Nov2015
An answer to 43,903 days of prayer
A current of energy ran through the air, for it was a much-anticipated day. It was 120 years, two months and thirteen days in the making, or (if you like) 43,903 days. Much prayer had gone into the day, you can be sure of that. Seventeen years of joint prayer, according to Everard Leske’s history… Read more
Aug2015
The church that followed its people
What do you do when you have a large family and no local Lutheran church? Build a church on your own farm, of course! And when those children move off the farm to town? Take the church building with you—brick by brick. That’s what happened in the remarkable story of the Trinity Lutheran Church in… Read more
Jul2015
A bridge and a beacon
This is the story of a church for the nation. St Peter’s Canberra: built from contributions of church groups, congregations and people from all over the country and still filled with a global membership, it is now a story that belongs to the church—across the nation and across the seas. In 1960, Max Lohe, president… Read more
Jun2015
A hearty welcome and new beginning
Post-war, one in six Lutherans was a refugee. By the mid-1960s, one in five Australians was a post-war migrant It was a topsy-turvy state of affairs. The world had been turned upside down, inside out and back-to-front and was now trying to find a new way to balance. Armistice had been declared and World War… Read more
May2015
The story of a little seed
This is the story of a little seed. The little seed that could … sprout! The little seed that did … sprout! The place of germination for our seed was, rather extraordinarily, a photography shop in Adelaide. Customer Louis Archibald Borgelt’s eyes were drawn to a pamphlet advertising a photographic cruise to Port Moresby. A… Read more
Apr2015
The curious case of the invisible church
The scene of the invisible church is the since-disappeared suburb of Kirkcaldy in Adelaide. The year is 1959. The leading figure is Rev Alfred Zinnbauer. Other participants include the Metropolitan Mission and Migrant Committee (MMMC), which had called Pastor Zinnbauer to be the Adelaide city missioner. Despite repeated attempts … to get Pastor Zinnbauer… Read more
Mar2015
The beauty within
My mother always encouraged me not to judge a book by its cover. Difficult in my line of work! Imagine soft leather, gilt edges, embossing and filigree. Tempted and swayed, too often I’ve disregarded Mum’s advice and fallen for the cover and not what is inside. But what if I open the book and am… Read more
Feb2015
A pastor, a bike and a portable reed organ
This is the story of Pastor Albert Ewald Reuther, born at Bethesda mission, South Australia, in 1892. After completing his seminary training at Neuendettelsau in Germany, he was called to serve the Western Australian home mission field in 1913, where he joined his stepbrother, who had been working there since 1907. We’ll begin, however, at… Read more
Dec2014
The travelling trowel
I call it the travelling trowel. Its working life begins in Perth in 1903. It is 29 April and the day of the foundation-stone laying for the new St Johannes school and church. Rev EH Fischer had been sent to the Western Australian mission field two years earlier as a church planter, staying until 1910…. Read more
Nov2014
War and peace
Professor Hermann Sasse came to Australia in 1949 with the post-war migrant wave. Notwithstanding his call to lecture in Church History at Immanuel Seminary, he was still to some extent a refugee—with push factors perhaps stronger than the pull factor. Born in July 1895, Hermann Sasse began theological studies at the University of Berlin in… Read more
