When my family moved to St. Louis in my teens, we went “church shopping”. It’s probably the only time that I’ve done this since I was relatively unchurched for much of college and then I was assigned my churches from that point on without much choice in the matter. I remember that we would go…

“The fightin’ Missiourians….” I’ll never forget someone telling me that our Lutheran church body was nicknamed this in the past. It makes sense. Lutherans can be a contentious bunch, it’s in our DNA. We told the Roman Catholic church to go fly a kite over indulgences, and we haven’t necessarily worked out all of our…

This comes from a question we received: “Why not use grape juice and a loaf of bread? Wouldn’t any liquid/solid food combo do?” So once upon a time, I remember this theoretical coming up in conversation: What if I’m with a church group and all we have with us is some grape kool aid and…

Little closet boxes, tiny little purple ribbon stoles, elaborate screens that hide collared men behind them, prescriptions to say 452 “Hail Mary’s” and 312 “Our Father’s”, starting off with the line “Forgive me, Father, it has been x amount of days since my last confession…” etc etc…. Those are the images that come up when…

On any given Sunday during worship, I am playing two different roles. Those roles are sacrificial and sacramental, and you can tell the difference by the way that I am facing. It explains one of the questions that I get quite often from people who didn’t grow up in the Lutheran church, “why do you…

It can be hard to write a newsletter article – not because there isn’t anything to say, but because there is so much that I could say. But not everything about what I could say will interest you or be beneficial to you in your walk of faith and vocation. I could probably do a…

So I’m writing this article while watching FOX’s (actually quite entertaining) “The Masked Singer” where famous people dress up in wild costumes that hide their identities, but reveal little aspects of them. These costumes range from an alien to a rabbit to a pigeon to…all sorts of stuff. And it makes me think of Sunday…

“We continue with the entrance hymn” is probably the strangest thing that I say on Sunday morning. There are great theological mysteries, and then there is the mystery of why we call this hymn the “entrance” hymn when we’re about five minutes into the worship service.  The reason for this itself is simple. Like a…

Recently there has been a meme going around the internet that says, “If you live in a pastor’s home, you have the right to remain silent, because anything that you say or do may be used as a sermon illustration.” Most of the time I ask for permission if I’m using something Liz has said,…

This coming Sunday, we are going to read from Nehemiah 8, specifically a story that sounds a lot like University Lutheran on a Sunday. The background of the story is that the people of Israel have somehow lost the book of the Law, the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament. Upon returning…