God makes us pure saints by planting us back in the earth we imagined we needed to escape.
Salvation is not merely to be put in “safety” but to be put into Christ.
Bringing your family to church to receive “the one thing needful” (Luke 10:42) in Word and Sacrament honors and pleases God.

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This is an excerpt from the introduction of “Common Places in Christian Theology: A Curated Collection of Essays from Lutheran Quarterly,” edited by Mark Mattes (1517 Publishing, 2023).
We don't make Church "happen." Only Christ can do so. It's his happening.
Even if the numbers are bad, the news about Jesus crucified for sinners and raised to new life hasn’t become any less good.
There is a revival, no less real and even more definitive, taking place in every church, every weekend, where God’s people gather around his gifts.
Reading includes, on some level, striving. Hearing, on the other hand, remains passive.
Zephaniah has given us something more visceral to help us understand the love of God: the sound of salvation.
God has the power to take that which is small, that which is overlooked, that which is despised, and use it to create something wonderful.
Forty days after giving birth, Mary, along with her husband Joseph, presented their firstborn Son at the temple and "bought" him back with a sacrifice of two small birds. This is known as the "Presentation of Our Lord."
Even as he was dying, the heart of God poured itself out for the sake of sinners.
I hope your people expect and even demand this of you. But how we proclaim the central message, that can (and probably should) vary.
Authentic proclamation, then, is the love of Christ for our souls, which we have seen and experienced through the under-shepherd’s pastoral care put into the words of Christ Himself.
I think the problem with the idea of eternity is that we do not have any direct experience of it, but we encounter enough of its possibility to be unsettling.