Dr. Kelly Fryer of A Renewal Enterprise keynoted the Assembly, with an interactive discussion. Update: Download a presentation outline: a-wake-up-call
“God is on a mission in the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod, and YOU are his plan for getting it done!” Dr. Kelly Fryer told the Assembly as part of her “A Wake Up Call” keynote presentation.
“God is on a mission in the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod, and YOU are his plan for getting it done!” Dr. Kelly Fryer told the Assembly as part of her “A Wake Up Call” keynote presentation.
True evangelical ministry, Fryer said, starts with asking “How is my life different because of what God has been up to?” – and telling people about it.
Fryer, co-director of A Renewal Enterprise, had the Assembly members discuss two key questions: How has God’s loving mission for the world come to me, and how has it come through me to bless others?
Those two questions “are the core of Lutheran theology,” Fryer said.
She told of learning in an LTSP classroom that “God comes down to love, save and set us free.”
“God comes down in water and bread and wine and people, and there is nothing we can do to deserve it,” she said. That realization “changed my life and my ministry,” she said, yet “I have come to realize that that arrow all by itself is incomplete.”
Completing the equation, she said, is an application of Martin Luther’s only metric for evangelical witness: “Does it serve the neighbor?”
“This is what it means to be church,” she said.
Yet in an ELCA study of the practices of growing, mission-minded congregations, researchers found that these strong congregations shared five characteristics that were not often found in mainline congregations.
First, these churches ” are conscious and mindful to God’s real presence in their lives, homes, communities, churches,” she said. “They talked as if God were alive, active, in the room, doin’ stuff.” Lutherans, she noted, often need to be encouraged to do this.
In these churches the Bible is not abstract word but the story in which they situate their lives, work and faith. They are awake to the reality that “to be a Christian is to be part of God’s loving mission to the world” and to ” a willingness to do whatever it takes to connect with their neighbors” and “to break the rules” in the service of mission, she said.
Finally, these congregations understand the transformative power of the Gospel. ” When you meet Jesus something happens,” she said. “You are changed forever.”