I recall a conversation from the early 1970’s. Talking with a member of our congregation in Venedy, I asked where he had grown up. Myself a transplant from the Chicago area, I assumed he had grown up in a different town and moved to little Venedy for whatever reason. He pointed and said, “I grew up in that house,” a house about two doors from where he now lived. An entire life lived in a couple houses in a town of about 125 people. I wondered then, and still do today, how does being bound that way affect a person’s outlook and faith?
I’m just returned from ten days in Brazil, where I taught a graduate level class at Seminario Concordia in the southern city of Sao Leopoldo. Six hours every day, last Monday through Friday, 21 pastors and I studied First Peter in detail. I presented in English, sometimes we slipped into German, but everything was translated into Portuguese. I also was privileged to attend two Sunday services in two different congregations, one including an ordination, and toured the offices of the Igreja Evangelica Luterana do Brasil. The entire trip was hearing stories, stories of life in a country I’d never visited, stories of pastors with joys and struggles, and the individual stories all converged in our study of the Bible and sharing faith. Truly an out-of-the-box experience that taught me again a basic truth: Little me, big God, big Gospel. Christ “must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30).
Our new curriculum gives seminarians cross-cultural experiences so they’ll grow in appreciation for the work of the Gospel in places unlike they’ve known, but I wonder how many parishioners aren’t growing in faith because they’re content to be bound by their local church experience with no stimulating vision for the world-wide Body of Christ?
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