Who we are
We are a welcoming community that invites you to join us in our church services, groups, on social media, and through our live streams…
Softer modern red to blend in with modern trends and colour palette
Smooth modern white rose encircling the red heart.
A fresh green resembling growth, youth and a flourishing future
The golden ring signifying preciousness and treasure.
Near-black-blue, the outer cross encaptures the complete rose and simultaneously confirms the inner cross
Inspired by the original luther rose, this modern version carries the same meaning. A red heart, surrounding a closest-to-black-blue rose. It symbolises that faith in Christ brings life. A softer red is used to signify the love and life of Christ and that faith in the crucified Saviour resides in the heart. The black cross symbolises Christ's death and sacrifice.
The red heart is enclosed in a white rose, representing peace and joy through faith; also purity and innocence.
The golden colour encircling the rose mirrors the original golden ring - the eternal and unending nature of God's love, grace and salvation.
Fresh green leaves emerging from the rose signify renewal, growth, and vitality. This reflects our new outlook focused on youth and a flourishing future.
The logo is versatile used differently for various occasions and platforms.
Lutheran Identity
So, what is a Lutheran anyway?
You’re holding in your hand an energy bar. An energy bar is a small item, no bigger than a candy bar, but it serves as a meal. I hope this short reflection on Lutheran Identity can satisfy your theological appetite. I hope that like an energy bar it will give you a protein-filled power-up. But also like an energy bar, I hope it tastes good, like a chocolate covering making the protein burst enjoyable.
Lutheranism, of course, has its own distinctives, elements that can pretty much be found only in Lutheran churches. The most important distinctive is the teaching of justification (being made right before God) by faith, or to be more technical, justification by grace through faith in the work of Christ—in other words, the Gospel, the Good News of salvation through Christ. Lutherans talk about ‘the chief article,' "the doctrine upon which the Church rises or falls." Everything goes back to this. This "chief article" holds Lutheran spirituality together. It also holds life together. Baptism is Christ saving us. Holy Communion is Christ giving us His broken body and His poured-out blood for the remission of our sins. The Bible conveys God's Law, which brings us to repentance, and His Gospel, which brings us to justifying faith. The Trinity is a unity of three persons, which enables us to say that God is love, and because He loves us, He saves us. Jesus is true God, because only God could bear our sins and save us like He did.
For this reason, I believe, Lutheranism is all about the comfort of troubled consciences which finds its heart in our Christology. Martin Luther said that we ought not to think of God apart from His incarnation in Jesus Christ. We often think of God the Father as an abstract idea or as an amorphous being far above the universe who looks down on human suffering. But God has become flesh. Not that Lutherans deny the transcendence of the Father or that we believe in the Son of God only at the expense of the other persons of the Trinity. But God the Father has revealed Himself fully in Jesus. To see the Father, we must see Jesus. As Jesus told Philip, "Whoever has seen Me has seen the Father' (John 14:9). So, our knowledge of God must be mediated by our knowledge of the person Jesus.
One of the main reasons some people do not believe in God at all is the problem of evil and suffering in the world. How could there be a God who looks down on all of the world's evil and suffering and does nothing about it? Notice the assumption: God is a transcendent being who looks down. What if God actually enters this world of evil and suffering? What if, somehow, He took all of that evil and suffering into Himself? What if this incarnate God suffered the just penalty for all the world's evil? This, of course, is what all Christians believe that Jesus accomplished on the cross. But few Christians, oddly enough, apply Christology to the problem of suffering. This brings us to another Lutheran distinctive: the theology of glory versus the theology of the cross. We would expect God to come down as a mighty king to be victorious over His enemies, to answer all of our questions, and to solve all of our problems.
Instead, God came as a baby to an unmarried mother who laid Him in a cattle trough; He was homeless; He was executed by torture. The incarnate God set aside His rightful glory for a cross. In doing so and by rising from the dead and then ascending to His glory, He redeemed us. By the same token, we want the way of glory—and so we expect all of our questions to be answered and all our problems solved—but we, too, have to bear our crosses. Ironically, in those times of our own weakness, suffering, and need, we find that Christ has taken up our crosses into His. We assume that suffering is meaningless, and if we suffer, we cannot bear it, to the point of thinking we must be outside of God's favour or there must not be a God at all. Lutheranism, to its great credit, has a theology of suffering. The cross is not just about Jesus dying as our sacrifice. The cross is the experience of God’s very being, God acting to take on suffering, death and annihilation.
