You have in your hands a very special issue of The Lutheran Witness. Its focus is on people and institutions of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod bringing the Gospel of Jesus Christ to a world that needs so very much to hear God’s Good News.

We all enjoy receiving cards and letters at Christmas. Whether from family far away or friends across town, they remind us of the relationships with which we have been blessed. Often, even in this aggressively secular age, those same cards and letters remind us of the great gift our heavenly Father gave us that first Christmas long ago in Bethlehem.

By the time this issue of The Lutheran Witness arrives on your doorstep, many of us will have been thoroughly inundated by all the relentlessly commercial manifestations of the coming Christmastide.

In human terms, 500 years is a long time. The world in which Luther lived half a millennium ago seems distant and hazy when we compare it to the life we lead today.

magazine, is for laypeople, while Reporter, our monthly newspaper, is for professional church workers and congregational lay leaders. This principle has served us well

With this issue, we salute and say goodbye to Mr. Don
Folkemer, managing editor of The Lutheran Witness
for the past eight years. Under Don, who retired
July 31st, the Witness held its own during a tough time for denominational magazines, whose circulations across the board have been falling for many years.

Missouri Synod, a constant challenge is trying to stay in touch with everyone to some degree. This isn’t easy to do. There are 2.5 million of us in some 900,000 households attending 6,150 congregations in 35 districts from Maine to Hawaii.

In this month’s cover story, Dr. Ardon D. Albrecht of Simi Valley, Calif., offers an inside peek, replete with pastoral and professional insights, into the soon-to be-released movie, The Nativity Story.

Why do Lutherans resist dirtying their hands in the secular realm? This is the question posed by Dr. Uwe Siemon-Netto, director of the Institute on Lay Vocation at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, in this month’s “We Are Needed: Are Lutherans Afraid to Take on the World?”.

Another story about the new hymnal? Yes, with this issue, we conclude our coverage of the run-up to, and arrival of, Lutheran Service Book (LSB). Few topics have commanded as much Witness ink in recent years as LSB, the fourth major English-language hymnal in the Synod’s 158-year history.

Normally, we use this space to draw your attention to a particular article—often the cover story—in the issue at hand. This month, though, I’d like to comment on the regular department known as ‘Letters’…

In June, we marked the coming of Pentecost with a cover story on the Holy Spirit. This month, we focus on another aspect of the season: Jesus preparing His Church for its mission in the world.