This is Ben.

And this is Keith.

And this is main street Lutherans.

What is main street Lutherans, Ben?

Well, you know, it's a podcast that we're developing, Keith. I don't know if you knew that, but we're just getting started with this. We're going to start with bi weekly episodes until we get going, and if there's demand for it, we'll go to once a week, I think. And so we'll talk about what main Street Lutherans are here in just a second. But first, you might want to know what makes us the right people to talk about what being Lutheran is. And so how about you, Keith?

Oh, I don't know if I should start. I didn't know we were doing a podcast. I thought you just liked having Zoom calls with me once a week, that's for sure. Yeah. So we've been talking about this, I guess, off and on for a little while. My name is Keith fair. I am a pastor in the evangelical Lutheran church in America. We'll be talking about what that is and what that means at some point, too. I've been ordained a little over 20 years, and for a little more than half of that time, I've been serving in my current position as a pastor at a church in York, Pennsylvania, which is in the lower Susquehanna synod, meaning that we're in the lower central part of the state of Pennsylvania, straight south of Harrisburg, but not all the way to. And east of Gettysburg. Yeah, east of Gettysburg, if you're familiar with that. A little closer to Philadelphia than Pittsburgh, but really closer to Baltimore, Maryland, and even to Washington, DC than we are to either of those. I've been wondering for some time to find a way to explore the ELCA a little bit more and who we are and what we mean for the sake of people in my own congregation was kind of my original setting, and Ben has had his own thoughts on what this might mean and where it might go as well. So, Ben, why don't you share that with us?

Yeah. So I live on an island in the Detroit river called Grocer, Michigan, where Keith is an ordained minister. I am nearing the end of my program to become a licensed lay minister. Hopefully by Easter of this year of 2024, I will be a licensed minister and can do most of the things that a pastor can do in ministry, except for perform marriages, and that is restricted to the synod here, southeast Michigan, around Detroit. We'll definitely talk about that program and lots of the other different forms of ministry, the offices of the church, if you will, as we go along my history. I've got degrees in philosophy and religion. I've gone on and had tech careers over the years. I ran a restaurant and a food truck. Currently I'm a historical presenter at the Henry Ford and Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, which is a gigantic museum regularly ranked as one of the best in the world. So I managed to take Keith there last summer. It's something else to see.

It was awesome.

Yeah. Only one place you can see Rosa Parks's bus.

That's right, on the very bus where she refused to give up her seat. It was really a moving experience.

Yeah. So I come to this podcast. I have other podcasts that I host. One is called today is, which is simply the day and date, and another one for my local island. And I've got a couple of others in semi production, one about fatherhood and one about the museum I work at. So I've got a good long history of this. I actually remembered when I started podcasting that I went to Capitol University, where Keith and I both went to Capitol University to become an audio engineer, and dropped out of that and went and got philosophy degrees. Just this last few months, Hank Green, who is one of the founders of Crash course and scishow on YouTube, Hank Green declared that if you have a degree in philosophy and religion, or it might have been John, they called it the billionaire bundle. So I have the billionaire bundle. Theology and philosophy. I come to that with that, the podcast here, it seems like it would be useful for congregations and for people who are interested in our church to know a little bit more about what that is. And other denominations have this sort of resource, and our denomination has not had one, at least not one that is very accessible, as far as we can tell. So we're trying to fill in that gap and give people an idea of what makes Elca Lutherans, Lutherans, what's the difference between ElcA and others, and what makes Lutherans different from others, other christian denominations. And that takes us to what does it mean to be main street Lutheran?

As we've said a couple of times, we're both affiliated with the evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which is a religious denomination in our country, the United States. The ALCA has been around for about 40 years. Not quite 40 years. Are we up to 40 yet?

Oh, no. 88, 80. A momentary math correction. The true answer to that math problem is 35.

So we'll talk about how the ELCA came to be at some point. Predecessor bodies that merge into this. We are a mainline protestant denomination, meaning that we've got a direct historical lineage, if you will, back to the Catholic Church, the Roman Catholic Church of the Middle ages up to the time of the reformation in the 16th century. We'll talk about that history at different points, but mainline is simply a shorthand word that folks use to describe protestant denominations or protestant churches that kind of have that historic connection to the Catholic Church rather than sort of springing up a little more spontaneously based on a person or a group's reading of scripture and their determination to become Christians of a particular bent. We're also an ecumenically minded bunch, meaning that we play nice with other Christians, and we have interest in what not only us Lutherans do in the church in the world, but what other christians do. And we tend to think that there's more that binds us together than that separates us from each other. We find that the differences that we have enrich our experience rather than divide us, but that doesn't mean that we're not solidly based in who we are and proud of our heritage. So you'll see both of those strands come forward at different times.

Yeah. So essentially, Elca Lutherans are the Lutherans that you'll meet at interdenominational events, say you've got a community Thanksgiving event or community Good Friday event. Elca Lutherans are most likely to be the Lutherans that are there. Elca Lutherans are Lutherans that will commune anyone who's baptized, and other lutheran denominations do not. They have restrictions on that. And so at least the two of us, and I think in general, our attitude is that our ELCA congregations are the Lutherans next door. We're the ones you'll see in parades and that sort of thing. Well, that's not to say that LCMs folks won't, but we'll be active in the community, and there's sort of a theological reason for that. And we'll get to that in the topics that we'll. So let's start with those.

