Dear Members and Friends of our ELS:

Abide in My Word (John 8:31, 32) will serve as the theme for our annual convention this coming June. I hope that many of our Lutheran Sentinel readers will be able to attend. There will be some important items to consider. I would like to take a moment to tell you about a few of them. Each of these fits well with our theme.

Abide In My Word means taking seriously the way God’s Word is transmitted to future generations. To this end, one of the avenues we are pursuing aggressively as a synod is the Lutheran Schools Initiative (LSI), which may soon be identified as Lutheran Schools of America (LSA). The vision behind this new endeavor is to establish a substantial fund/foundation that will empower our synod to target, motivate and assist established congregations in developing Lutheran elementary schools; to encourage the start of preschools simultaneously with exploratory missions; and to select potential communities around our country in which to erect synod-run schools where churches eventually will be formed. In the reports to this year’s convention, the Board for Education and Youth, the Board for Stewardship and the ad hoc committee for LSI, are making a number of recommendations. A two-year synod-wide offering is being proposed, beginning at the 2006 convention. As we seek to fill the LSI administrator position, some restructuring will also need to be done. No doubt a new board will need to be formed whose duties would encompass and greatly expand the work that currently is assigned to a subcommittee of the Board for Education and Youth.

Abide In My Word means staying only with the Word of God and confessing the truth in all matters of doctrine. A special committee has been helping us in the past years to produce a scripturally sound document on the doctrine of the Public Ministry. This document can be found on our new website (evangelicallutheransynod.org). We have experienced considerable harmony in our study of the Public Ministry under the guidance of the PCM (Presidium’s Committee on Ministry). We hope that our synod will adopt the PCM statement at this year’s convention.

Another aspect of our theme Abide in My Word is the determination to do world mission work. More souls still need to hear of Christ the Redeemer. Our Board for Foreign Missions is urging this year’s convention to declare Lutheran Mission Salvation–India (LMSI) to be a new mission field for our synod. Extra-budgetary funding has been committed for the support of LMSI. A delegation from India will be visiting our convention, and there are plans to have a special presentation on the India mission work on Tuesday evening, June 21, 2005.

Please continue to pray for the work we are doing together in our synod.