Loss, Grief and Nostalgia in Congregational Life
Bishop Michael Girlinghouse
Bishop Michael Girlinghouse
Rev. Mike Girlinghouse has served as Bishop of the Arkansas-Oklahoma Synod since July of 2011. Prior to being called to serve as Bishop, he was Pastor of University Lutheran Church in Norman, OK and Campus Pastor for the University of Oklahoma. Ordained in 1987, Bishop Mike has served as a parish pastor, campus pastor and in congregations in transition or in need of a substitute pastor. Bishop Mike has also served as an instructor at two universities teaching courses in Death and Dying and World Religion. In addition to his book, Embracing God's Future without Forgetting the Past (Fortress 2018), Bishop Mike is a devotional writer who has written for Christ in our Home and posts a daily devotion on Facebook. Bishop Mike was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, attended college at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, MN and seminary at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. He is married and has one adult daughter.
Loss, Grief and Nostalgia in Congregational Life
All congregations have experienced significant changes in the past two years. Even before the pandemic many congregations were dealing with declining church participation, aging membership and other changes. All these changes resulted in loss, and with loss comes grief. In this presentation at the 2022 Alaska Synod Assembly, Bishop Mike Girlinghouse explored how this grief impacts and is expressed in congregational systems, the role yearning and nostalgia play in that grief and how we can draw on those memories of the past to step into God's future.
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