Being Lutheran
Word Alone. Faith Alone. Grace Alone. ~ Martin Luther
Our heritage is rooted in the teachings of Martin Luther and expressed through our affiliation with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). The Lutheran Church as a whole is a worldwide community known for its devotion to the Bible and the Holy Spirit as the true sources of Christian love, guidance, and belief. Together we seek to be passionate and humble followers of Jesus Christ out into the world. Our individual and common life is our testimony of faith. By God’s grace, we seek to proclaim by what we say and what we do, that the Gospel is not a formula of do's and dont's, but the revelation of God’s gift of freedom in Christ.
We acknowledge our identity as the children of the Protestant Reformation. We seek to embody the true spirit of that movement in our faith and life together. We confess that denominationalism was never the intent of Martin Luther and repent of the division and brokenness that has been borne of that legacy. We believe that God is not finished with any of us yet--we are continuing to be reformed as persons and as the Church in Jesus Christ.
In that conviction, we celebrate our common faith and creeds with other Christians even as we humbly acknowledge our differences. Through it all, we retain an eternal perspective, recognizing that we are a part of the Body of Christ, the Church Universal. Together we are the community of believers throughout the world who preach, teach and live in and by the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We respect and seek to learn from the different ways that other communities interpret and live out the Gospel. Diverse in tradition, ethnicity and geography, we are forever striving to become one with them, all in the name of God the Father, through Jesus Christ our Lord and in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Grace is united with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which resulted from a union of three North American Lutheran church bodies in 1982: The American Lutheran Church, the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches and the Lutheran Church in America. It currently has 4,709,956 baptized members in 10,448 congregations, 8 seminaries, 28 colleges and universities, 14 high schools, 296 elementary schools, 1,573 early childhood programs and 145 camp and retreat centers nationwide.