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Lace and grace

by Linda Macqueen

Judging by the photo, Sunday, 12 September 1943 was a sunny day in the country town of Appila, South Australia. Cool, though, more than likely. Spring mornings are still nippy in these parts.

Not that Lorraine would remember anything about the day. She was a babe in her mother’s arms. Maybe she was a bit grizzly, having been woken and bathed earlier than usual, and pulled and poked into the lacy white gown her mother had lovingly sewn. It was Lorraine’s baptism day.

As was the tradition in those days, this was the first time her mother would have been to church since her baby’s birth. Baptism day was an exciting day for young mothers—arriving at church dressed in their best (and probably new) dress, glowing with pride and joy as the other women hurried over to ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ at the lace-and-satin bundle.

What matters is that God made me his child that day, long, long before I even knew him

All the regular Trinity Lutheran folk were at Appila church that day. Lorraine’s sponsors—two aunts and an uncle— were there too, of course, dressed in their finest for this red-letter day. The young pastor, Bill Stolz, three days shy of his 28th birthday, was glancing through the rite of baptism one more time, making sure he wouldn’t stumble at a critical moment, or forget the baby’s name. Not that he was nervous; he’d already baptised 54 babies during his short pastoral ministry. ‘People made a lot more babies in those days’, he says cheekily.

‘I can’t remember my parents telling me anything about my baptism day’, says 71-year-old Lorraine Kempf (nee Pech, formerly Waack). ‘Not that the details matter. What matters is that God made me his child that day, long, long before I even knew him. I can thankfully say that God chose me, and has kept me in my baptismal faith. I love this Bible verse: “But even before I was born, God chose me and called me by his marvellous grace” (Galatians 1:15).

‘Years later, in my confirmation lessons, I learnt what God had done for me on that Sunday morning, 12 September 1943. All the things Jesus Christ won for me through his death and resurrection were given to me, no strings attached: forgiveness of my sins, deliverance from death, and eternal life.’

Over the years, every time Lorraine would run into Pastor Stolz, she would remind him (not that he needed reminding, she says) that he was the pastor who baptised her. She had always felt a special bond with him.

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A fruitful beginning

by Rosie Schefe

Seven years after his first visit, Michael (also known as Mick) Hauser will soon return to the coastal city of Lae, in Papua New Guinea. His return will complete one cycle of learning for Michael, just as a new one begins.

In 2008 Michael was a participant in a study tour to Papua New Guinea. In Lae the group stayed in a guesthouse where LCA Mission International program officer (now interim director) Glenice Hartwich was also staying.

Glenice remembers meeting Michael: ‘It was on the steps of the guesthouse. We talked about volunteering, and Mick asked me if there were opportunities for volunteering through the LCA. I was able to tell him that, yes, there were. The following year he was off on a three-week trip to Sabah, in Malaysia, as a Mission International volunteer.’

Life’s experience is perhaps the great teacher, particularly when it comes to being a multicultural Christian

When Michael returns to Papua New Guinea, he will do so as a lay theologian, appointed to serve at the Martin Luther Seminary (initially for two years) as a lecturer in systematic theology and historical studies. His appointment is part of the LCA’s 129-year ongoing partnership with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Papua New Guinea (ELCPNG).

But Michael’s story begins much earlier than 2008. He describes his background: ‘I was born into a very German Lutheran background, on both sides of the family. I was educated at every turn by Lutheran institutions: Faith Lutheran College at Redlands, St Peter’s College Indooroopilly and then Australian Lutheran College (ALC).’

But as a young adult he strayed away from matters of faith. He eventually returned to Lutheran schools, as a residential supervisor at Yirara College in Alice Springs, Northern Territory, and then at his old school, St Peters College;

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Lutheran hospitality— neither dampened nor scorched

By Rebecka Colldunberg

A WARM WELCOME

Dateline: January 2015
Place: Tanunda and Williamstown, South Australia
Disaster: Sampson Flat bushfire

When they were threatened by searing bushfires, the residents and staff of Abbeyfield aged-care facility in Wlliamstown were evacuated and were welcomed with open arms into Tanunda Lutheran Homes (TLH).

