Study Guides

Study Guides

Study guide: Farm bill brings Lutherans together

Raise your hand if you’ve eaten today! OK! Now raise your hand if you plan on eating tomorrow! All right! Everybody who had a hand up should be interested in…

Study Guides

Study guide: Is America facing a “post-Christian” future?

Data from pollsters and sociologists agree that the church occupies a smaller, less-prominent place in our culture than it did even a generation ago. Some are even using the term…

Study Guides

Study guide: The “e” word

The first “Evangelicals” were the courageous Christians who gathered 500 years ago around Martin Luther, the monk who taught faith insights so revolutionary that the Roman Catholic Church excommunicated him…

Study Guides

Study guide: Called and chosen

The ELCA has 17,460 rostered ministers (deacons and pastors). The 250 women of color serving as rostered ministers comprise only a tiny fraction of that number—1.4 percent, or 1 out…

Study Guides

Study guide: God revealed through people with disabilities

Our culture has changed significantly in the last 50 years in both its awareness of the needs of people with disabilities and its willingness to accommodate those needs. Of course,…

Study Guides

Study guide: “It’s all about death—and life!”

“Nobody gets out alive,” the old quip goes. And like many wisecracks, it expresses well an underlying truth: All of us are born, all of us live and all of…

Study Guides

Study guide: Member status

What’s a “member” of a church today, when we experience lots of mobility in our culture and “belonging” means something very different for us than our grandparents? One church is…

Study Guides

Study guide: Form a faithful foundation

Lutheranism provides great recipes for faith formation, such as the baptismal affirmation found in Evangelical Lutheran Worship (page 236)—to live, hear, proclaim, serve and strive. Like the recipes we use…

Study Guides

Study guide: Past experience not necessary

“Give a man a fish,” the old saying goes, “and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Congregations that…

Study Guides

Study guide: Stepping up to stop stigma

In the three-and-a-half decades that our nation has been grappling with HIV and AIDS, we have much to celebrate. Health education and prevention have reduced the incidence of infection dramatically…

Study Guides

Study guide: The millennial mystery

You hear it in many congregations: Where are the young adults? In the 50 years since mainline churches hit their peak in membership, our culture has undergone a sweeping change….

Study Guides

Study guide: Ministry of presence

Federal chaplains who serve with our active-duty service personnel and in our nation’s military hospitals and federal prisons see a side of human life that few outsiders do. The ELCA…