What is a Lutheran?
A Lutheran is a follower of Jesus Christ through membership of the Christian Church. He or she would be defined as an Evangelical Christian. The term evangelical refers to a term Protestants like to use to point out that their faith centers in the good news of what God has done for people in Jesus Christ. There are about ten million Lutherans in the United States.

Why do these Christians carry the name "Lutheran"?
Lutherans did not like it that their enemies gave them the name of Martin Luther (1483-1546), nor did Luther welcome such a designation for his fellow believers. But the name "stuck", so members of the Lutheran Church not only live with it, but enjoy remembering by means of it what God did through the sixteenth century reformer.

Who was Martin Luther?
He was a fallible, energetic, robust, occasionally crude, never dull German monk who had tried to please God by living the disciplines of a monastery. But he experienced the wrath, not the love of God, for these efforts. A reading of the Bible, particularly the letters of Paul, led him to an experience of God's unmerited goodness. He became a preacher, a reformer, church leader, author of scores of books, family man, and proclaimer of the fact the God forgives people out of love, though Jesus Christ.

What is the core or central accent of Lutheranism?
A code word for the heart of Lutheran belief is the reality of "justification by grace through faith". People do not use the old sense of the word "justification" with much frequency any more. In this phrase, "justification" means that God considers righteous, or makes just, people who make nothing of their own righteousness or justice. Instead they accept God's gift of Himself, His love, His activity, in the death and rising again of His Son, Jesus Christ. Since no one deserves such love, people are saved by grace. Since they are grasped by it and do not reason or work their way into it, the grace is received "by faith".

* Used with permission