Forty-four bishops from the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America and its Canadian equivalent left for the Middle East today, including Bishop Gerald Mansholt of the church’s Central States Synod which includes Missouri.

On the synod’s website, Mansholt said the two-week trip is part of the ELCA’s “Churchwide Strategy for Engagement in Israel and Palestine,” adopted by the 2005 Churchwide Assembly.

According to John Brooks, director of the ELCA News Service, the trip was planned “long before the current Gaza conflict.”

Writing in a Dec. 31st pastoral letter, Bishop Mark Hanson, the ELCA’s presiding bishop, said the denomination “joins with all people calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and southern Israel,” and asked ELCA members “to join Middle East religious leaders who requested that Sunday, Jan. 4, be ‘a day for justice and peace in the land of peace,’” according to an ELCA press release.

In his own message, Mansholt wrote that there were three goals for the trip:

The purpose of the trip is threefold: to grow in awareness of what is happening “on the ground” among Israelis and Palestinians; to accompany Bishop Munib Younan and the members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Jordan and the Holy Land; and to advocate for strategies that lead to a just and lasting peace for all peoples living in the Middle East.

You can follow the bishops’ progress via Mansholt’s blog.