From Bishop Miller: Dec 2024- Germany Trip

In November, Bishop Miller and Lowell Leitzel represented the Upper Susquehanna Synod at the ELCA Wittenberg Center 25th Anniversary Seminar in Wittenberg, Germany. Prior to the seminar, Bishop Miller visited the Kirchenkreis Ansbach-Würzburg, a companion church to the synod. Bishop Miller reflects on his visit.

It gave me great pleasure to visit with our companion church in Ansbach and to attend the Wittenberg Center 25th Anniversary seminar. My visit gave me the opportunity to gain an understanding of the Lutheran Church in Germany and begin to know our partners in that part of the world. While in Ansbach, I was able to see some of the global mission work of the Bavarian church, including our shared accompaniment with the Lutheran Church in Liberia.

Near the end of the Wittenberg seminar, I was asked to name my favorite part of the week’s events. Although I could not answer at the time, the question made me think hard about what I was doing there and what I would take from this visit.

Near the end of the week, as we gathered for daily worship in the Stadtkirche (town church), I looked around at those in attendance – nearly forty from the seminar along with a small number of local congregation members, including (and especially) sisters from the local deaconess community. It was not the pulpit from which Martin Luther preached, nor the font in which his children were baptized, and not even the altar painting by Lucas Cranach depicting Lutheran theology in art that caught my spirit: Rather, I found myself awed to know that a community gathers in this place nearly every day to pray for and on behalf of the world.

This experience reminded me that God’s mission for the church includes prayer for those who are not among us, even those who are not a part of the body of Christ. In the Stadtkirche, I saw a small community with a big task but one borne alongside the one who bore all the world on the cross. I was filled with hope for our small congregations who share that same commission of prayer. To all our congregations I say: “Let us pray…”