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English conversation partners needed

LCA International Mission is seeking volunteer English-speaking conversation partners for seminary students from STT Abdi Sabda in Indonesia.

The online program, which will run from 12 July to 8 August this year, aims to give students the chance to practise their English skills with a native speaker and to grow in confidence. Volunteers are still welcome to join the program even if they are not available for all dates.

Each session will begin at 8am Indonesian time (9am AWST, 10.30am ACST, 11am AEST, 1pm NZST) and will be 90 minutes long.

CAN YOU HELP?

Who is needed: Native English speakers

What for: Being an online conversation partner with Indonesian seminary students

How: Via Zoom online conferencing platform

When: Weekdays from 12 July to 8 August 2023

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Listening to the Spirit’s prompting

Have you ever had a feeling you should call or visit someone? Then, when you respond to that feeling and it works out that it was precisely the time that person needed you. I have come to learn that this is the Holy Spirit prompting me to listen and respond to that feeling.

Since the time of lockdowns and isolation for so many, I have tried to respond to that prompting and allow the Holy Spirit to guide and lead me to help those in need.

What would happen if each of us made this a priority to listen to the ‘still, small voice’? I imagine that a lot of God’s work would get done through his faithful people.

Christian young people I have spoken to seem very tuned in to the Holy Spirit and his leading. As we get older, I feel that maybe our ears aren’t quite as tuned in to listening to the Spirit’s guiding, rather feeling that they have already done their work and that it’s now someone else’s job. We are all God’s workers and disciples – whatever age or stage of life – and we can all grow in our listening for that prompting. I encourage you to continue to lead a life of learning, listening and growing to know what it is we are to do to spread God’s kingdom here on earth.

CHANCE TO OFFER MEANING

Lutheran Tract Mission (LTM) has many resources for just this ministry – for you to share and perhaps give to someone seeking and searching for meaning in this confusing life.

Pick up one for yourself and one for a friend or neighbour. As it says in Matthew 28:19, ‘Go, then, to all peoples everywhere and make them my disciples’ (GNT). Listen to the Spirit’s prompting – maybe he is calling you to be an apostle or pastor to help teach others.

Look at the LTM website to find what you need for your ministry: www.ltm.org.au

SHARE YOUR STORIES AND INSPIRE OTHERS

Please share stories with me of how tracts from Lutheran Tract Mission have spoken and reached you and others in your community.

Give others new ideas as to how to use tracts in sharing God’s love! Keep your ears open – there may be a need only you can fill!

Anne Hansen, Lutheran Tract Mission Development Officer

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Podcasts to share LCANZ stories

The LCANZ will this month launch regular audio podcasts as a new way of sharing stories with the wider church community.

To be published fortnightly and accessible for listening through the LCA website (www.lca.org.au/podcasts), the podcasts will feature interviews with a wide range of people on a wide range of topics of interest within the church.

Check LCA eNews for further details, including information on how to subscribe to the podcasts. Sign up to LCA eNews for the latest news and updates from across the church each fortnight – at www.lca.org.au/lcaenews-signmeup

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Archives talks now shared live online

The stories of the LCA are now shared more widely than ever before, with monthly talks being streamed on the Friends of Lutheran Archives (FoLA) YouTube channel.

The mission of Lutheran Archives is to preserve the stories of the church and make them accessible for generations to come. FoLA supports this work by promoting research and enabling church members and the wider community to ‘enjoy the harvest’, curating a program of public talks presented by researchers on a diverse range of historical topics relevant to the Lutheran story in Australia. These monthly public meetings are held in person at Immanuel Lutheran Church, North Adelaide and livestreamed straight to YouTube.

You can tune into FoLA livestreams every month at the same place: https://www.youtube.com/@friendsoflutheranarchives9644/live

UPCOMING MEETINGS

Ein Buschmann kann alles: HA Heinrich at Hermannsburg after Horseshoe Bend. Live at 7.30pm, Thursday 13 April 2023

Dr David Moore, linguist and translator of Central Australian languages, tells the story of Hermannsburg Mission in the era of teacher Hermann Adolph Heinrich, who assumed responsibility for running the Mission after Missionary Carl Strehlow’s death at Horseshoe Bend in October 1922. As teacher Heinrich once told a German visitor, ‘a bushman can do anything’.

