Co-missioners,
Today we send an update from our editor on the Crossings conference that starts this Sunday evening. Appended from a past conference is a piece of theological reflection that you will not want to miss.
Peace and Joy,
The Crossings Community
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Crossings Conferences: A Bit of What’s Coming, A Bit of What Has Been
-as told by Jerome Burce
Three Days Hence—
This coming Sunday is January 19th. That’s when people will be meeting in St. Louis for the latest International Crossings Conference. The first of these took place in 2007. Nine more have followed. This year’s will be the eleventh such meeting. As with the first ten, it will feature two and a half days of presentations and conversations focused on an overarching topic, in this case the biblical concept of “Sabbath” as a matter of urgent importance in 2025. As the planning team framed it in the title of the conference, the issue is “Hearing Christ,” and, in doing so, encountering “the Gospel for an Exhausted World.”
Many of you will not have signed up to attend this in person. I wish I could tell you that there’s a last-minute chance to do so today. I can’t. Instead, like that unhappy fellow who lurks in the shadows of the Christmas story, I’m obliged to let you know that the inn is full. No room! This is in part a consequence of having to shift our venue from the Shrine of Our Lady of the Snows in Belleville, Illinois to the Pallottine Retreat Center in north St. Louis County. The guest rooms are fewer there and the meeting space is smaller. We discovered this at a seminar we held there last year.
Meanwhile the interest in the conference seems stronger than it has been of late. Mayhap this is due to a general forgetting of the fears that constrained us during the pandemic years of 2020 to ’22. More likely it’s been sparked by the topic and by the speakers our planning team recruited to address it. All of them are younger than 50. One or two are a decade-plus younger. Two of the keynoters in particular are equipped to do what we’ve always expected from our keynoters, which is to use the distinction between Law and Gospel to help us think through the topic at hand. Are there other theological communities among American Lutherans that make a deliberate priority of this? I’d like to think so, but I’m not aware of them, and certainly not within an ELCA orbit. Herein lies Crossings’ chief distinctiveness and our main contribution to the conversation of the wider church. We take our Lutheran identity seriously. We insist on this. With Luther, Melanchthon, and their sixteenth century colleagues, we grasp that God has two ways of speaking to us and dealing with all of humankind. God tells us what to do, what not to do. And when God forces us to recognize how abysmally far we are from meeting these expectations, God tells us yet again of all that God continues to do in and through Christ Jesus to make and keep us as his own forever, and—get this—to do so righteously, in a way that will leave us jumping with joy and all creation nodding its approval.
Promoting and touting this agenda of God’s—that’s what Crossings is for. We’ll hear much more about it beginning this Sunday night and stretching through to midday Wednesday.
And with that, an invitation to anyone who can’t be there in person but even so would like to follow what’s going on: consider attending online. We’ll have no problem accommodating you there. The online cost is $130 for the whole conference. Our tech people will have arrangements in place to allow online participants to contribute their thoughts and questions along the way. See our website for details.
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Some other notes—
- You may have noticed that I referred to this conference of ours as “international.” Indeed it will be. A few pastors from Singapore have arranged to be there, carrying on a tradition that reaches back to our first conference ever. This year a pastor from Ethiopia will join us too. One of our key speakers will be travelling to St. Louis from England. He’ll be the latest in a series of speakers who, over the years, have crossed oceans to be with us. They’ve come from Germany, Australia, and South Africa, and, circuitously, from Finland and Japan.
- Kudos in advance to this year’s planning team. Led by Pastor Ella Moehlman of Lisbon, North Dakota, the team includes Ella’s husband, Louis Moehlman; also Robin Lutjohann of Boston and Matt Metevelis of Las Vegas. All four are new to Crossings’ conference planning. They’ve been joined by veterans Cathy Lessmann and Chris Repp, and by Sherman Lee and Bethany Dreher of the Crossings office. From what I’ve heard, you can expect a meaty, refreshing program.
- And here I add that this program will include an introduction to the participants in the second round of our Preachers’ Mentoring Project. This unfolded last fall. You’ll be glad, I’m sure, to hear of its outcome.