Yeah. The theological topics that we're planning on hitting on, among others, are going to be things like talking about sacraments. What is a sacrament? How many sacraments are there? Where does our understanding of sacraments come from, and does it differ from others? We'll be talking about historic documents like the creeds that we share with other aspects of the church, the apostles Creed, the nicene Creed, and we'll even dip into the athenasian creed, I'm sure, a little bit here and there. We'll talk about the Lord's prayer and what other forms of prayer there are for us as Lutherans. And again, we'll talk about Martin Luther, who is, for better and for worse, someone that we owe a lot to of our identity, along with others, people of his time in the 15 hundreds and 16 hundreds, and people all the way from then until now as well. And some of those theologians that we'll refer to as we hit these various topics.

Isn't that amazing? There are still theologians out there.

I know.

Yeah.

No. Anybody who ever says or thinks anything about God is by definition a theologian.

That's true. Even those of us with degrees would have to admit to.

Yep.

So we'll also talk about the historical things we talked about, how we'll talk about the ELCA formation at some point. We'll talk about the reformation. I think we need to talk about Christianity and Lutheranism in America, how they developed and why our church is the way it is. It has elements that didn't come from Europe particularly. Well, not directly from the german side of the european church anyway, some of our congregationalists bent and such. But there are also things like something that most Lutherans probably don't know is that in the world in general, our tradition is called evangelical. And now in America, evangelicalism is basically southern Baptist based and non denominational based. I'm using air quotes. So knowing the distinction between that kind of evangelical and why Lutheranism other places is called evangelical church, and that's an important distinction. Once you grow beyond the United States and see the faith tradition outside of that.

Yeah. And then there's practical elements. What's a lutheran worship service look like? How are things done? Things that you might want to know if you have never set foot in a lutheran church before and you're curious, maybe you've been invited by a neighbor or a relative. Maybe you're attending a lutheran wedding and you just want to know what things look like. So we'll talk about those kind of practical details.

Yeah. And we'll talk about the cultural stuff, which kind of ties into that. Right. Things like Lutherans will talk about hot dish. And now not all Lutherans. That's sort of a Wisconsin Minnesota topic. Even up in the Dakotas, I don't know.

They're called a potluck. And in Ohio we heard them referred to as covered words for nobody wanted to cook dinner for everybody, so everybody brings something and you share it. That's all that means.

But some people refer to hot dish as a very specific casserole, and I'm curious what that is. So we'll bring in some folks that can answer that. Also, why? There's some german things and there's some scandinavian things. And then the other thing is, what other ethnicities are represented in the ELCA now? There are lots. We have hispanic congregations, we have african congregations, and there are people from all sorts of places that bring their family traditions, regional traditions into the church and do that. Now I'm mostly experienced, the Church of Ohio, Indiana and Michigan, which is a very small region of the country and of the globe, of course. And so I'm myself curious what other kinds of traditions, other areas of the country have.

Yeah. Me coming out of Ohio and know, same deal. I'd like to learn more about that, too. Yeah. And then we're going to be talking about topical things, stuff going on in the news that people in the lutheran church might find interesting, stuff happening in the news about the lutheran church and other denominations that we're going to be asked to reflect on. So we're going to be doing some current events. For example, if you're following the news about the United Methodist Church right now and some of the challenges that they are facing as a denomination, and some of the debates and schism, that's a very formal sounding word, debates and struggles that are going on, know, folks might wonder, did the ELCA ever experience anything like that?

The short answer is yes, probably several times.

Yeah, probably several times. We'll probably do it again one day. And, yeah, we'll share a little bit about that context and talk about how does the ELCa fit in with our understanding of politics. And I mean, not just politics in the church, but politics in our United States of America and in the know.

And that'll dip back into history because Luther and Melanchon had a very particular attitude on politics and the responsibility of a Christian to deal with the political world. So I'm looking forward to talking about that. Our format for the show, we're going to have three sections to the show, and the first we're going to start with a topic that'll either be like a current event or maybe a question from the audience. We're really looking forward to interacting with the audience here. And then we'll get into a main topic that might be an interview with an expert. It might be just Keith and know giving our opinions, qualified opinions, hopefully, about certain topics.

No guarantees, though.

And then we're going to close, at least until we run out of questions. We're going to close with a catechism question. So think of it. Something along the lines of, are you smarter than a catechism student? And so you can play along with that. And we'll have instructions on how to do that when we do the catechism question, which is next, right.

Our very first catechism question for our main street Lutherans podcast is this.

Oh, I'm so excited.

True or false, Benjamin? The small catechism was written as a cliff notes version of Luther's large catechism for 8th graders to study from.

Oh, I so want to answer this right now, but we're going to answer this in the next episode at the end of the episode. So you have to listen all the way through now to get there. But if you have your answers, you can send those to us on our social sites and our email address, and we'll pick a winner and we'll come up with some sort of prize for that. Now, the first three or four episodes, we won't have the winners picked because those will have already been recorded before we launch to the world. So we'll have to do some sort of massive winner pick for some secret prize at some point in the future, right?

That and many more exciting things to come.

That's right.

So that's main street Lutherans. That's who we are and what we are hoping to do. And I think that I can speak for both of us to say that we're really excited that you're going to be with us for this journey.

Absolutely.

All right. Main Street Lutherans is hosted by Keith Fair and Ben Foat. You can reach us at [email protected] you can find [email protected] or on the socials at Lutherans right now. That would be Facebook, Instagram and threats. We hope to find you there. The show is produced by media productions. And until next time, go in peace. Serve the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

You don't want to get trolled by somebody else's computer brain?

No, I've got enough problems with my own.

Yeah, I hear.