In the Barossa and beyond: George French Angas, artist and naturalist. Live at 7.30pm, Thursday 25 May 2023

Dr Philip Jones, senior researcher at the SA Museum, presents an illustrated talk on the artist and naturalist George French Angas and his 1847 work South Australia Illustrated and explores how Angas’s legacy informs our understanding of colonial South Australia.

PREVIOUS MEETINGS

You can also catch up later! Previously streamed talks are available to watch on the FoLA YouTube channel.

Dear Sisters in the Faith: Letters of Thanks from Post-War Germany. Recorded 7.30pm, Thursday 23 February 2023

Reference Archivist Bethany Pietsch shares the story of a Lutheran family and women’s guild in country Victoria who sent relief parcels to desperate households in post-war Germany told in the words of the thank-you letters sent back by recipients between 1947 and 1949.

Bethel SA – a settlement of Germans, Wends, Moravians, Lutherans and others. Recorded 7.30pm, Thursday 23 March 2023

Lyall Kupke, former director of Lutheran Archives, presents a talk on the eclectic Barossa community of Bethel, where from 1855 German and Wendish settlers experienced a Moravian Brethren church and settlement, two Lutheran churches and a breakaway group

HOW TO FIND US

Subscribe to the FoLA YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@friendsoflutheranarchives9644

Join livestreamed meetings: www.youtube.com/@friendsoflutheranarchives9644/live

See all past & future streams: www.youtube.com/@friendsoflutheranarchives9644/streams

Contact FoLA: Email fola@lca.org.au or become a member to receive regular news.

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Family traditions bring a wellbeing boost

by Jodi Brook

Family rituals and traditions are important to the health and wellbeing of today’s busy families. They promote a sense of identity and a feeling of belonging. A ritual differs from ordinary routines by having emotional significance. Traditions are often cultural, ethnic, or faith-based and can be handed down from generation to generation, connecting us to the past.

Rituals are important because they allow us time to communicate, problem-solve, and balance our time together. They provide opportunities to affirm family values, faith and life experiences, and time to celebrate together.

Rituals and traditions can occur annually, monthly, weekly, daily, seasonally or randomly.

WHY ARE RITUALS IMPORTANT FOR HAPPY FAMILIES?

Traditions and rituals are the building blocks of strong, caring, happy families.

Traditions make us spend time together without the normal daily distractions because they are planned. Rituals and traditions make sure we do the things we really value, even when we are rushed and busy.

Traditions help us build a family identity by establishing how we communicate, how we make decisions and solve problems, as well as how we celebrate birthdays, Christmas, Easter, milestones and other family events.

Traditions make it possible to create a family history as they are passed on through the generations.

Traditions give us many reasons to celebrate life together. They make it easy because you know what to do and how to do it.

Traditions bring together generations, which can add such richness to our family life.

Traditions help us organise our busy lives. Planning rituals and traditions on specific days of the week or year means those projects will be achieved, such as organising family photos on New Year’s Day or sending a card on someone’s birthday.

LENT AND EASTER CAN BE GREAT TIMES TO START

We invite you to try these rituals and traditions during Lent and Easter.

  • Select a candle to serve as your ‘Christ Candle’, and gather an additional candle for each person in your household. Begin your home devotional times each week by saying ‘Jesus, you are the light of the world’. As you do, light the Christ Candle. Then have household members take turns lighting their candles from the Christ Candle. As each one does, say together: ‘You are a child of the light. Make your light shine before others.’
  • Daily silence to reflect on God’s presence in your life.
  • Times of fasting by eating simpler meals with water or skipping meals.
  • Limit the use of television, computer games and social media to focus more attention on God’s grace in your life.
  • End each day with a blessing: ‘May the Lord Jesus bring you peace when you are afraid; may the Lord your God protect you in time of trouble and give you a song of joy in your heart’ (Psalm 32:7).
  • Have meals together with others and offer a mealtime prayer.

Jodi Brook is director of Grow Ministries. For more articles about growing faith in families and across generations, visit the Grow Ministries blog at www.growministries.org.au/online-journal

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Finding freedom from busyness

by Anne Hansen

I keep a calendar or diary for my work and one for my family and personal activities. These calendars seem to fill up so quickly. I still like to write commitments down, so that I can look ahead and behind at what has been done and what is still to come. I often feel that I am a slave to my calendar and all the things that fill it. I have so many church activities, youth, Mainly Music, my work with Lutheran Tract Mission and family events, so how do I find time for me and God?

