Nevada cities are banning homeless encampments in record heat. With too few shelters, people are being punished just for surviving.

This isn’t compassion. It’s cruelty.

As people of faith, we stand with our unhoused neighbors.
✊ Join the fight for housing justice.

Rural communities in Nevada and across the U.S. are losing access to healthcare at alarming rates. Between 2019 and 2024, small towns lost nearly 2,500 physicians and 3,300 practices closed, leaving patients with 11% fewer options for care (KNPR).

Independent doctors are being hit the hardest — their numbers have dropped by 43% in rural areas. For Nevadans outside Reno and Las Vegas, that means longer drives, delayed checkups, and fewer specialists close to home.

The reasons are clear: low reimbursement rates, high malpractice costs, limited residency opportunities, and financial pressures that make rural practice unsustainable.

What Nevada needs: more residency slots, fairer reimbursement, loan-repayment incentives, and support for rural practices. Healthcare is a matter of justice — and no community should be left behind.

Critical programs that protect the integrity of our air, soil, water, and the habitats that sustain all living creatures are at risk.

As Congress considers a budget for 2026, proposals across the government would make deep cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Clean Water and Drinking Water State Revolving Funds, Superfund cleanup and environmental justice programs—rolling back progress on safeguarding public health and creation care. These cuts could result in increased pollution of our air, contamination of our water and degradation of the habitats creation calls home. As people of faith, we are called to steward creation so that all life may flourish. Programs that protect clean air, restore soil health, provide safe drinking water and safeguard habitats for wildlife are essential for the well-being of our neighbors, human and nonhuman alike.  

As the ELCA social statement Caring for Creation: Vision, Hope, and Justice cautions, “Our current practices may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner we know.” 

Join us in asking Congress to ensure their budget negotiations reflect the vision of creation flourishing! What do you see locally? Customize this message to increase its effectiveness. 

HAPPENING RIGHT NOW!

The Nevada Public Utilities Commission is ruling on NV Energy’s rate hike request:

Rates will go up

• Starting April 2026: new daily demand charge (your bill will depend on your highest daily use).
• Solar customers: current customers are safe, but new ones will see changes.
• Low-income families: no discount yet, but solutions are being studied.

We’re fighting to make sure community voices are heard and families aren’t left behind.

In case you were wondering, Lutherans (of the ELCA variety) are crystal clear. Christian Nationalism is a “distortion of the Christian Faith.” It is an “unhealthy expression of patriotism.” It is not the way of Jesus. Don’t be confused by what you are hearing.

At our churchwide assembly in Phoenix this summer, we adopted a social statement on Civic Life & Faith. Article 38 states:

“At the time of this writing, there is a peculiar form of unhealthy patriotism gaining traction in the United States—Christian nationalism. Christian nationalist belief seeks to fuse selected Christian ideas about what should be the national way of life with a comprehensive cultural framework. That framework incorporates highly selective narratives, practices, symbols, and value systems. For example: “In a Christian nation, social power is placed in the service of the Christian religion.” Christian nationalism explicitly seeks to implement such a legislative framework. Yet, this “turns God into a mascot for the state.

​​”In hardline strains of Christian nationalism, only white, U.S.-born, Christian believers are considered genuine U.S. citizens. This privileging of white, U.S.-born Christians is connected to our country’s violent practices of white supremacy, such as Jim Crow laws or the hundreds of years of Black African slavery.

“Such belief in an intrinsic moral and intellectual superiority of white European Christian civilization has been used to justify as natural and right that white Christians, especially males, should be in power. Such views about race, ethnicity, sex, social/economic class, and religion deny that one’s birth in the nation or one’s great contributions and service to the country are enough for a resident to be considered a “true American.” It distorts who is considered to be a true citizen of the nation.

“A comparison of any strain of religious nationalism, including Christian nationalism, with the actual teachings of Jesus and of the Holy Scriptures reveals that these values are not Christlike. Christian nationalism, in particular, perverts the Christian message by cherry-picking texts that interpret the Scriptures in ways that connect religion to domination. Christian nationalism fuses an imagined conception of a Christian nation with a false vision of God’s ultimate will. It confuses the kingdom of God with a particular government. Jesus rejects identification of earthly structures with God’s kingdom or will: “My kingdom does not belong to this world” (John 18:36). Lutherans teach that the kingdom of God is not a nation, not a particular culture, not a racial grouping, not a form of government, and not even a denomination or a religion (Article xx).

“For theological reasons, the ELCA repudiates Christian nationalism as a distortion of the Christian faith that crosses the line into idolatry. This church also realizes that Christian nationalism contradicts the U.S. motto, e pluribus unum (out of many, one). It effectively substitutes “we the (self-declared) true American-Christians” for “we the people.” It is an unhealthy form of patriotism that harms this country, divides it, and especially endangers the well-being of vulnerable members of our society.”