News
By the staff of The Lutheran, ELCA News Service and Religion News Service
Dec. 2: Giving Tuesday ELCA by the numbers
On the heels of Thanksgiving, after Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping, there is Giving Tuesday—a global day dedicated to giving back. This year the ELCA is challenging Lutherans to give a total of $25,000 on Giving Tuesday (Dec. 2) to the ELCA Malaria Campaign (www.elca. org/malaria). It’s enough to help one country stock its clinics with malaria medication and rapid diagnostic kits for a full year. As of Oct. 31, the ELCA Malaria Campaign had passed the $13 million mark on its way to $15 million by the end of 2015.
ELCA help for Iraq About 2.4 million people in Iraq are displaced from their homes—a num- ber that grew after violent persecu- tion of Christians and other ethnic and religious minorities by Islamic State extremists. At the end of Sep- tember, Lutheran Disaster Response sent $50,000 to ACT Alliance, which works through the Lutheran World Federation and Christian Aid to pro- vide food and other aid to displaced people and their host communities in northern Iraq.
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The Nobel Committee regards it as an important
point for a Hindu and a Muslim, an Indian and a Pakistani, to join in a common struggle for education and against extremism.
Norwegian Nobel Committee chairman Thorbjorn Jagland, in announcing the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize to 17-year-old Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan and Kailash Satyarthi of India.
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www.thelutheran.org Harvest helps hospital ELCJHL/DANAE HUDSON
Everyone got into the olive harvest with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land’s English-speaking congregation, including 2-year-old Esther Manning. Members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Redeemer helped harvest olives on the Lutheran World Federation’s Augusta Victoria campus on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. The olive oil is sold to provide oncology and diabetes care through the LWF’s Augusta Victoria Hospital—the only oncology department serving the West Bank and Gaza. Learn more about the ELCJHL at www.
elcjhl.org and the LWF Jerusalem project at
www.lwfjerusalem.org.
T
he ELCA has 9,464 congrega- tions and 3.86 million members (down 2.2 percent from 2012)
as of Dec. 31, 2013, according to sta- tistics released by the ELCA Office of the Secretary. During 2013, ELCA congrega-
tions as a whole: • Had a 3 percent decline in worship attendance (to just more than 1 mil- lion) over the previous year. • Had an average worship attendance per congregation of 111 (in 1988, the average was 149), with about 27 percent of ELCA members attending worship on a given day. • Maintained a relatively stable group of 2.4 million “active participants.”
• Baptized more than 49,500 children and adults, and confirmed nearly 41,300. • Maintained income of more than $2.4 billion and saw assets grow by 5 percent to $20.6 billion. • Saw average annual giving per bap- tized member increase 2 percent to $533. • Noted their strengths as worship (40 percent), music (26 percent), community service (25 percent), fellowship (20 percent), Christian education for children (13 percent), Christian education for adults (12 percent), confirmation (10 percent), stewardship (5 percent), and evange- lism and recruitment (3 percent).
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