A Communion of Communities: Being Lutheran in a Globalized World
December Term
Because of staff transition in the LWF Regional and Global Offices, this December Term program will not be implemented in 2010.
This is an opportunity to develop strategies for bringing global perspectives into your ministry settings in North America and to network in the course for implementation of these strategies.
The journey will take us to Bossey Ecumenical Institute (Switzerland), Taize (France), The International Museum of the Reformation, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Geneva.
A Communion of Communities: Being Lutheran in a Globalizing World
Journey with us to Geneva, one of the Ecumenical centers of the world, where we will see the global experience of being Lutheran in the 21st century through the mission, witness and public ministry of the LWF and its churches. More information coming soon.
2009 Brochure
Post Seminar
My Story / Our Stories
LWF Pre-Assembly
LWF Assembly
Pre-Seminar
Objectives:
- Develop, from a North American context, a deeper appreciation of our Lutheran identity within a global communion of churches.
- Discover the role of accompaniment within the global church in sharing gifts (both receiving and contributing) and overcoming challenges in North America.
- Begin to develop strategies for global perspectives into the context of North American church life in further long-term mission interests.
- View the Seminar Syllabus.
We will be learning about and discussing issues such as:
- The work of the Lutheran World Federation, the World Council of Churches, and other ecclesial familes such as the World Alliance of Reformed Churches
- North American models for building relationships (Companion Synods) within the global Lutheran communion - joys and challenges.
- Ecumenical dialogues in pursuit of church unity
- Particular challenges facing churches in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe
- Interfaith dialogue and diapraxis in the world
- Humanitarian assistance, sustainable development, and climate change
- International affairs, human rights and advocacy, especially in the context of the United Nations
- How our own churches, and cultural differences, are viewed in relation to other churches in the communion
The Church
How baffling you are, oh Church, and yet how I love you!
How you have made me suffer, and yet how much I owe you!
I should like to see you destroyed, and yet I need your presence.
You have given me so much scandal and yet you have made me understand sanctity.
I have seen nothing in the world more devoted to obscurity, more compromised, more false,
and I have touched nothing more pure, more generous, more beautiful.
How often I have wanted to shut the doors of my soul in your face,
and how often I have prayed to die in the safety of your arms.
No, I cannot free myself from you, because I am you, although not completely.
And where should I go?
~ Carlos Carretto,
The God Who Comes