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…

Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori in Gaza in March, courtesy of Episcopal Life Online

When something has been a “crisis” for longer than one has been alive, it can be hard to maintain focus and energy around it. We’re all familiar with the idea of compassion fatigue. But the crisis in the Middle East, and at the moment particularly in Gaza, has reached a new boiling point. Rather than try to figure out the historical origins of the conflict, or God forbid get into a shouting match about victimization and blame, it seems the most important thing is to focus on the people being hurt by the situation, and not close our eyes to the ongoing and worsening humanitarian crisis.

“Innocent lives are being lost throughout the land we all call Holy, and as Christians remember the coming of the Prince of Peace, we ache for the absence of peace in the land…