Matthew Harrison s new edition of this seminal writing by the first president of the LCMS restores Walther s precise language on the doctrines of church and ministry. As the subtitle of the original German edition states, The Church and The Office of The Ministry is a collection of testimonies . . . from the Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church and from the private writings of orthodox teachers of the same.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1877.

This collection of essays, a companion volume to the book, Twentieth-Century Lutheran Theologians (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), examines important nineteenth-century figures from the perspective of contemporary European and North-American scholars. Each essay provides an overview of the life and central ideas of a key Lutheran/Protestant theologian who has had a significant impact on theological reflection down to the present. The focus here is on those thinkers who were active between 1799 (the year when Schleiermacher's Speeches appeared) and the First World War. These are individuals who deserve repeated examination, whose insights are still worth pondering today, and whose theological positions help us to understand better "where contemporary theology has come from" (Karl Barth). All of the essays were initiated by the journal Lutheran Quarterly in order to assess our theological heritage as we move further into a new millennium. The goal of the authors, each a leading theologian, has been to describe a given thinker's life and vocation and how that person's work continues to impact theology today.

Many people today, especially among emerging generations, don’t resonate with the church and organized Christianity. Some are leaving the church and others were never part of the church in the first place. Sometimes it’s because of misperceptions about the church. Yet often they are still spiritually open and fascinated with Jesus. This is a ministry resource book exploring six of the most common objects and misunderstandings emerging generations have about the church and Christianity. The objections come from conversations and interviews the church has had with unchurched twenty and thirty-somethings at coffee houses. Each chapter raises the objection using a conversational approach, provides the biblical answers to that objection, gives examples of how churches are addressing this objection, and concludes with follow-through projection suggestions, discussion questions, and resource listings.