Lutheran Witness: June/July 2019

In its June/July issue, The Lutheran Witness turns its attention to the 2019 Synod Convention.

Contents

From the President: Thanks, Herb!

Features:

LCMS National Convention Fast Facts

Joyful Together in Worship — preview the convention opening service

Overture Overview — key questions up for discussion in Tampa

Joy and the Lutheran Life — preview the convention essays

Joy to the World — 2019 National Offering FAQs

Meet the Candidates — get to know the nominees for LCMS president

Departments:

world views: A monthly news column from Gene Edward Veith

searching scriptures: Who Are We in Christ? — Herbert C. Mueller Jr.

bene+diction: A Prayer for the Church — James L. Brauer

From the editor

Thy will be done.

I’ve thought about these words a lot lately, especially since that rainy April Saturday when I dropped my husband off at the airport for three long months of Navy chaplain training. When the kids and I finally join him again this August, our lives will be entirely different from anything we’ve known before.

This isn’t what we planned. Five years ago — even two years ago — we could not have seen this coming. Yet like so many of God’s intentions for His people, this new adventure is already turning out to be bigger and better and stranger than we ever could have imagined.

Thy will be done.

I’ve also prayed these words often as I think about the upcoming LCMS convention, around which this entire issue of The Lutheran Witness revolves. If past conventions are any predictor, interested onlookers like me may soon find ourselves surprised, dismayed, overjoyed (or all of the above) by the decisions our beloved church body makes in convention this July.

Come what may, though, we will pray together the prayer our Lord has taught us, never forgetting Luther’s wise words: “The good and gracious will of God is done even without our prayer, but we pray in this petition that it may be done among us also.”

Amen and amen. May His good and gracious will in Christ be done among us, now and always.

In His mercy,

Rachel Bomberger
Managing Editor, The Lutheran Witness