Adrainne Gray

Church communicators from the Lutheran communion talk audio
(LWI) - Highlighting the work of four communicators who use radio and podcasts as their platform, The Lutheran World Federation (LWF) Global Communicators Network will host its online quarterly event, “Church communicators talk audio” on Thursday 18 August at 2 p.m.
“Radio is very powerful because someone can listen in their car, while they are working, from prison and while in hospital. Radio can heal people,” said scheduled guest s...

Leadership conference of the Americas visits project sites and witness vibrant work
(LWI) - Last week, the LWF Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and North America (NA) regions met in person at the “Leadership Conference of the Americas” where participants were invited to witness the vibrant work of the local churches.
This included learning about the project work of the churches, including kindergartens, schools, elderly care facilities, theological education, women’s theological formatio...

—Adrainne Gray
I don’t like gates, enclosures, pens, fences, walls.
I never have. It’s part of the reason I felt more suited to the call of deacon or the office of Word and Service, positions that call one to go outside the walls of the church, mostly.
The feeling of being restricted bothers me. It bothers me even more when others appear to be stuck, confined or fenced in. I want to be free to live the life God intended, and I encourage others to find that freedom as well.
For many of us here...

Evangelical Lutheran School of Hope Ramallah Principal Naseef Muallem walks Munib Younan, bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land, through the school during a visit for the first week of classes. Ben Gray / ELCJHL
Editor’s note: This is the final post in a four-part series about the new Evangelical Lutheran School of Hope in Ramallah. Catching up? Read parts one, two, and three.
Two weeks before the opening of the new campus for the Evangelical Lutheran School of...

Editor’s note: This is the third post in a four-part series about the new Evangelical Lutheran School of Hope in Ramallah. Catching up? Read part one and part two first.
To imagine the impact the expanded Evangelical Lutheran School of Hope in Ramallah campus will have, one can look back on the lives of its graduates. Of particular interest to ELCA members may be the story of Ala Rasoul, a Palestinian Muslim and 1993 graduate of Hope.
After graduating from Hope, Rasoul went on to get his degr...

At 15 and 13 years old, my children still wait and expect the gifts they requested for Christmas. With each passing year, they are almost sure they’ll get what they ask for, partly because we negotiate it before Christmas arrives. My husband and I decide what is a reasonable gift request on our salary and they sometimes, with the guarantee of Granny’s check coming in the mail, use their cash for whatever we haven’t agreed to gift.

As they’ve matured, we implemented a process that doesn’t dimi...

Editor’s note: This is the second post in a four-part series about the new Evangelical Lutheran School of Hope in Ramallah. Read the first post here.
Why build a new school?
Built in 1966, the old campus of the Evangelical Lutheran School of Hope in Ramallah could no longer meet the demand of the community or withstand the wear and tear of years of use.
The sprawl of Ramallah alone had increased from 165,703 in 2012 to 185,701 in 2016. (That’s a 12.06 percent growth rate in four years, or 4 p...

Ya’tik il-‘afye, the Arabic phrase for “good job,” was shared freely between students, staff and teachers as they basked in the sunlight their new building provided. This is how the Evangelical Lutheran School of Hope in Ramallah opened its doors in August, welcoming students to a new, expansive building for a new school year.
The school is one of four in the West Bank connected to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land (ELCJHL), with a co-educational history extending ba...

Confirmation came a little late for my daughter. My husband and I were deployed to serve as missionaries in Jerusalem, which interrupted her final year of confirmation class. It took us a while to settle in before she could pick up where she had left off in the U.S. and complete confirmation at 16 years old.
Honestly, she didn’t seem to mind the delay and, with a bit of maturity under her belt, my daughter began to question whether she was willing to confirm her baptism.
Finally, she agreed t...