I’m an English Lutheran living on the outskirts of London. I can also be found on Twitter as @johnthelutheran.
Lutherans have been called “the first evangelicals”, and are the earliest of the various church traditions to come out of the 16th century reformation. The Lutheran tradition combines an “evangelical” belief in the cross of Christ and the word of God with a “catholic” belief in the effectiveness of the sacraments – baptism, absolution and the Lord’s Supper – as means by which God brings his gifts of forgiveness, life and salvation to us.
My background is in the Church of England, and for a number of years (after my return to faith from atheism in 1994) I identified myself with the “conservative evangelical” wing of that church. However, there was always a tension between that and my love (rooted in my childhood) of more “Anglo-Catholic” forms of worship and devotion. Becoming a Lutheran resolved that tension for me, and this has, ironically, given me a fresh love and appreciation for the Church of England in recent years.
Licensing
This site is under a dual licensing arrangement. This is to ensure maximum flexibility for non-commercial use, with a “copyleft” approach for commercial use (including advertising-supported blogs). For more details of the motivation behind this approach.
For non-commercial use, the applicable licence is “Attribution-NonCommercial”: in other words, you must attribute the source (see below). For details of the licence click the image below:

For commercial use (including, I repeat, advertising-supported blogs), you must attribute the source, and also issue the derivative work under an equivalent licence (Attribution-ShareAlike). For example, if you use any content from this site in a blog post, that post must be issued under this licence – the rest of your blog can remain under whatever licensing arrangement you choose. So that’s this licence here:

Please note that you only have to comply with one of those licences. So if you are using material for non-commercial purposes, you only have to comply with the first licence. If you are using material for commercial purposes, you only have to comply with the second licence.
Finally, these licences only apply to original material written by me. Any third-party material included on this site is not included within these licences. Third-party material is normally clearly recognisable from the context of the post (e.g. it’s an image, or blockquoted, or in quotation marks).
Attribution policy
Just commonsense, normal web practice: if you quote anything off this blog, a link back to the original post would be appreciated. If you quote it in printed format, just the blog address will do (currently www.confessingevangelical.com), though the post address or a TinyURL (or equivalent) link is also fine. Basically as long as I get the possibility of some traffic from it, I don’t care.