‘The senior management team were all on site and prepared the Gramp Chapel for the arrival of 29 residents and staff’, TLH chief executive officer Lee Martin said.

‘The residents and staff felt comforted to be staying in the chapel at their time of need; they felt calm and protected’, the general manager of Abbeyfield, Barbara Wieland, said. ‘I was so touched by a Tanunda resident who approached me when we were given the all-clear to return to Abbeyfield and asked, “Are you really sure it’s safe to return? You are welcome as long as you need to be here.” That attitude just summed up how we were treated.’

Shortly after their return to Abbeyfield, the residents and staff were keen to return the hospitality, so they organised an afternoon tea to say thank you. Barbara also presented TLH with a gift to show Abbeyfield’s appreciation—a candle (now displayed in the Gramp Chapel) and a pair of ‘friendship birds’ as a sign of the new relationship between Abbeyfield and Tanunda. Several visits are planned throughout the remainder of the year to give the two groups of residents an opportunity to catch up. The first one is planned to happen this month.

FOOD AND FRIENDSHIP BLOWS IN

Dateline: February 2015
Place: Rockhampton, Queensland
Disaster: Cyclone Marcia hits Rockhampton

Nanthakumaran, his wife Sujiatha and their children came to Australia as Tamil refugees from war-torn Sri Lanka. They rented a house in Rockhampton and formed a friendship with Lutheran pastor Rob Edwards and his wife Joyleen, whom they would often welcome into their home and fill up with delicious oriental cuisine.

The morning after Cyclone Marcia, Nanthakumaran’s oldest son called Pastor Rob with some bad news, ‘Hello, Pastor’, he said, ‘Our house is broken … our roof blew off.’ Pastor Rob went to the house straightaway. ‘I could see immediately that the house was uninhabitable. I knew that there would be shelters set up for this very circumstance, and I knew also that they would be very crowded and temporary at best. The thought came that they could stay with us.’

The Tamil family welcomed the invitation, on the proviso that Rob …

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I once was lost

By Mark Worthing

In 2013 the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) adopted and released a statement titled ‘Welcoming the Stranger’ and challenged Lutherans around the world to consider their mission and ministry in light of this profound biblical principle.

At the fourth Australian Conference on Lutheran Education (ACLE 4), held in Brisbane in September 2013, about 1000 Australian Lutheran educators were challenged by LWF president, Bishop Munib Younan, to think about what it means to welcome the stranger.

The LWF statement Bishop Younan introduced begins by asking us to make a personal pledge: ‘A core value of my faith is to welcome the stranger, the refugee, the internally displaced, the other. I shall treat him or her as I would like to be treated. I will challenge others … to do the same.’ But who really is ‘the stranger’?

In May 2006 I was in Iran, to speak at a conference on religion and medicine at Tehran University. I arrived early, so decided to head into the old city and check out its famed bookstores and food stalls. In my enthusiasm, I failed to note the name of the hotel at which I was staying or even the name of the suburb in which it was located. By about 10.00 pm I was getting cold and I realised I was hopelessly lost in this very foreign city of 14 million Farsi speakers. With my blue eyes, pale skin, brown hair (yes, it was once brown!) and Western dress, I stood out as being out of place. After many acts of hospitality by ‘strangers’ who spoke a little English, or German, or French, I finally arrived back at my hotel in the early hours of the morning. I will never forget the dozens of Iranians willing to help the stranger among them that chilly May night.

That incident gave me a new perspective on the concept of the stranger. I had always assumed the stranger was someone else, someone who needed my help. As the LWF statement reminds us, ‘we are all considered

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As long as I am needed

by Jonathan Krause

The bitumen road runs out at Lokichoggio in northern Kenya. The last 30 kilometres, from Lokichoggio to the Lutheran-run transit centre at Nadapal, on the border with South Sudan, is a jigsaw of furrowed red-dirt gutters.