The good news of the gospel is that God entered hell. It’s the horrible good news that God has been overtaken by nothingness, that God has been found in hell (*The creeds and Lutheran Confessions proclaim that Christ descended into hell and destroyed it for all believers). It is good news because God, in the person of Jesus Christ, has taken on nothingness, abandonment, and hell and has made such realities the location of God’s action among us. This is good news because everyone who struggles with nothingness – all who find themselves alone or journeying through great experiences of hell – can be assured that they are swept up in the presence of God. In our times of pain and struggle, we are bound in the love of God, a love that takes what is dead and, out of such impossibility, brings new life (Root, Andrew: Taking the Cross to Youth Ministry, 2012:79).
Lutheranism also has a theology of everyday life that brings satisfaction and joy. It is called the doctrine of vocation. To realize that just being a husband, a wife, a mother, a father, an employee, and a citizen are all callings from God, that the day-to-day tasks that all of these are holy before God. Not only that, but God is working through human beings to bestow His gifts: He gives me my daily bread through farmers, bakers, and cooks; He protects me by police officers; He heals me by doctors, nurses, and pharmacists; He proclaims His Word and gives me Christ's body and blood through my pastor. And somehow, He is working through me. All of these vocations have the same purpose: to love and serve the different neighbours whom God brings to us in each of our multiple callings.
We believe that in church God serves us through His Word and the Sacraments and that He sends us out in our different vocations to live out our faith in love and service to our neighbours. He is still present, though, even in the mundane, ordinary routines of life, working through us and serving us through others. That gives our life a purpose and a meaning that we never realized before.
It is my hope that this existential view of what it means to be Lutheran can be used as an aid to help comfort troubled consciences and be the fire that ignites us as we reach out to other people. In other words, to stick to the metaphor of the energy bar, I hope this proved to be both tasty and nourishing.
by Past. Anja Spiske
Sources utilized
1. Gene, Eward Veith, What is a Lutheran https://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2019/05/whats-a-lutheran
2. Root, Andrew. Taking the Cross to Youth Ministry, 2012, Zondervan
Das Christenherz auf Rosen geht, wenn’s mitten unterm Kreuze steht.
The Christian heart on roses lands, when under the Cross of Christ it stands.
(M. Luther, my translation).
The ‘Luther Rose’ has become a symbol of the Lutheran Church, familiar to Lutherans throughout the world. It was designed in 1516 by Martin Luther, who said that it set described the basic elements of Christian faith.
In 1530 he described the rose to a friend. He said that the black cross on a red heart reminds us that the crucified Christ saves us. It is a black cross, which mortifies and causes pain, but it leaves the heart its natural colour. It doesn’t destroy nature, that is to say, it does not kill us but keeps us alive, for the just shall live by faith in the Crucified One (Romans 1:17). The cross humiliates us and causes us pain, but it also brings us righteousness and life when, in our hearts, we believe in the crucified Saviour. The heart is in the centre of a white rose, to show that faith brings joy, comfort, blessedness and peace beyond that of the world. The background of the rose is sky blue to show that this joy in the Spirit and in faith is the beginning of the heavenly joy to come. It is surrounded by a golden ring, to signify that the bliss of heaven is endless and lasts forever, and is more precious than all other joys and treasures.
Our History
Evangelical Lutheran Church in South Africa (Cape Church) | ELCSA (Cape Church)
is historically a German church, but nearly all congregations also or exclusively offer services in English or Afrikaans.
19 Congregations
11 Pastors
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in South Africa (Cape Church) / ELCSA (Cape Church) is historically a German church, but nearly all congregations also or exclusively offer services in English or Afrikaans. It has about 4,000 members in 19 congregations served by 11 pastors. There are currently three vacancies. The congregations are scattered throughout the Western Cape, Eastern Cape and Free State provinces.
ELCSA (Cape Church) is a member of United Evangelical Lutheran Church in Southern Africa (UELCSA), the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), the Lutheran Communion in Southern Africa (LUCSA), the South African Council of Churches (SACC), Conventus Reformatus and the Western Cape Ecumenical Network (WCEN).