Nobel laureate and peace activist Leymah Gbowee is a member of the Lutheran Church in Liberia and participated in the ELCA’s International Leaders program, completing a master’s degree in 2007.
women—to protest against Libe- ria’s corrupt government and end its long civil war. Gbowee’s faith motivated her courageous action, she told the Women of the ELCA Triennial Convention in 2011, and that same faith should motivate all of us to rise up, get out of our comfort zones and work for justice in God’s world. “T e God we serve is not a God of halfway [but] a God of wholeness,” she said, and “[God] who called you will equip you.” Back in Wittenberg, Kanyekanye,
the pastor from Zimbabwe, echoed this sentiment: “We have a voice that is more powerful than we can imagine.” Some of the participants in the
women’s seminars were not raised Lutheran or even Christian. T ey became Lutheran in response to the good news that they encountered in word and action through the global Lutheran church. T ese women are living testimony that the gospel con- tinues to create faith and transform lives even 500 years aſt er the begin- ning of the Reformation. T e powerful message of God’s
grace through faith in Jesus Christ is not “old news.” It is a life-giving trea- sure that we have received and are called to share. As ELCA Presiding Bishop Elizabeth A. Eaton reminds us: “We are church, we are Lutheran, we are church together, and we are church for the sake of the world.” T at “we” is all of us—women
and men, clergy and lay, young and old. Maybe it’s not so complicated aſt er all.
‘We are church, we are
Lutheran, we are church together, and we are church for the sake of the world.’
Author bio: Kleinhans is the McCoy Family Distinguished Chair in Lutheran Heritage and Mission at Wartburg College, Waverly, Iowa.
October 2015 21
‘The God we serve is … a God of wholeness. [God] who called you will equip you.’
© MICHAEL ANGELO
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