To the Cross – A new Lutheran site is born

Here is a guest article by Peter Slayton of Ad Crucem. Peter’s passion is helping people discover and develop their God-given gifts so that they consistently confess Christ to a world that desperately needs the Good News. He loves theology, technology, music and social media. He is a member at Bethany Lutheran Church in Naperville, Illinois.

 

Did you know you can find Steadfast Lutherans just about anywhere? Even in Scandinavian pietistic circles!! I’m excited to announce the launch of a new confessional Lutheran online community called Ad Crucem (latin for “To the Cross”). As our “About” page says:

Ad Crucem is a fellowship of like-minded pastors and laypeople dedicated to sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ crucified for sinners. Most of us come from a Scandinavian Lutheran background, but our community is much broader than that.

Our goal is to encourage Lutheran pastors and laypeople to learn more about their confessional roots, but we aim for a much wider audience as well – American Evangelicals. We will be trying very hard to strike a tone that is both winsome and doctrinally uncompromising as we learn to speak “Lutheran” with an American accent. Our hope is that American Evangelicals and others who desire to learn more about Lutherans find our site and are able to easily understand what we are saying and why we as Lutherans care about the doctrines we care about. I find that many times as I’m discussing important doctrinal issues that I speak of them in such a way that only “insiders” can really understand me. One of the things I have loved about BJS is the move in the last year or so to teach more doctrine and become more accessible to the non-trained lay-person. We hope to continue in that vein but to draw in a new audience while we do it.

To this end, we’ll be launching multiple platforms today. By the time you read this, our first article on our website will have gone live. I really hope you go read it. It’s written by one of our founding members, Ben Baker, and explains very well why we chose our name and what we hope to do. You can find that article here. We also have a Facebook Fan page here, a Twitter handle (@AdCrucem) and, what we hope will become one of our best outreach tools, a Youtube channel. We are particularly excited about the Youtube channel. Our current plans are to host monthly roundtables/interviews/discussions via Google Hangout and broadcast them live on our Youtube channel. Viewers will be able to comment and ask questions live during the broadcast and then each video will be posted on the channel and website for further discussion afterwards. Our first topic of discussion, which will be broadcast in mid-November, will be on the efficacy of the Word or “How does the Word work?” We’re hoping it will be a good one for people just encountering Lutheranism who might have some questions about our view of salvation and God’s Word, topics that can be major theological hurdles for those with non-Lutheran backgrounds, but which can be wonderful gateways into confessional theology when properly understood.

I hope you come and contribute to the conversation as we strive to spread our doctrine and theology, especially the pure Gospel of Christ crucified for sinners, to a new audience.

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