Our Blog

By: Pastor Berg

Over the last few months, we’ve explored God’s Word to see exactly how he defines the Church, its mission, and where we individually fit in that mission.  As we close out our series of articles on the Church, we see one more way that God has given us an opportunity to carry out our personal mission and his Great Commission.  God has blessed us by gathering like-minded believers into a group called a synod.  Synod is a Greek word that means to walk with or walk together.  As members of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, why do we walk together?

We walk together because there are some things that we can’t really do on our own to carry out the church’s mission and God’s great commission.  As a congregation of 800 souls, we don’t have the physical or financial resources to train future workers for God’s vineyard.  Our pastors’ time is already stretched to accomplish weekly sermon preparation, Bible study and Catechism preparation and teaching, member visits, etc.  To add the duties of trying to train a young man for the full time ministry would do that young man a disservice.  Neither do we have the physical or financial resources to make disciples of “all nations.”  We can do a respectable job of sharing God’s Word in Madison, but we can’t possibly service all of Wisconsin, the Midwest, or the fifty states in our nation.  Nor can we hope to reach the billions around the world who need to hear the good news of Jesus Christ crucified.

But, joining together with like minded believers, we are able to accomplish, by God’s grace, far more than we ever could individually.  That is why the primary goals of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod are three-fold: 1) To train future full-time workers for God’s harvest fields, 2) To support and search out new mission opportunities in our own country. 3) To support and search out new mission opportunities throughout the world.  By God’s grace, our synod is accomplishing its goals!

Our ministerial educational system of two preparatory schools, one college, and one seminary is the envy of many!  We have congregations or worship opportunities in all 50 states in our country.  We have missionaries in over 30 foreign countries not to mention contacts that visit other countries regularly.  God has blessed our efforts to carry out his great commission tremendously!  However, because of financial constraints in the last few years, we’ve had to pull back missionaries, dramatically increase tuition at our schools, and have started very few new home missions.

That’s where we come in!  As a member of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, we’ve committed to walking together with like-minded believers to work together to carry out Christ’s mission for his Church!  We can help individually by committing ourselves to this important task.  That means praying diligently for this important work to be blessed by God.  That means making the Wisconsin Synod a priority when it comes to our blessings that we return back to God.  That means encouraging the youth in our congregation to consider sharing the Gospel with children or with adults as a full-time occupation.  But most of all, it means believing God when he says in Malachi, “Test me in this,” says the LORD Almighty, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it.”  God has placed a tremendous opportunity at our feet!  He’s given the mina of his Gospel to us as a synod.  Let’s get down to the business of Walking Together so we can Work Together for the spread of the Gospel!  We know that God will bless us more than we can even imagine!