Our three-vehicle convoy crawls. The UN team is up front. Our Lutheran World Federation (LWF) team is in the middle. And three heavily armed Kenyan police guards bring up the rear.

The convoy crawls … until suddenly our guards’ vehicle flies past, beckoning us to put pedal to metal too.

We hang on tight for five crazy kilometres, then suddenly slow again. I don’t see anything different in the bush, but later the guards explain the danger of ‘bandits’.

Once we reach Nadapal, there is new danger—the war spilling over from South Sudan. Alphonse Abolem, who leads the Lutheran team here, explains:

‘LWF is the first ones to come here. We are in the middle between Kenya and South Sudan. At the start time, there was fighting. There were gunshots. One of our shelters was shot at. Gunshots are not a rare thing. You always fear for the worst.’

This transit centre at Nadapal is supported by the Lutheran family through Australian Lutheran World Service (ALWS). It makes me humbly proud to see how our church, half a world away from the hurt here, is bringing love to life in such a practical wa

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Are we going to Hallelujah?

By Tasema James

Tesema is thirteen. He was four years old when he was adopted from Ethiopia. Now a Year 8 student at Tatachilla Lutheran College in South Australia, Tesema shares his feelings about being welcomed.

I was born in 2001. We lived in Addis Ababa. As a child we were very poor. We lived in a mud house, I think. We slept on the floor.

Our clothes were very dirty because we had to wear the same clothes every day.

I can’t remember what we had to eat. The water we had to drink was very unclean. We didn’t have a toilet, just went outside at the back. What I remember about Ethiopia is it was very dry.

My mum was usually a cheerful person. She had to walk a lot. My dad was very protective. He loved us. He slept right next to the door in case anyone tried to barge into the house.

One day my dad took me to work. He died in front of me. He worked with animals and he got charged by a bull. I knew he’d died, and I felt really sad. Our mum was really sad for a long time.

Mum couldn’t care for us, and we had to go to the orphanage.

My little brother Abebaw went with me. The orphanage had green sheds we stayed in, and one main building in a square shape. I was two-anda- half years old when I went there. Abebaw was just a baby.

‘It was really late at night when we went, so I can’t really remember saying goodbye to my mother. It was far from our house, and we went there by minivan. I have never seen my birth mother since. At the orphanage our only food was mashed potatoes twice a day.

I was told I was going to get adopted, and that Abebaw was going to come with me. That was really good, because I knew we were going to go somewhere better.

While we kids over the age of one-and-a-half only had mashed potatoes, the kids under that age had really good food. I got jealous of that. One day the lady who fed the little ones was late to turn up, and we went over and ate the food of the young ones. It was yummy. There was a good time once. The lady turned up late again.

There was a big green door she had to open up to get into the orphanage. It was good she turned up late because we got into the room for the little ones, where they had toys. It was the first time we ever got to play with toys.

Then we heard her coming, and we had the quickest clean-up of our life. At the orphanage Abebaw was picked on a bit. One time he wanted to go outside, and there were these guys making a fire, and they grabbed him and put his hand over the fire. I quickly went over and got him and took him away. But he had a big black mark on his arm. We were at the orphanage for a year-and-a-half.

I was told I was going to get adopted, and that Abebaw was going to come with me. That was really good, because I knew we were going to go somewhere better.

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THE HEART OF FAITH

by Linda Macqueen

A young woman making her own way in the world isn’t always going to listen to her mother’s words of wisdom. But Heidi Gellert does try.

She’s thankful for the life her mum gave her 26 years ago—and then again, just last year.

‘I should listen to Mum’, she says. ‘After all, without her, I’d still be on dialysis and I wouldn’t have the life I’ve got now.’

