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Speaking Engagement
Commemoration of the Visitation
Yes, today is Trinity Sunday, but May 31 is also The Visitation of Mary to Elizabeth, a lesser festival (LBW & ELW)/principal feast of Christ (LSB) on many liturgical calendars. In More Days for Praise (Augsburg Fortress 2016), author Gail Ramshaw writes that this day “as focused both on joy at the coming of Christ and on the friendship between the two women” (124). Her suggested topics for prayers include
- “Praise God for giving to us believers the company of others with whom to worship.
- “Pray for the grace to sing thanks to God, no matter how life develops.
- Pray for deepening friendships” (125)
For the first and third suggestions on this list, I praise God and give thanks for some new and renewed connections with deaconess sisters and daughters of deaconess sisters. As the keynote speaker for the LCMS NOW district conference for youth and family ministry (in April 2026), I met two deaconess sisters and the daughters of two deaconesses!
Left to right, Deaconess Ashley Bayless, Lutheran Hour Ministries (Spokane Valley, WA) and Deaconess Amanda Mumm, Immanuel Lutheran Church (Twin Falls, ID), and me. It was great to meet some deacs from other parts of the country doing important ministry in the church.
Left to right: DCE Patra Mueller (Hope Lutheran Church, Seattle, WA), daughter of Deaconess Rhoda Pfotenhauer, and DCE Dereem Hoff (Our Savior Lutheran Church, Tacoma, WA), daughter of Deaconess Eunice McKinney. I’ve known Dereem since she was a child, as Eunice and Bob brought their children to the Deaconess Annual Meeting every year; and I first met Patra’s mother, Rhoda, for 30 years – since we both live in the Twin Cities. When she saw my name on the program materials prior to the conference, Patra emailed me, saying that her mother is also a deaconess and also named Rhoda. I responded that I was sure I knew her mom!
As the retiree among these women, I would certainly be the “Elizabeth” to them and they are the younger “Mary” to me. I treasure the holy conversations we had together. What a gift to be with these dedicated deaconesses and deaconess daughters, all serving Christ and Christ’s church in “faith and service.”
For more about the NOW conference, click here and here.
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Visitation Photos (by Rhoda Schuler) …
Banner photo: Marian Grotto, Portland, OR (March 2025)
Closing photo: Monastery of the Visitation, Ein Karem (Jerusalem suburb), Israel (December 2017)
Presenting at Best Practices Ministry 2026
I’m pleased to announce that I will be presenting a breakout session at Best Practices Ministry 2026, “A free conference to encourage ministry support workers as we reach out with the gospel of Christ,” hosted by Christ Church Lutheran in Phoenix, Arizona, February 12 – 14, 2026. As described on the website,
For over 10 years we have offered this FREE conference to remind professional and lay church workers that you are loved, you are not alone, and you matter. And when we say free, we truly mean that: free meals, free shuttling, free speakers, free snacks, free activities, free registration.
My session is titled “Searching the Scriptures, Discovering Jesus: Small group Scripture reflection tools for both seekers and disciples.” Click here to register for the conference and find more information about BPM.
Partners in the Gospel
The month of September has been full of activities and travel for me. A few days after my “book event” at St. John in Wheaton, I flew to Arkansas for a weekend full of activities at Salem Lutheran Church in Springdale with these two fabulous, faithful, and fun pastors, Adam Gless and Brandon Martin. Kent Burreson and I had prepared a report on our visit in February, when we interviewed both Hispanic and Anglo members of this bilingual congregation. Although we presented to different groups three times over the weekend, we failed to ask anyone to take a photo of us as we presented. We do, however, have photos from each of the 4 breweries we visited! Yes, we had lots of fun and laughter (and there were many minutes of each visit when the guys had their eyes fixed on the beer rating app on their phones), but we also had serious and deep theological conversations over beer and wine (for me).
Pastors Gless and Martin invited us back to make our report (Titled “Pray with Ceasing, Live with an Eschatological Vision”) during the weekend of the “Festival of Nations,” a great event hosted by Salem with food from various cultures, a Gospel-centered message that precedes the meal, a great DJ, and some Latin dances. Our report praised the congregation for their sincere efforts to built bridges between the Hispanic and Anglo members of the congregation and the pastors for their leadership in this process. We also made a few recommendations to encourage their growth and maturity as a bilingual congregation. In short, as Kent and I joked (sort of), we can now add “church consultants” to our CVs.
Here are some photos and a video that show some the joys of the weekend:
I’ve never witnessed a more joyful time of clean-up than after the Festival of Nations. It helped that the DJ was still working!
And yes, Kent and I both signed our books for Pastors Gless and Martin.
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.