Lutheran Vespers Celebrates 50 Years of Radio Ministry

     PHILADELPHIA (ELCA) --"We are 50 years old this year," said the Rev. Walter Wangerin, Jr., host of "Lutheran Vespers," a radio ministry of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.  "But all anniversaries find their joy in Jesus and their life in the Spirit of God," he said.  Members of the ELCA gathered to give thanks for Lutheran Vespers at the Pennsylvania Convention Center Aug. 16.
     Kathy J. Magnus, vice president for the ELCA, presented an award of recognition for 50 years of programming to Irene Stangland, Lutheran Vespers director for program services.
     Lutheran Vespers is heard weekly and features sacred music, both traditional and contemporary, complementing scripture readings and homilies.  The program began as an evening radio broadcast on WNAX, Yankton, S.D., in 1947.  Today Lutheran Vespers is carried on 206 stations in the United States, Africa and Guam.
     "The best kind of feedback we get from our listeners are those that speak as if we have met and shaken hands a long time ago," said Wangerin. "I can usually get a sense of the markets, where it's working exactly as it ought to be, because listeners send pictures of grandchildren, pictures of the child that just graduated and some talk at length about a story I told that sparked that kind of response in their own human experience."
     "As I look back, it is just a marvel that God has kept this ministry going for all these years," said Stangland.  "And now, when the church is flourishing and booming, we have the opportunity to reach so many people. From receiving letters I have a sense for how people are looking to God and the church for answers in their life.  I am surprised to be a part of this ministry," she said.
     "I am willing to allow my life to be 'storied,'" said Wangerin.  "I hope that over the years listeners have established the kind of relationship that allows us to think about things that both the secular world and the religious world hesitate to think about -- things that may be too intimate to wonder into the other, too honest.  It is that relationship that I will seek," he said.
     Wangerin finds radio ministry fulfilling.  "A great deal of my time in ministry is spent in the inner city in African American congregations which resists cold, intellectual preaching.  Human stories and presentations are invited, so God takes residence in immediate relationships with people.  Now to be doing this on the radio seems to me that for a long time I've been trained in that kind of sensitivity, so that even if I don't see the audience when I sit in front of the microphone, I have such an intimate and blessed memory of that audience sitting in front of me at the congregation," he said.
     The celebration took place while more than 1,000 Lutherans gathered for the 1997 ELCA Churchwide Assembly, Aug. 14-20.  Wangerin spoke at a banquet Aug. 16 celebrating the ELCA's tenth anniversary.  Other anniversary plans for Lutheran Vespers include a celebration at Central Lutheran Church, Minneapolis, Oct. 24, and two seven-day "Alaskan Summer Solstice Cruises" in June 1998.  Wangerin will be the storyteller at both events.

For information contact:

Ann Hafften, Director (773) 380-2958 or NEWS@ELCA.ORG
http://www.elca.org/co/news/current.html