Speaking Gig with Kent Burreson
Last week Kent Burreson (my co-author) and I gave the opening plenary address at the Multiethnic Symposium held May 6 and 7, 2025 at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis. Our presentation (with the unwieldy title “A House of Catechesis and Prayer for All Nations: Formation through a Contextualized Catechumenate”) was well received by the audience of about 200 clergy, seminarians, and lay church leaders. This paragraph from the presentation summarizes our address:
The Nairobi Statement on Worship and Culture was prepared by the Lutheran World Federation in 1996. For today’s presentation, we’ve expanded the language and will speak about worship AND catechesis in relation to culture. For us, worship and catechesis go hand-in-hand and both are essential for strong faith formation.The Nairobi document includes four statements about worship as transcultural, contextual, counter-cultural, and cross-cultural, each of which is grounded in statements about Jesus Christ also as transcultural, contextual, counter-cultural, and cross-cultural. These categories serve as the outline of our presentation, with Christ as transcultural bookending our remarks.
We drew on Kent’s research at Redeemer Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Bronx (included in our forthcoming book) and also on our recent research at Salem Lutheran Church in Springdale, Arkansas, a bilingual congregation (English and Spanish) that is introducing some innovative practices for lifelong faith formation. Pastors Adam Gless and Brandon Martin of Salem, along with two couples active in church leadership, attended the conference (photo, below).
Interested readers can find out more about the relaxation side of our visit to Salem Lutheran in February here. We really did do some serious research while there, interviewing Hispanic and Anglo members. Over the summer we will be preparing a report for the congregation with recommendations for strengthening the congregation’s faith formation process and practices that will promote a sense of unity across the cultures and languages of the people of Salem.