Are ELCA Lutherans now unchurched?
Retired professor of church history and storyteller James Nestingen speaks with a folksy country drawl befitting his North Dakota upbringing as a Norwegian Lutheran pastor’s kid. I once heard him speak as a Bible study leader at an ELCA synod assembly, teaching the twenty first chapter of John. When Peter and other disciples had empty nets on Lake Galilee, Jesus told them to try the other side of the boat: So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in because there were so many fish. “And they were big fish too,” Nestingen said with eyes sparkling, “fat walleyes, eight pounders every one.” His Minnesota listeners laughingly approved. “Church history” in Lutheran seminaries seems to assume that the church was born in 1517 on the day that Luther nailed his 95 theses onto the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church, as if the first fifteen centuries after Christ are a mere footnote. And so Nestingen, the professor emeritus of church history at Luther Seminary in St Paul, is an ex