TIME IS A GIFT FROM GOD

Time is a precious resource. God has given us just enough time in a day to do what we are able and the rest we leave for another day. It is easy to be a slave to our schedule but remember that even Jesus spent time by himself to recharge and rejuvenate. May God give you this gift to be able to sit and reflect and pray. Our bodies were made for work and rest – I pray that you find the time for rest and reflection on God’s word, for then work becomes easier.

Lutheran Tract Mission has resources for your reading and to give to anyone who is in need of seeing their routines in the way God has given them to us. As we read in Ecclesiastes 3:1, ‘There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven’ [NIV].

SHARE INSPIRING STORIES

We want to provide for our church and people in different ways to reach others with God’s love. Visit our Lutheran Tract Mission website at www.ltm.org.au to find what you need for your ministry.

Please share stories with me of how tracts have spoken and reached you and others in your community! Give others new ideas as to how to use tracts in sharing God’s love!

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Hope through crises

In the wake of multiple climate catastrophes affecting people in New Zealand’s North Island earlier this year, the No.1 radio station in Auckland reached out to the LCANZ’s Messages of Hope ministry.

Steph, from NewstalkZB radio, contacted Messages of Hope with an update about the crises ‘so you can be on top with your audio to relate’. As a result of her request, more uplifting messages about where God is in times of crisis have been shared with people who lived through Cyclone Gabrielle and other recent disasters.

Listen, watch and read the messages at www.messagesofhope.org.nz and under the www.messagesofhope.org.nz/grief-suicide-and-suffering topic.

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Chance to take the pick of the pics

Lutheran Media’s annual Calendar Photo Competition is on now. Enter your best original and inspiring landscape, architectural, animal or nature photo for the chance to have it included in the 2024 calendar and for the chance to win cash prizes.

Entries close on 26 May 2023. Find out more at www.lutheranmedia.org.au/image

And 2023 calendars are still available. Order on 1800 353 350 or online at
www.lutheranmedia.org.au

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Equip yourself to step out in faith

Take a journey with Jesus out into the multicultural neighbourhood around you by taking part in next month’s LCANZ Cross-Cultural Ministry Conference in Melbourne.

Registrations are now open for the two-day conference, which is a call to leave your ‘home base’ and engage with those who need to hear about ‘the reason for the hope we have’.

Cross-Cultural Ministry Facilitator Craig Heidenreich says the conference will also address the practical challenge of how to walk in a way that blesses our unsaved neighbours. ‘How do we learn to listen, and talk to them in a new way?’, he asks. ‘Let’s be people who engage these neighbours (who have come from ‘the nations’) and welcome them into our fellowship so that our gatherings start to reflect the diversity around us.’

Go to www.lca.org.au/cross-cultural-conference for more details and to book your place. Registrations close on 26 April 2023.

CULTURE PUT INTO CONTEXT

Speakers at the conference will include multicultural consultant Dr Meewon Yang and multicultural second-generation coordinator Charlene Delos Santos, who will address the topic, ‘The impact of multicultural church models across generations’. LCA and Interserve missionary Nathan Bradtke will share about building rapport with people of Muslim background, while the conference dinner speaker will be Major Karen Elkington, manager of the Salvation Army’s asylum seeker support program.

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Register now to host an exhibition

Register now for the 2023 LCANZ Simultaneous Art Exhibition and begin planning with your congregation, school or aged-care home to host an exhibition in your local community under the event theme ‘Come to the Banquet’. Registrations close on 30 May with events able to be staged in August this year.

Organiser Libby Krahling says this year’s theme offers ‘a rich opportunity to explore the many passages in the Bible connected to food and feasting and celebrate the great banquet of Holy Communion and the wedding feast awaiting us in eternity’. ‘Groups might also like to brainstorm ways of incorporating hospitality into their exhibitions’, she says.

ARTISTS OF ALL STYLES AND STAGES WELCOME

Artists using any media and with any level of experience are encouraged to explore the theme, using resources developed by LCA Visual Arts. These include a devotion, suggested Bible passages for study and a range of activity ideas suitable for workshops or individual use.

Register today and access resource packs, poster templates and information on hosting an art exhibition on the Visual Arts website at http://visualarts.lca.org.au/simultaneous-exhibition-2022/ or email libby.krahling@lca.org.au 

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