Dear Partners in Mission:

September is upon us. A month of new things in many of our congregations. Back to school has been in place for weeks. Now it is time for fall programming, sunday school reboots, changes in liturgy, and all sort of other opportunities.

While the temperatures in our communities don’t reflect it, fall is coming. Football has started in most of our communities (although in my house its fall baseball). For those with kids we are back in the rhythm of school lunch packing and pick ups and drop offs.

If you don’t have that reality in your life no doubt fall brings other changes. We pray it might bring some rain after a brutal August of dry and hot across most of our territory. Probably too late to make a difference in harvest but still we pray that God will continue to water the earth and remind us of our baptism.

As your congregation moves into this new season know that we are with you in the synod office. We have resources for fall stewardship programming. Our Parish Lay Ministry Academy begins again with now two cohorts of leaders. I am excited again to teach my “How to Read the Bible” course. In this work we have our students engage our AI Assistant “Lutherbot,” www.ntnl.org/lutherbot/ to help them research and develop programming.

In addition to the Lutherbot work we also hosted a webinar this past month about AI and what it is and isn’t and how we as people of faith can engage it. Those resources are available on our website at  https://www.ntnl.org/resources/learn-ai-webinar/

Why are we doing this? Well the reality is change is constant. AI is a part of that change and NT-NL is being a leader in engaging that. Bringing a Governed AI Assistant to help our communities if they desire. Governed AI means we control what is in the Assistants database of information. It isn’t randomly searching the web to get answers but has Lutheran Confessional and historical documents to guide it. We also are working on how to engage WhatsApp as a tool for our Conterencia Latina communities to access this resource.

Already we have seen how this can be helpful to congregations. People are willing to ask a computer a question they won’t ask a person. A governed AI assistant can help our leaders, Rostered and Authorized, to create resources for their communities. I encourage you to engage this, your synod council will be discussing this in September along with our new starts resolution.

In all of this we are doing what we know we must as Lutherans in NT-NL. We need to be connecting and engaging our communities. Telling our story and doing this work together.

#Juntosenmision

Bishop Gronberg