Last year, her mother Annie gave Heidi one of her own kidneys. But that’s not the first organ transplant she’s received.

Heidi was born into a Lutheran farming family at Willaura in western Victoria. When she was just 13 months old, she became Australia’s youngest heart-transplant recipient. Readers of The Lutheran might remember an article about her, in the March 1990 edition. When Annie wrote that story, Heidi was recovering beautifully from the operation, much better than anyone had expected.

Then one day, five months after the heart transplant, Heidi became ill and was rushed to the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, three hours away. There she suffered a massive stroke as Annie held her in her arms.

‘God was looking after Heidi’, Annie says. ‘If the stroke had happened at home, Heidi would have died.’

Even so, the little girl would spend the next eight weeks in the Intensive Care Unit, desperately ill. ‘They didn’t think she would survive’, Annie says. ‘If she did, she would be severely physically or mentally disabled, they told us. The doctors spoke to us about turning off her respirator.

‘One day, in the midst of despair, I heard Jesus say, “Trust me”.’

During those harrowing weeks, each time Heidi faced a new crisis Annie would ring her church community and ask for prayer (and she still does). She thanks God that again and again he heard their pleas and pulled Heidi back from the brink of death.

‘For all her life, Heidi’s been aware that God has saved her, several times over’, Annie says. ‘And her health struggles are not over yet, and probably never will be this side of heaven. She’s grown up facing the constant reality that her life is fragile. She learnt from a very early age that she has to trust in God for every precious moment, every day.’

But Heidi is quick to point out that hers is no fairytale faith story. In her early teens, she reached a frightening low, even thinking about suicide.

‘I’ve learnt to depend on God, that’s true’, she says, ‘but I’ve done a lot of kicking and screaming too. I haven’t always been happy with what he’s doing, and not doing. I wouldn’t want people to think I’ve got this super-charged faith. I haven’t. It’s just that my circumstances have forced me to trust in God … because I have nowhere else to go.’

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Being church together

by Rosie Schefe

Sin …. it’s a dirty word, but someone has to use it.

‘In the church we get to work with sin all the time’, Pastor Paul Kerber says. ‘That’s what a pastor’s role is: to discern and appropriately apply God’s word so that people can name sin for what it is. But that is not the end of the story. As pastors, we use the word of law to identify sin so that we can bring the gospel of God’s forgiveness to all who so desperately need it. A church of the gospel proclaims the gospel—and the gospel changes lives!’

Whether we admit it or not, Paul says, over time many of us have adopted a worldly approach to sin—within marriage and family relationships, between neighbours and even within congregations. This approach is primarily law-based; identifying sin in legal terms, and dealing with it using only punishment or sanctions.

But this is not biblically based; what is missing is the work of the cross. A clear pronouncement of forgiveness of sins in Christ’s name is the gospel flowing freely, Paul says. And when the gospel flows, lives are changed.

On 26 April, Paul was installed into the position of Assistant to the Bishop— Reconciliation Ministry, commissioned to build on the groundbreaking work of Pastor Bruce Zagel and to ‘indigenise’ it into the culture of the Lutheran churches in Australia and New Zealand. His challenge is to transform reconciliation ministry from a primarily teaching and training focus into something much deeper, where the gospel can be seen to be permeating and active right through the church— ‘a part of its DNA’, in the words of LCA Bishop John Henderson.

‘This is about equipping us all to live as God’s children, set free by the gospel to live out our faith in the world’, Paul says.

‘It is also about learning how to speak forgiveness so that our language does what it needs to do—to build relationships in Christ.

‘As God’s children we are all called to be there for others who are caught in sin, to work with them in order to speak the gospel, so that the Holy Spirit brings healing and hope. That’s what biblical reconciliation is: it is the gospel. It is the good news that, through Christ’s death, we were reconciled to God. It is through our risen Lord Jesus that we have

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New Instrumental Version

by Sheree Schmaal

They say music is a universal language. A young Lutheran composer is using it to help audiences discover God the creator.

