Director’s Letter

On the Move Together

By Kevin D. Robson | Winter 2023

Rev. Kevin D. Robson

This issue of Lutherans Engage the World — like so many that have preceded it — portrays a lively church and her living members intentionally on the move together. We are called to live and work not in chaotic commotion, but with purposeful “co-motion.” St. Paul’s encouragement comes to mind:

I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. (Eph. 4:1–3)

The apostle pleads with baptized saints to cultivate humility — and from that, gentleness, patience and forbearance in love. In such a setting, the church’s mission is poised to flourish.

If the active practice of humility were meant to disrupt the divisions between the Jewish and Gentile members of the congregation at ancient Ephesus, how much more so does it do that in our day, in the midst of a polarized, intersectionalized, take-no-prisoners and win-at-all-costs culture? We are really not so far from the saints who journeyed through this earthly life before us. With them, we rejoice in a gifted unity, the oneness that is already ours by virtue of one Baptism into the one body of the one Lord Jesus Christ. He prays for those the Father has given Him, and He sacrifices Himself unto death upon a cross, that this unity would not be just feeling or façade or guesswork, but reality. And the Father, through the Spirit, answers for the sake of Christ’s flawless righteousness with a big, beautiful, bold oneness that is now ours.

The foundational fact that Christians are one in Him begins and ends with Jesus. Together and on the move, the church speaks His pure Word of grace and the hope of life everlasting in the kingdom of God. It’s how the kingdom grows.

In His hands,
Rev. Kevin D. Robson
Chief Mission Officer, The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod