Coon Prairie Lutheran Church, Westby, WI

Coon Prairie Lutheran Church
in the country

where the ancestors are buried

 Coon Prairie Lutheran Church
in town

"Coon Prairie Lutheran Church was established on July 12, 1852, just four years after Norwegian settlers entered the Westby area. The congregation received its first pastor in 1855 and dedicated its first wooden building in 1857. Coon Prairie’s pastors served as many as 11 congregations throughout the region for many years. During the pastorate of Halvor Halvorsen (1872-1921), a fine stone building was erected which burned to the ground on Easter Sunday, 1909. Congregation members could not agree on a new building site and two identical edifices were built at $22,500 each: Country Coon Prairie on the original site and Westby Coon Prairie in the thriving new town. Coon Prairie was an important member of the Norwegian Lutheran Synod and experienced the theological divisions over predestination which rocked that church body in the 1880s. In 1917 it joined 92 percent of Norwegian Lutherans in the United States in forming the Norwegian Lutheran Church in America and is currently part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America." 

 - From Westby, Wisconsin Remembered blog, by Eric Leum, Mr. C.'s cousin. In memory. Today would have been his 70th birthday.

 

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"Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime." - Martin Luther
 

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Have a blessed Lord's Day,

Reformation Day, October 31

John Calvin's best senior pic

"Man's mind is like a store of idolatry and superstition; so much so that if a man believes his own mind it is certain that he will forsake God and forge some idol in his own brain."

 "Man's nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.... Man's mind, full as it is of pride and boldness, dares to imagine a god according to its own capacity; as it sluggishly plods, indeed is overwhelmed with the crassest ignorance, it conceives an unreality and an empty appearance as God.... To these evils a new wickedness joins itself, that man tries to express in his work the sort of God he has inwardly conceived. Therefore the mind begets an idol; the hand gives it birth.... Daily experience teaches that flesh is always uneasy until it has obtained some figment like itself in which it may fondly find solace as in an image of God."

- John Calvin

"Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God.  But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end." - Hebrews 3:12-14

Large and small,

magnificent and humble -

places where Christians meet to worship God

This post is linked to

Inspired Sunday

and

Mosaic Monday

  Salisbury Cathedral

The Young Martin Luther

long before 1517

Have a blessed Reformation Sunday, friends!

Happy Reformation Day

Martin Luther in his younger years

He would later post his 95 theses on the Wittenberg Church door (in 1517)

After many soul-searching, agonizing, and tortuous years, Martin Luther came to understand Romans 1:17 "For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith, to faith: as it is written: 'The just shall live by faith.'"

Justice is not about earning God's favor, but receiving God's mercy which He purchased through the atoning death of Christ on the cross. Christ, the perfect lamb of God, became our substitute, taking our sin, bearing the punishment we deserved, and giving us His righteousness.

Luther wrote,

“I felt that I had been born anew and that the gates of heaven had been opened.  The whole of scripture gained a new meaning.  And from that point on the phrase ‘the justice of God’ no longer filled me with hatred, but rather became unspeakably sweet by virtue of a great love.”

 Martin Luther, stifling a grin

 Discussion of Martin Luther's famous and must-read book, Bondage of the Will.  To buy it at Amazon.com, click HERE.