Word: lutherane
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Louis, church planting is that most blessed of arrangements: a win-win proposition. New churches like the French-Speaking Baptist Church of St. Louis, now ensconced inside the ornate walls of the century-old Lutheran Church of Our Redeemer, get to worship in some of the most beautiful religious structures in the city instead of the storefronts in which poor congregations often start out. At the same time, church planting has advantages for struggling host congregations like Our Redeemer, whose membership has fallen from 1,200 to 88 as its German-American neighborhood has changed to a black, Haitian...
Church planting puts Sunday in St. Louis on a busy schedule. At St. Peter's Lutheran, a 35-member white congregation is overshadowed by a planted 150-member Vietnamese Lutheran congregation led by a Vietnamese pastor. Mount Olive Lutheran Church has a white Lutheran service at 10:30 a.m., an African-American Baptist congregation at 12:15 p.m. and an Eritrean Coptic Orthodox congregation at 2 p.m. And Kingshighway Baptist, besides its white and Latino congregations, is host to a special church for street people and unaffiliated youth that meets Thursday nights...
...chapel, which nobody really seems to want. Language can also be a barrier. "My congregation can't understand him even when he speaks English," jokes the Rev. William Doubek of his Vietnamese counterpart. Moreover, different denominations cannot worship together. "If we were to hold a joint service, the Lutheran Synod would be pretty hard on us," Bodimer notes. And, says Our Redeemer treasurer Charles Wuensch, "there is a feeling among some in the congregation that we don't have anything in common with these people, that we wouldn't have anything to say to them...
...objected that Sikes' street-oriented mission was bringing blacks into the church. And at Mount Olive, a white parishioner would not let a group from the black congregation in to practice a Kwanza ceremony. But Mount Olive has since started a race-relations workshop involving both the white Lutheran and black Baptist congregations--a sign, most St. Louisans involved in church planting contend, that this kind of roof sharing can be a force for racial cooperation. "The first black baptized here I baptized six or seven years ago, and some of the people literally went into shock," says Paul Powell...
...biggest obstacle is cultural differences built into worship styles. Speaking of black Baptists who share his church, Lutheran Doubek says, "When they sing Amazing Grace, the song is the same but it sounds different." Our Redeemer's Haitians use Haitian music, and the Kingshighway Latino congregation integrates salsa, soul and tango sounds. Sermon styles differ: African Americans expect call and response from the pews and services that last twice as long as a typical white service. Roosevelt Clossum, minister of the African-American congregation at Mount Olive, says that when he went to give a guest sermon before the whites...