A " Local " ELCA Lutheran Drafted into the NFL
Roy Schuening, a life time member of Peace Oregon was drafted in the fifth round of the NFL draft this past weekend. He will play football professionally with the St. Louis Rams. Roy played at Pendleton High School, Oregon State. He is the son of Ron Schuening and Renae Graton. Ron is a truck driver and Renae is a teacher. He has two sisters, Kelly and Carly. Roy enjoys hunting and fishing.

PLU mourns death of football player, girlfriend

WENDY CARPENTER; wendy.carpenter@thenewstribune.com

Published: April 27th, 2008 06:19 AM

Students at Pacific Lutheran University were in mourning Saturday following the deaths of Brady Freeman, a junior offensive lineman on the college football team, and his girlfriend, senior Jocelyn Denham.

The two students, both 21, died in a car accident late Friday afternoon near Brewster in Okanogan County. Freeman’s twin brother, Boone Freeman, a junior offensive lineman at the University of Puget Sound, was injured in the crash.

Both Freeman twins were standout athletes and co-valedictorians at Tonasket High School. Denham originally was from Bend, Ore.
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Exploring a new ministry
Lutheran pastors spend three years patiently learning how to be more relevant in a land of forests and streams
Saturday, April 26, 2008, NANCY HAUGHT, The Oregonian Staff

Answers. Pastors have them. Sometimes, though, they wrestle with questions. Especially in the unchurched Northwest. What does it mean to be spiritual but not religious? To be a minister in a place where salmon fishing is sacramental, and old-growth trees are cathedral spires? Seven Lutheran pastors went looking for answers. Their three-year journey began and ended on the Columbia River.

From the beginning, people in the Northwest lived close to the land. Missionaries brought a foreign message and flung it over native peoples like a blanket. Settlers who needed to lighten their wagons threw off the churches they knew. Homesteads were remote. That nurtured an individualism as rugged as the landscape and a skepticism toward everything -- including organized religion.

"Things are different here," says John Rosenberg, pastor at the Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd in Olympia. "If you took this place seriously -- the land, environmentalism, history, poetry, art, indigenous expressions -- how would that effect being a Lutheran pastor out here?"

That question launched the quest.

The Louisville Institute, which encourages ministers to know the unique people and the places they serve, gave Rosenberg and six other pastors $40,000 and three years to find some answers. They adopted a name for the project: Salmon Nation Spirituality.
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