Hello and welcome to the Thinking Fellows podcast.

My name is Keogh Keith, and today I am joined by Adam Francisco, Bruce Hillman, and my father, Scott Keith.

Today we are talking about a Lutheran identity crisis.

I think Lutheranism is in perpetual identity crisis.

It seems at least relatively true, but Lutherans are always fighting over some of the adjectives that should go in front of the word Lutheran.

And this is, I don't know, coming back up again, some of the common ones are things like

confessional Lutheran, which I would probably call myself, and we can dive into that later.

Lately, you're hearing a resurgence of the phrase missional Lutheranism.

I'm hearing more and more Lutherans also give themselves the title evangelical Catholic, which was a

That was a thing in the NALC in the 2010. Which was a movement, I think even older than that.

And now, too.

And now this has seemingly nothing to do with the movement, but just a desire to take back the word Catholic.

And then I think Lutherans obviously have the claim to the word evangelical, which in America and the West, we've basically completely

given up. So my question is, what do these phrases mean? Which one should Lutherans sort of

cling to or announce or what's important about these? And do we have a Lutheran identity crisis?

I'm going to go, we're going to ask the first question to Adam this morning,

and we're just going to go around kind of like we have been.

I'm going to give you that first one.

Does Lutheranism have an identity crisis?

Do these terms matter?

Do we need to land on a few?

Yes, no.

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