Faith Stories

There has been some sawdust flying around the basement of Redeemer Lutheran Church, Indianola, on Wednesday afternoons this fall, and we have not been under construction or renovation.  Now, we have sewing machines whirring and quilt blocks hanging on bulletin boards in our education wing, and it is not from our regular Monday morning quilting [...]

Waiting during a long layover at Washington Dulles, we checked e-mail using the airport’s free wi-fi service. It was bad news from Senegal, and we hadn’t even gotten there yet. The nine-year-old daughter of Honoré Badiane, EELS employee in Yeumbeul, where we lived for a year, had died from a severe case of malaria. We [...]

On Veterans’ Day, St. Stephen Lutheran Church in Urbandale, IA honored 37 veteran members with a special Quilts of Valor (QOV) presentation. The QOVs were handmade by 21 congregation members. The youngest volunteer quilter is 8 years old. Also, among the volunteers was an award-winning quilter. The presentation was a surprise (or covert operation) for [...]

Earlier this fall, the people of Palestine Lutheran Church in Huxley, Iowa were looking for a project to raise money for the high school youth group (called R.O.C.K. for Reaching Out for Christ’s Kingdom) to use for mission trips and service projects.  Little did they know, the project they ultimately undertook would raise more than [...]

Janelle Bidne, Coordinator of Communications Contributors: Russ Finkler, member, Grace Lutheran Church, Davenport, IA Rebecca Wiese, diaconal minister, Grace Lutheran Church Davenport, IA In the beginning, there was an idea and the idea was “to grow”.  Four members of Grace Lutheran Church in Davenport, Iowa had an idea to cultivate Grace’s ministry through a vegetable [...]

St. Stephen’s Lutheran Church, Cedar Rapids “I’m getting inquiries about what church I belong to that would actually re-roof a member’s house,” noted St. Stephen’s, Cedar Rapids, member, Dave Marner. St. Stephen’s members did indeed re-roof his house. How that came about is the interesting story. Earlier this summer St. Stephen’s LaMar Grafft was driving around the [...]

Elaine Haugen, Minister of Care Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, Ankeny  I arrived at John Stoddard Cancer Center in Des Moines with a bag of pillows from our Pink Ribbon Ministry to drop off at the infusion center. They followed me onto the elevator, this most unlikely couple. She was in a wheel chair and appeared [...]

Janelle Bidne Coordinator of Communications   The hot days of summer upon us now may not seem like a blessing, but these summer days are certainly blessed with opportunities for youth to attend Bible Camps that are supported by congregations throughout the synod. Bible camps such as Camp Shalom, EWALU, Ingham-Okoboji, Lutheran Lakeside, and Riverside [...]

By Ellen Hanusa Wonderlin One March Saturday, Zoe Lawson, 9, and her sister Ivy, 7, tagged along with their mother MeLissa to a quilting bee in the basement of Grace Lutheran Church, Des Moines. It was a first in a series of activities geared toward passing on skills and expanding participation among congregants in the [...]

  Wearing “baptismal blue” T-shirts, a crew of 100 Wayne Zion Lutheran Church members set out to perform cleanups and other tasks at various Jones County sites on Sunday, Sept. 30. “I could not have been more pleased,” said Ellery Dykeman, pastor at Wayne Zion Lutheran. “We really wanted to take seriously how God calls [...]

Bethany Lutheran Church of West Branch, IA has a long history of reaching out and caring for people in the community.  For over ten years the congregation has provided food and supplies to the West Branch Food Pantry.  Volunteers deliver the donated items and pass on the Pantry’s specific food and supply requests to the [...]

Mas o menos! More or less. Our hosts in Nicaragua taught us that no Spanish vocabulary is complete without these necessary words. Everything is mas o menos, more or less. And, one more very essential word for communicating in Nicaragua is chunche, which means thingamabob or doohickey. With these simple phrases one can communicate all [...]

    Gathering each morning with fellow students for coffee and conversation over scripture is not the average routine for a college spring break.  However our group from Iowa State Lutheran Campus Ministry did just that before heading out on our mission trip to Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.  We were grounded in [...]

One evening each month at St. Stephen Lutheran Church in Urbandale, you’ll find an assembly line of members filling sacks of food that will be placed each Friday in backpacks of children that attend nearby Karen Acres Elementary School.  The recipients of these sacks are children that are chronically hungry; they don’t always know where [...]

In the midst of work, practices for a particular sport or fine art, and running errands; it’s hard to find time to make a wholesome evening meal for the family.   St. Peter Lutheran Church in Grimes, Iowa has stepped in to help with the “what’s for dinner?” dilemma with a new ministry. The Take and [...]

It started with a letter in the Outreach Committee’s mailbox at church. A young man had written to Seeds of Faith about his organization, Bike and Build. Members from Bike and Build, a group of thirty to forty young people, would be bicycling from the East Coast to the West Coast this summer to raise [...]

Purling, counting rows, and knitting are not a part of the typical service ministry for church youth groups.  However, what started as a simple one-time project for a confirmation class at Faith Lutheran Church in Eldridge, Iowa has grown into a full fledge ministry of the church. The confirmation students were in need of a [...]

Since 2010 Lutheran Campus Ministry at the University of Iowa has been taking spring break trips to Nicaragua. In 2010 and 2012 we visited a town on the north side of Lake Managua known as San Francisco Libre, where we worked with a remarkable group of young adults called La Red de Jovenes Contra Violencia/The [...]

Adventure on the Appalachian Trail:  Our Continuing Education Adventure – The Road Less Traveled   I had backpacked several sections of the Appalachian Trail before, so I wasn’t surprised when Pastor Bill Bernau asked me to lead a group of pastors for a week.   What did surprise me was that we would use this hike [...]

On Saturday afternoon, October 20, 2012, from 3 to 4 PM, at Coffeesmiths (Cedar Rapids SW), Holy Redeemer Lutheran Church, an ELCA congregation in Cedar Rapids launched its first ever Coffee Klatch. The conversation was lively, and ranged over current events, corporate life, and how we might respond to life as people of faith. It [...]

It began with a simple post on Facebook and a mention in the church’s bulletin. Going beyond the doors of the church it took to the streets and the Des Moines area. Now, in numbers and interest, the group is growing. It is the new ministry group at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Des Moines, [...]

In the bible, God created animals before he created people and when Our Lord and Savior Jesus was born it was in a stable with animals.  Animals in the bible go on to be associated with The Holy Trinity with God sometimes referred to as the great “lion” of Judah, Jesus Christ as the “lamb” [...]

If you’ve heard about the Pine Ridge Reservation in southwest South Dakota, chances are you know that it has one of the highest unemployment rates and is in one of the poorest counties in the USA.  While poverty and unemployment are prominent parts of the story of the Oglala Lakota people who live on the [...]

Brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short… For the present form of this world is passing away.  ( 1 Corinthians: 29a, 31b) Late in the afternoon on Sunday, May 22, 2011 an EF5 tornado swooped down upon the city of Joplin, Missouri, changing lives in that community forever.  Seven thousand homes and businesses [...]