The Crossings Blog

Colleagues, I spent my first four years as a young communicant at Concordia College in Adelaide, Australia. Those of us who boarded at the school went to church on Sunday at St. John’s, the Lutheran congregation around the corner, where, in keeping with late-60’s Lutheran practice in Australia and the U.S. alike, the Lord’s Supper was ...

Colleagues, The Rev. Lars Olson is today’s contributor. I haven’t met him, and can tell you nothing about him beyond those things you can read for yourself at the website of First Lutheran Church, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where he serves as an associate pastor. First Lutheran is a large ELCA congregation with enough oomph to ...

Colleagues, First: If you haven’t signed on yet for next month’s Crossings conference, consider doing so this week. Call it a Christmas gift to yourself, if that helps. The topic is pressing, as are the speakers I’ll get to introduce as keynoter for the event. Because of their readiness to pitch in, we’re able to offer that ...

Colleagues, Advent launched again last Sunday to do for the Christian world as the days surrounding January 1st do for the secular one. Four days in, it’s tugging eyes toward the future in a move that also drives a reappraisal of the present. The word we use in church for “reappraisal” is “repentance.” We’ll hear about ...

Colleagues, In our last post we sent you a review by Ed Schroeder of a book entitled Moral Injury and Just War. As Ed was wrapping his work on that, he was surprised to get the following notice— “You are invited to view “Is Anybody Listening?” at 5:00pm on Sunday, October 11th at the national office of ...

Colleagues, The congregation I serve is going to celebrate the Reformation this coming Sunday. So will lots of other Lutheran churches in the U.S., and elsewhere too. Whether and how joyfully they do it will depend heavily on their pastors’ opinions about the merits of what happened in 1517 and thereafter, and, more to the point, ...

Colleagues, We’re six days away from this year’s Veteran’s Day observance. It bears remembering that the day first appeared on calendars as Armistice Day, recalling that eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, when the armies stopped shooting on the Western Front. This past summer I listened to an audio recording ...

Colleagues, Today’s offering comes from Steven Kuhl, Executive Director of the Crossings Community. Steve has spent much of his working career as a pastor and professor in Greater Milwaukee, where he also serves as a member of the Unity and Relations Commission of the Wisconsin Council of Churches. In that capacity, he worked with four others ...

Colleagues, I began the last post (#860, September 10) by announcing a formal change in Thursday Theology’s publication schedule, from weekly to bi-weekly. I start today by adding a clarification about the purpose for this exercise. It’s long overdue. In fact I can’t recall that anyone has ever spelled it out in all the seventeen years ...

Colleagues, I start today by announcing a formal change in Thursday Theology. A weekly post, which has not been so weekly of late, is shifting to a biweekly format. I discussed this with other members of the Crossings Board when we met last month, pointing out that gifts granted to Thursday Theology’s first author and editor, ...