Humans speak more than 6500 different languages. Yet God’s word—as recorded in the Bible— has been fully translated into only 531 of these. Another 2352 have at least one book of the Bible translated—but that’s still fewer than 40 per cent of languages.

They say music is a universal language. So wouldn’t it make sense to have a musical translation of the Bible?

It could be called the New Instrumental Version—an album of 66 tracks that translate God’s word into melodies and harmonies, and reveal the glory of his creation, power and saving grace not through words or lyrics but through instruments, notes, rhythms and keys …

But is it really possible for the Holy Spirit to speak through music?

Composer Kym Dillon believes it is. The 25-year-old member and musician at St Paul’s Lutheran Church Grovedale, Victoria, sees music as ‘a sort of language that can communicate aspects of God that are very difficult to convey through mere words alone’.

His compositions—including two largescale orchestral pieces commissioned by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO)—are not overtly Christian or ‘sacred’. Yet he says it’s impossible to separate his creations from his faith in God as his creator.

‘I am fascinated with the human creative process, and our abilities to be creative artists, considering we ourselves are the result of God’s artistic creation, and are also made in his image’, Kym says.

‘I often reflect on my own creative process as a composer through this lens of our God as, among other things, an artist.’

These reflections are explored in Kym’s 2012 and 2014 works for the MSO, LOGOS and Liber Creatorum.

The Victorian College of the Arts graduate says he has found Liber Creatorum (Latin for ‘book of creation’ or ‘book of the creatures’) a great place to start when sharing the gospel with non-believers.

The eight-minute orchestral piece centres around Kym’s interest in natural theology. He believes that if you look at the universe in all its complexity and beauty, and trace these things back in time to their origins and simplest parts, you will find clues about its creation by a divine force, and what the nature of that divine force may be.

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Blank canvas

by Rosie Schefe

Artist Paul Schubert stands in his inner-city backyard, contemplating a large expanse of cardboard. In just a few short weeks its whiteness will give way to a celebration of Pentecost, and the work will decorate the sanctuary at Zion Lutheran Church, Glynde (an Adelaide suburb).

But for the moment the piece remains blank.

That doesn’t mean Paul is lacking in inspiration. Far from it, in fact. This has been a work in progress since February, when he was first invited to put together a display for the congregation’s harvest thanksgiving celebration.

‘I was asked to create something that would be a pleasant surprise, beautiful and interesting’, Paul says with a smile. ‘I had two weeks notice.’

That harvest thanksgiving painting is on the reverse of the cardboard that Paul contemplates now. Laid flat on the cement, it stretches about six and a half metres across. At its longest point it is about four and a half metres high. The work is designed to fold, giving it a three-dimensional aspect, with cut-outs and add-ons that allow light through and encourage viewers to get closer.

Based jointly on the words of Psalm 103 and of Hymn 642, this beach scene is a reminder that all good things come directly from God. It tells of the attributes of God and depicts his glory shining onto his people and into their lives. It also depicts Christ’s work of bringing forgiveness and healing to our troubled world.

Paul says that he chose a beach theme (not normally associated with harvest thanksgiving) for several reasons. He grew up around the beaches and boats of Port Lincoln, on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula, then pursued a career in industrial design for the boatbuilding industry. He hasn’t lost those earlier loves—the organic curves of seashells, light dancing over water, the rhythmic sound of waves on the beach.

‘I wanted to get people to relax and enjoy a scene. Then they become more receptive to the ideas depicted in the work’, Paul says. ‘When people are in a calm state or meditating, they are more open to ideas and inspiration. I’m particularly interested in communicating Christian ideas to non-Christians through my work.’

Paul’s art practice took on a particularly Christian flavour about 16 years ago, sustaining him through a personal crisis. This period of his life brought him a new appreciation for God’s strength…

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