The Crossings Blog

Co-missioners, Today’s post is both late and timely. Late, because it discusses a text we heard in church two weeks ago on this year’s First Sunday of Advent. Timely, because the issues God pushed us to face that day are issues we deal with every day. “How are we judged?” “Who does the judging?”  Our thanks to ...

Co-missioners, Kudos to writer Chris Neumann for today’s one-of-a-kind post. We urge it on you for three reasons. First, Chris raises an issue that has never surfaced in Crossings. We know of no prior writer who has addressed it. That includes Bob Bertram and Ed Schroeder. We doubt that it has ever crossed your own minds as ...

Co-missioners, There is an endless list of gifts to thank God for this Thanksgiving. Among them is the simple fact that more Americans than usual will take a break from the crabbiness of the times to express some thanks of one kind of another. Not that all of these thanks will be directed to God. We ...

Co-missioners, Today’s guest writer is the Rev. Dr. George C. Heider, a Senior Research Professor of Theology at Valparaiso University. Dr. Heider is a product of the system that trained many of us who connect with Crossings these days. He graduated from Concordia College, Bronxville, from Concordia Senior College, Fort Wayne, and finally, in 1979, from ...

Co-missioners, Atop the sounding board of the imposing pulpit in Cape Town’s Strand Street Lutheran Church—the oldest church building in South Africa—there sits a swan; or to be more accurate, the carved and painted figure thereof. From the floor of the nave it appears like a white dot incongruously marring the rich dark wood the pulpit ...

Co-missioners, Today’s contribution is about preaching. It comes in the form of a book review by Bruce Modahl for which a bit of background might be helpful. In 1871 Yale Divinity School inaugurated an annual series of lectures on preaching named after a famous Yale alumnus, Lyman Beecher. Beecher was one of America’s superstar Protestant clerics in ...

Co-missioners, Reformation Day is three days hence, and on a Sunday for once. Lutherans will celebrate, or so one hopes. Will the music be robust and daring, pandemic strictures notwithstanding? One hopes for that too. Lutherans have a deep tradition of singing the Gospel, and often better than they preach it. Here the credit goes to ...

Co-missioners, This week we send you another a classic from the Crossings’ library. Going forward we plan to do this at least once a quarter. Today’s item was written by Ed Schroeder in 1976 and originally published in Currents in Theology and Mission, launched two years earlier as the theological journal of Christ Seminary—Seminex. (Today it ...

Co-missioners, Our editor, Jerry Burce, is still the full-time pastor he was when took up with Crossings two decades ago. Much of his theological work spills out in the sermons he preaches at Messiah Lutheran Church in Fairview Park, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. Here’s one from the Sunday before last. We pass it along with ...

Co-missioners, In recent decades a group of New Testament scholars have set lots of Protestant teeth on edge with a so-called “new perspective on Paul.” They argue among other things that the 16th century reformers skewed Paul’s gospel by equating it with his teaching on “justification by faith.”