The Long Walk Together

By Rev. Justin Eller, First Lutheran Church Lincoln, NE

Walking together is what we do when we accompany. It is also a healthy way to relate to others when we participate in God´s mission in the world. The Accompaniment Model of the ELCA gives us a roadmap for how to be in God´s mission together and maybe even how we are church together for the sake of the world. The model begins with a walking together story, the “Road to Emmaus” from Luke.  And it´s during the disciples´ walk together where Christ is revealed in their midst through shared stories and broken bread. It helps us see that our story of walking together is intertwined with the story of our fellow pilgrims through life, both locally and globally, and how all of our stories are part of God´s larger story of being with us, of forgiveness through the cross, of reconciliation and restoration for the flourishing of human community. Our walk together, as sisters and brothers in Christ, is strengthened when it embodies mutuality, inclusivity, vulnerability, empowerment, and sustainability. But what does this look like in real life and ministry?

For seven years, I worshiped, prayed, learned, served, and walked alongside Lutheran sisters and brothers in South America, first as a Pastoral Team Educator in Bolivia and then as the ELCA´s Regional Representative in Southern South America. In Bolivia, walking together meant a collective exploration of what it meant to be Lutheran and Bolivian and indigenous today instead of the foreign missionary coming in from outside and prescribing a Lutheran identity. My wife and I ministered alongside lay pastors, women´s leaders, and youth coordinators as they decided the vision and direction of their church, while telling the stories of their history. While we served as formal educators through workshops and classes, the Bolivian Lutheran congregations taught me, as a new pastor fresh out of seminary, how to baptize twelve children at once, offer pre-marriage counseling and then marry a couple, pastorally care for the sick and suffering, preach liberating good news in a colonized and conquest-ed land, and do miracles with Christian education sometimes with only a stick and a roll of masking tape. As a teaching missionary, I learned how to be walked with. 

When my ministry area expanded to serving our ELCA companion churches in 6 countries, walking together took on new meanings. I journeyed with national churches and their elected leaders through joyously high moments of celebration and disastrously low moments of tragedy and pain. We walked together through dreaming of ELCA World Hunger projects that would help them address pressing needs in their context and we walked together through the processes of applying, planning, monitoring, and evaluating the impacts of their projects. Representing the ELCA with our companion churches in the region, I learned how you make the long walk together. 

Then with the stirring winds of the Holy Spirit, my family landed in Nebraska. And yet again, walking together transformed. From walking together with a single congregation where I serve as one of the pastors to walking together with unaccompanied migrant minors during their immigration hearings; from walking together through corn fields and snow drifts for synodwide listening posts to walking together with our synod mission partners, serving arms, and companion synods. One thing that is evident here is the love, care, and dedication that holds us together as one church living out our baptismal calls as disciples of Jesus Christ, transforming the world. And all of that...happens because we walk together with Christ by our side.