about us

Bethlehem Lutheran Church is a confessional Lutheran congregation in Lund, Texas — a small Swedish farming community in northeastern Travis County, just outside Elgin. We have been a congregation since January 16, 1897, and we have been worshipping on this same ground ever since.

What does confessional Lutheran mean? It means we believe what Lutherans have always believed — and we are willing to say so plainly.

We believe that the Bible is the Word of God, true in everything it teaches.

We believe that we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, on account of Christ alone — not by anything we have done, but by what God has done for us in the death and resurrection of Jesus.

We believe that God actually delivers what He promises in the Sacraments. In Baptism, He makes a person His own and gives the gift of faith. In the Lord's Supper, Christ is really present with His body and blood, given and shed for the forgiveness of sins.

We believe that the historic Christian faith — confessed in the Apostles', Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds, and summarized in the Lutheran Confessions (the Book of Concord, 1580) — is the faith that has been preached since the time of the apostles. We have not invented anything new. We are simply receiving what has been handed down.

And we believe that all of this is for you — that the Gospel preached at this altar is not for someone else or somewhere else, but for the person reading these words right now.

Bethlehem is a member congregation of Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC) — a fellowship of confessional, mission-minded Lutheran congregations committed to the authority of Scripture and the historic Lutheran witness. LCMC congregations are independent and locally led, gathered together for shared mission, theological accountability, and the work of the Gospel.

We are not a megachurch. We are not trying to be one. We are an ordinary Lutheran congregation doing the ordinary work of the Church — gathering each Sunday around the Word and the Sacraments, raising children in the faith, burying our dead in hope of the resurrection, and welcoming whoever God sends to our door.

If that sounds like the kind of church you have been looking for — or even if you have never set foot in a church before and are simply curious — there is a seat for you here.