“You Lutheran pastors sure do travel a lot.” That was what a student (who came from a non-Lutheran background) once said to me when I told her I was going to be going on a trip. She’s right. Lutheran pastors tend to travel for things like Circuit Meetings (usually once a month, getting together with the pastors of seven near by churches), District conventions/conferences (usually once a year getting together with other pastors, church workers, lay people), and other stuff. In addition to those “normal Lutheran pastor travels,” I travel more. 
This week I am in Orlando for the whole week for two things: a.) Pastoral Leadership Institute – Missional Leader immersion training, b.) Florida Georgia District Board of Directors. In January I traveled to St. Louis to be at our National Youth Ministry Symposium. February and March were surprisingly without travel, but that’s only true because we canceled our Spring Break trip that we were planning.
So why travel this much? Certainly, there are successful pastors in Tallahassee who probably haven’t left the city in years. A big part of the travel is relationships. God has put us in our relationships, and He asks us to be faithful in those relationships. In the Lutheran church, we believe our relationships with other churches that confess the same things that we do are important. There is no thing as a “rogue Lutheran church,” at least not a healthy one, because to be “rogue” is to disavow the gift of relationship that we have been given.
In a way, my travels are simply a picture of what we do every Sunday at University Lutheran. We get together with people who share in our beliefs so that we can fellowship with one another, teach and learn from one another, and get things done together. Those are the things that I do when I’m out on the road – but they are also the things that we do when we meet one another on Sunday or outside of Sunday.
Hebrews chapter 10 says that we should cherish those relationships and not give up on meeting together. That can be a road trip sometimes, but God promises us that it will be worth it, because He has put us in those relationships. So let’s all meet back up this Sunday and I’ll tell you about what this week was like for me, and you can do the same with me. Let’s care for our relationships by meeting and joining together as the Body that He died and rose to make us into.