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And finally, some theology—
The inaugural Crossings conference of 2007 was organized around the theme “Honest-to-God Gospel for Today’s Church and World.” One of our keynoters was the late John G. Strelan—Joe, as he was commonly called. Joe was a key leader and theologian of the Lutheran Church of Australia in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He got his start as a missionary in Papua New Guinea. In the course of his career, he emerged as a tremendously gifted thinker, teacher, scholar and pastor.
Joe’s topic in 2007 was “Honest-to-God Gospel Meets the Dying World.” I can’t encourage you enough to read it—or re-read it, as the case may be. Below you’ll find a few paragraphs to whet your appetites. They appear toward the end of his first section, the one that begins with the first and only introduction that most of us will ever get to the Rev. Samuel Marsden, aka “the flogging parson.” And in the passage I quote below will come some other things that most of us will not have thought about before, or certainly not in this way. They have to do with preaching. See the last paragraph in particular. Then linger over its final sentence. I for one have yet to encounter a sharper description of what the preaching task is meant to achieve.
Herewith Joe—
‘Gospel’ implies a ‘gospeller’: How shall they hear without a preacher? God addresses the dying world through agents (angels, prophets, apostles, various other human messengers, enemy rulers, terrorists) or means (floods, wars, earthquakes, famines, tsunamis).
Thus when God had something to say to Israel, God sometimes did so through an angel; on at least one occasion God spoke through a donkey (a fact that has been of great comfort to many preachers); but most commonly God spoke through human beings, men and women.
The prophetic literature of the old covenant is replete with the phrase: The word of the Lord came to…. One example: The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai: ‘Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it’. Jonah went off in the very opposite direction. But God threw a storm after him, and after a series of ‘throws’, Jonah ended up where he started. Then we get one of the most beautiful sentences in the Bible: The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time. A second time! God was patient with this petulant prophet. But Jonah did not repent. Iraq repented, from the king to the cattle, Iraq repented…but not Jonah.
Earthen vessels, aren’t we. Weak, recalcitrant Jonahs. There is, however, one Gospeller who was without sin but who became an earthen vessel for the sake of a dying world. The Scriptures say of him: Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days God has spoken to us by the Son…He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being. The Son. Spitting image of the Father. The Son shows us the heart of God, beating for us…pining for us.
Jesus Christ is both Gospeller and Gospel. As he came from God and was sent by God, so we gospellers have our roots and origin in heaven, and we are sent by the Son to a dying world, living and speaking in the power of Holy Spirit, the Son’s promised gift to us.
Inasmuch as this is true of all gospellers, we are all the same. All of us speak of God’s great rescue as ones who have themselves been greatly rescued by God. In parts of Eastern Germany there are pulpits known as Walfischkanzeln. The preacher enters the pulpit through the body of the fish, and emerges to speak from between the jaws of the fish. That’s the place from which all gospellers speak: from between the jaws of the fish.
That we all have in common. But in everything else we are, each of us, different. And here’s where we see the great wisdom and the world-embracing love of God. When the life-giving gospel meets the dying world in and through me, it will have a different shape, a different texture, from the gospel which meets the world through you. Its heart and soul is the Lord Jesus Christ crucified and risen, but its clothing comes in part from our life experiences, the way God has chipped away at us to conform us to the image of the Son. So don’t knock your experiences, good or otherwise. And don’t insist that others must have your set of experiences in order to be effective gospellers. This individuality is how God makes provision for an ongoing repetition of the Pentecost event: men and women preaching the one message (Christ crucified), but each one speaking a different language so that people may hear, understand, and say: today God’s Word struck me as surely as the spear of the hunter finds the heart of the pig.
Come, Holy Spirit. Make it so!
JEB
Author
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Dr. Burce is a pastor Emeritus of Messiah Lutheran Church in Fairview Park, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. He began his ministry teaching Scripture and theology at a seminary in Papua New Guinea, where he had been born and raised as a child of Lutheran missionaries. He was introduced to U.S. parish ministry at Zion Lutheran Church in Southington, Connecticut. Dr. Burce received his MDiv from Christ Seminary—Seminex and his DMin from Hartford Seminary. He is president of the Crossings board and edits “Thursday Theology,” a weekly Crossings publication.
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