Hey there!

Big news — the Lutheran Answers website has been overhauled!

I’ve spent a lot of time working on this thing. I had a few goals in mind when I started, all of which I think I’ve accomplished with this refresh.

But before I get into all that, I wanted to give you a big up-front of the features!

📖 The complete Book of Concord — fully searchable
Every creed, the catechisms, every article, all in one place and easy to find. No more digging through PDFs or physical books. Just head over to the website and click confessions at the top (or press ctrl+k on any page to search!).

❓ A growing library of Christian Q&A
Real questions believers actually wrestle with answered clearly from a confessional Lutheran perspective. This has always been the goal of the project, and something I have been putting more time into lately. 

🎙️ The podcast links, all in one spot
Catch every episode on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. Forget the link for it? All easy to find on the website.

🤖 Welcome Back Big Craig
Our resident AI pastor is back and better than ever!

You can now ask him to fact-check any Lutheran Answers article and he will, without fail, tell you it looks great (use with appropriate suspicion).

But if that isn’t your thing, I’ve also integrated ask Grok and ask Claude into every article. Just click the Context Menu at the top:

You can also just go to Big Craig directly and ask him about various articles you find on the internet and he’ll give you an honest answer!

✍️ Want to contribute?
I’m always looking for writers and editors to help this resource grow. Submit your content here if you're interested.

Go check it out, poke around, and let me know what you think! Also, please let me know if you find any bugs so I can squash them.

What are my goals here?

I’ll get to the goals, but I want to first give you a bit of backstory:

I’m going to be honest with you: I’ve been really burned out lately. With full time school, full time work, full time church, part time ministry, full time family - it just never felt like I had time to relax and do things I enjoyed. And this effort was just another thing to do.

Well I’ve gotten a bit of a break! My importance in my local congregation has been scaled back significantly, which is a huge blessing. And I’m taking a 10 week break from school (not my choice, there just aren’t any courses available to me this quarter).

So I took about two weeks to just do nothing with my time. Which was lovely. And now I’m itching to do stuff, so I turned my attention to Lutheran Answers, which I had let languish.

Well, I’m going to spend my time getting this thing back together and get it on the road.

The Goals

My goal is to create three different, but interlinked things:

• A fun podcast

• An informative website

• An edifying newsletter

🎙️The Podcast

I’m sure you’ll be excited to hear that I’ve been recording new episodes for a few months now, with the goal being building up a log of episodes that I can release weekly in the near future.

I can’t give you an exact date yet because I’m waiting for the finished version of a theme song from Lutheran Satire’s very own Hans Fiene.

Once I get that in hand, I’ll begin release episodes on a regular schedule.

🌐The Website

I’m paring down the website. I had an idea for courses, sermons, music, articles - just a one-stop-shop for all things Lutheran. It is too much for one guy to do on his own.

So I’m just going to stick to answers. My goal is to start putting out a three or so answers a month and growing the archive.

The other things are great ideas, and stuff I’ll work in should the project grow beyond just me.

📰The Newsletter

This is the tricky part for me.

Please let me know: Do you want casual updates like this one? Or do you want devotionals?

Do you want strictly transactional emails, where I just let you know when new stuff happens?

Some secret blend of those things?

I desperately need your help with this. Please hit reply and let me know.

Some new back-end stuff

I migrated to buttondown for my Newsletter over cost. The website is back to Static and self-hosted.

Ultimately this saves me some money, as the previous platform (Ghost) was $30 a month, and WordPress was more than that. I’ve managed to bring my costs way down, which increases the longevity (this project only survives as long as my budget can handle it).

Still, if you want to help me defray costs, you can donate here. Everything helps!

That’s all I’ve got for you, for now!

My goal is to stop by your inbox pretty regularly from here on out. Please make sure to let me know what you want to see in these emails! I don’t want to be annoying, and I do want to provide you with some value.

In Christ,
Remy Sheppard

Post Script:

Make sure to Visit the revamped Site →

Post Post Script:

You can leave comments on these emails now. Very cool.