Education. Our Ministry

The Vocation and Education Unit of the ELCA works to advance the mission, vision, strategic directions, and abiding commitments of the ELCA. To play our role effectively in this work, we are guided by our own mission, vision, and values.

Committed to Faith — Dedicated to Truth
The Church is engaged in the task of education because it is dedicated to the truth. That dedication alone is its true nature and function…If [our] commitment to the faith is not one with our commitment to the truth, no multiplication of secondary consolations or benefits will suffice to sustain that commitment for [our] own integrity.¹ — Joseph Sittler

Lutherans in the United States have from their early days supported colleges as an expression of their trust in education and their hopes for the future. In the changing circumstances of the twenty-first century, this network of diverse institutions provides the Church with a grounded, supple and forward-looking resource essential for its witness in a context of multiple pluralisms and intense vocational hungers. Fortunate to have missed the full wave of secularization which weakened the college networks of many of its sister denominations,² the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) now faces the need to reaffirm institutional support of its colleges to renew their strength for a new generation.

For the Church itself, Lutheran colleges continue to provide formation for emerging leaders. While gifted candidates for ministry present themselves from a range of backgrounds and at many stages of life, liberal arts education in the context of faithful nurture remains an exceptionally valuable preparation for those preparing for pastoral and other leadership. The 55% of ELCA first-career candidates for rostered ministry who come from Lutheran schools is a startling proportion in the context of American Protestantism and a sign of the irreplaceable role which the colleges continue to play in the life of the Church.³

Yet the value of leadership educated at ELCA schools goes far beyond the Church's own needs. The Lutheran movement of reform has had vocation at the heart of its vision of Christian life — including the vocation of all the baptized for their work in the world. To claim the work of medicine or teaching or political service or corporate governance — and the work of family nurture — precisely as vocation is the challenge which Lutheran colleges seek to present explicitly and winsomely to their students. This shaping of careers of adult faithfulness in the light of the demands and gifts of Christian faith is, of course, a lifelong challenge in which congregations also have an essential part — but college years distinctively offer an opportunity for developing perspectives on work which will guide students through decades which may include a number of changes of job and even of profession into a long retirement of active service. In an American context in which the "hunger for spiritual meaning" is met on every side — and yet often pursued in ways which have become clichéd and shallow — the Church has in its colleges an outstanding means of helping seekers to direct their quests for meaning into lives of vocational usefulness.

Increasingly, the contexts of work for today's students will be global. All education is seeking to prepare students for this reality, but colleges of the Church have an opportunity to place this globalization of perspectives also into the context of Christian relationships. In our century the expansion of Christianity in the global south will be transforming for all communions — yet the character of that transformation is still undetermined. Where some foresee growing gulfs of misunderstanding and potential schisms, others see the opportunity for mutual enrichment by exchange and partnership with these vital new communities. One agent with potential to help effect the more positive outcome is the college system, with its resources both for the education of U.S. students, on campuses here and in experiences abroad, and also for cooperation with students from emerging communities, who can help to educate their peers and the wider Church during their exchanges.⁴

Such formation for the future is, of course, valuable to the many students at our colleges who are not ELCA members; moreover the contributions made by the work of graduates, Lutheran and not, go far beyond the communities of the Church. This rippling of good is to be celebrated as part of the vocation of our Churchwide structure, one of the ways of carrying through our public witness to the world and desire to serve it. As the Churchwide structures seeks to identify its particular avenues of activity and witness, support of the health of its college network must be reaffirmed. The history of the twentieth century shows that the Christian character of educational institutions cannot be taken for granted: it needs active attention and institutional commitment to sustain the distinctiveness of vocational identity which is subject to erosion from multiple pressures. Lutherans have tapped the vocational devotion and financial resources of generations to create for themselves a unique place in the world of American higher education, a place which would be minimized both to the cost of our own church and the impoverishment of the ecology of American Christian and civic life. A leading Roman Catholic theologian and observer of higher education wonders, if Lutherans were to weaken their commitment to liberal arts education in a Christian context, who would be left to join with his own tradition in this task — a task which can be described as the seeking of that region of wisdom where the people of God are fed with "the food of truth."⁵ To offer that truth, so constitutive of the life of our own bodies and so essential to the strength of what we do in the world, is the vision of Lutheran higher education. Its work needs the visible and substantive support of the entire Church.

Endnotes

1. Joseph Sittler, "Church Colleges and the Truth," in Faith, Learning, and the Church College, ed. Connie Gengenbach (Northfield, MN: St. Olaf College, 1989), p. 27; quoted in Tom Christenson, The Gift and Task of Lutheran Higher Education (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2004), p. 29. Christenson's book was published under the auspices of the Division for Higher Education and Schools as part of its ongoing effort to support the articulation and advocacy of a Lutheran understanding of the relationship between faith and learning.
    
2. In 1990, "presidents of the sixty-nine Presbyterian schools forming the Association of Presbyterian Colleges and Universities were warning that 'the Presbyterian Church could be close to the point where its involvement in higher education might be lost forever,"' and resolved to try to reclaim some of that role.
   
   A nuanced but critical presentation of the Presbyterian example, working backward from this declaration, can be found in Bradley J. Longfield and George W. Marsden, "Presbyterian Colleges in Twentieth-Century America," in The Pluralistic Vision: Presbyterians and Mainstream Protestant Education and Leadership, one of seven volumes in the Presbyterian Presences series edited by Milton J Coalter, John M. Mulder, and Louis B. Weeks (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1992, pp. 99-125.
   
   Longfield and Marsden relate the decisions of predecessor bodies of the Presbyterian Church (USA) by the 1980's to sever ties between the national denominations and the colleges; they argue that, despite recent efforts to strengthen the Christian mission of the schools, by the end of the last century "Presbyterians were still serving the nation by providing it with some respectable schools, but no longer did this service, other than being a good in itself, have a clear relationship to the distinctive goals of the church." Noting that the Episcopal Church, the Disciples of Christ and the United Church of Christ, among others, have taken similar routes, they conclude, "Though most church-related schools provide an ethos open to spiritual ideals and constructive humanitarian concerns, they now rarely seek to unite Christian faith and learning in any explicit way." (pp. 99, 123, 121.)
    
3. The number is for candidates 31 years of age or younger. When second -and third-career candidates are included as well, the number from Lutheran schools is still a remarkable 40%. (Statistics are kept by the ELCA Division for Ministry.)
    
4. The cautionary view of these changes has given by Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). A hopeful corrective was offered by H. George Anderson in his contribution to a symposium on Jenkins’ book, “As the Tide Turns: Third World Influence on an American Denomination,” (Hanover College, March 15, 2004). As an example, Anderson described how, because Lutheran colleges had several dozen students from southern African countries during the anti-apartheid struggles, local congregations and women’s groups heard their stories and sought to influence the policies of the national Church to support resistance. The example is an excellent one for showing the interdependence of all levels of ELCA life — the local actions would not have been taken without the partnership agreements sustained at the national level with both international Lutheranism and the college network.
    
5. John C. Cavadini, "The Food of Truth," in Labors from the Heart: Mission and Ministry in a Catholic University, ed. Mark L. Poorman, C.S.C. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), p. 66. The evaluation of Lutheran colleges in preparing students for the pursuit of wisdom, related in private conversation, reflects years of teaching experience with graduate students from many undergraduate backgrounds.