Churchwide News & Events

for the most up-to-date ELCA news - go to www.elca.org

Everything is not okay.  Three years out from Hurricane Katrina there remains a lot of devastation across the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Camp Victor has assisted over 1,800 families with cleaning, repairing and rebuilding their homes and is still operating as a disaster relief volunteer camp. Find out how you can help.  

Due to the increased intensity of humanitarian crises around the world, Lutheran World Relief has received several requests for quilts, layettes, and health, school and sewing kits. Upcoming collections can be found online at www.lwr.org/parish/ingathering.asp .For those not able to quilt or assemble quilts themselves, making a financial gift to the Project Comfort Fund is another way to be involved in this much-needed ministry to the hurting world." Giving information for the Project Comfort Fund is online at http://lwr.org/parish/comfort.asp . For more information visit www.lwr.org .

You can be proud to be a member of the ELCA! Look at some of the ministries YOU make possible through your congregation, synod, and churchwide organization. When you hear the stories you will proudly say, "Wow, the ELCA is really doing a lot!" Find out more at www.elca.org .

• Working together as the whole Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, we are making Christ known in ways that no individual or congregation could do alone. We are 5 million members in 10,800 congregations across 65 synods in nine regions across the United States and Caribbean. We are one of 136 member churches that make up the Lutheran World Federation. We are third largest Lutheran church in the world.

• You support nearly 300 ELCA missionaries and volunteers in 47 countries. For example, you support the work of medical missionaries in Papua New Guinea. A church-supported hospital there provides affordable care to poor, rural patients. Recently one 10-year-old girl's life was saved. After a poisonous snakebite, her family rushed her to the hospital for the lifesaving antivenom. At $385 a dose, they could never have afforded it. But thanks to your support, they paid only $2.

• You train church leaders from around the world. Thanks to the generosity of members like you, the ELCA provides international scholarships to future leaders of other countries. For example, after completing a Master's Degree in Old Testament at Trinity Lutheran Seminary, Gideon Maghina was elected bishop of the central diocese of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania. 

• You have educated more than 500 pastors, doctors, health workers, teachers and agricultural workers in Lutheran churches around the globe. You have trained 77 leaders in Tanzania, 33 in Namibia, 31 in India, 28 in Madagascar, 25 in Ethiopia and 16 in Brazil. After these leaders study at ELCA colleges and seminaries, they return to their homelands to bring the Gospel to life. 

• You help plant new congregations at home, too. 358 ELCA congregations have been organized since 1988. Did you know that more than half of new starts are in ethnic specific and multicultural contexts? Plus, research shows that fast-growing congregations have a higher percentage of people who are newer to the faith—people who began worshiping within the last five years—than average congregations. Working closely with synods across the ELCA, you are helping start new congregations across the country, especially in fast-growing areas.

• You support a vast education network of 28 colleges and universities, 170 Lutheran campus ministries, 20 high schools 160 elementary schools, 1,800 early childhood education centers

• Your special support of the ELCA World Hunger Appeal makes a difference. For example, in rural Pennsylvania, folks with limited incomes are growing their own food. Even kids are learning about gardening and nutrition. They sell some of what they grow at a nearby farmers' market. Growing your own food encourages healthier eating. Learning a new skill encourages self-reliance.

• You help people break out of the cycle of poverty and hunger. Your gifts to the Hunger Appeal make a world of difference to this village in Haiti. You helped provide a new school, six coffee cooperatives, hearty breeding pigs and small businesses that mean a brighter future for these families. This is only one example of how the ELCA responds to hunger by providing relief, development, education and advocacy—all outside the church's regular budget. This ministry is made possible through extra-mile giving to the ELCA World Hunger Appeal.

• You are making a difference in the world, and you can feel good about that. Thank you for your generosity through your regular and designated giving to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. These stories illustrate the ministries YOU make possible through your congregation, synod and churchwide organization. As you give your regular offering, remember that it is not just money—it is possibility!

Are you an interim pastor? Check out the Interim Ministry Association ELCA.

Peace Not Walls is the campaign of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America to learn, pray and act for peace with justice in the Holy Land.  The 2005 ELCA Churchwide Assembly adopted this strategy to promote a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to call for a halt to construction of the separation barrier and its removal from Palestinian land. [More at FAQs]. They have extensive education resources about the situation in the Holy Land for use in congregations.

The Inter-Lutheran Coordinating Committee is proud to introduce a special resource to assist pastoral care givers provide ministry among returning veterans. Caring Connections http://caringconnectionsonline.org is an online journal the Committee publishes that presents topics of interest in the field of pastoral care. To subscribe to Caring Connections, visit http://tinyurl.com/3aeo3r

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