, I reflected on this extraordinary, flourishing community of Lutheran Christians in our Asia-Pacific region. I found myself praying, earnestly asking the Lord of the Church to show us how we might better gather our young people into this experience of the wider shared mission of our Lutheran communities in our part of the ‘wonderful works of God’. This is a challenge for our church.
For these regular reflections in The Lutheran, I have chosen to use the title of the wonderful Australian Lutheran song of faith, ‘Because we bear your name’, co-written by Dr John Kleinig and Dr Robin Mann. One prayerful line of this song captures our shared witness with our sisters and brothers of the Lutheran churches of the Asia-Pacific region: ‘Help us receive each other, Lord, for you receive the least of us and come to us in them – because we bear your name.’
In Christ,
REV PAUL SMITH Bishop, Lutheran Church of Australia and New Zealand
