Nominees for Concordia Seminary President Announced

[Dave Likeness]

Into the 1950's the LCMS Springfield seminary was for 2nd career men
The St. Louis seminary was for guys going through the SYSTEM.

With the arrival of Dr. Jack Preus as President of Springfield the effort was
made to upgrade the faculty with Ph.D's and get the proper accreditation.
By the 1970's both seminaries were trying to recruit the same students
and St. Louis was getting more married seminarians.

Today, both seminaries are in a down cycle of recruitment whether it is married
or single students.  Both Ft. Wayne and St. Louis face challenges to reverse the
current recruitment trends. 

[Mark_Hofman]

Hey Mark,

Thanks for this.  Rather heartbreaking.  I got to know your Dad a little bit serving my first call on the Western Slope.  He was certainly kind and gentle to me.  Just curious, did you grow up in Delta/the Western Slope?

Peace,
Scott+

Yes.

[PrTim15]

Dad was a pastor, his dad, my Uncle, my great great grandfather...looks like I have a library to give to a young buck pastor down the line. Barring unforeseen circumstances the Klinkenberg line will die w me in LCMS. On another note our congregation in Orange has raised up a a fist full of guys both from St. Louis and CMC Irvine guys. So grateful to raise them up. We had a graduate this year who is in Des Peres, MO and one who will enter sem after this year having done Pre-sem at Irvine.  Students can be raised up not on the basis of a political proclivity of the congregation, but raised up by congregations that treat their pastors well. Students can be raised up by congregations that reinforce respect for the office, argue in healthy ways and follow after Jesus.

Enrollment, we have had roughly 20 years to study it social logically and theologically we have all the answers, but we lack something to get after it with any real passion or zeal. Certainly we struggle with creativity in the fact they the students need to get in a pipeline that seems to plop them into the sem's lap. Harvest is plentiful...

[Dave Benke]

Dad was a pastor, his dad, my Uncle, my great great grandfather...looks like I have a library to give to a young buck pastor down the line. Barring unforeseen circumstances the Klinkenberg line will die w me in LCMS. On another note our congregation in Orange has raised up a a fist full of guys both from St. Louis and CMC Irvine guys. So grateful to raise them up. We had a graduate this year who is in Des Peres, MO and one who will enter sem after this year having done Pre-sem at Irvine.  Students can be raised up not on the basis of a political proclivity of the congregation, but raised up by congregations that treat their pastors well. Students can be raised up by congregations that reinforce respect for the office, argue in healthy ways and follow after Jesus.

Enrollment, we have had roughly 20 years to study it social logically and theologically we have all the answers, but we lack something to get after it with any real passion or zeal. Certainly we struggle with creativity in the fact they the students need to get in a pipeline that seems to plop them into the sem's lap. Harvest is plentiful...

Good luck with the library hand-off.  I tried that with a tub of books on my way out of the District Presidency.  Ended up giving some of those to the library at Concordia, Bronxville.  Oops.
I do have couple of autgraphed books by Waldo Werning, a complete set of Lenski, and a book of Akkadian stele hieroglyphs for the discerning student.  And a complete set of Kittel but I'm using those.

And of course, For All the Saints, in daily use.

Dave Benke

Dave Benke

[Richard Johnson]

I have a complete set of Kittel that I'm not using. If anyone's interested, drop me a note.

[J. Thomas Shelley]

Dad was a pastor, his dad, my Uncle, my great great grandfather...looks like I have a library to give to a young buck pastor down the line. Barring unforeseen circumstances the Klinkenberg line will die w me in LCMS. On another note our congregation in Orange has raised up a a fist full of guys both from St. Louis and CMC Irvine guys. So grateful to raise them up. We had a graduate this year who is in Des Peres, MO and one who will enter sem after this year having done Pre-sem at Irvine.  Students can be raised up not on the basis of a political proclivity of the congregation, but raised up by congregations that treat their pastors well. Students can be raised up by congregations that reinforce respect for the office, argue in healthy ways and follow after Jesus.

Your spiritual sons...a blessed legacy.

Reminds me of a verse from last Sunday's Third Tone Antiphony:

Gazing on your offspring round about your table bearing branches of good works,
be glad, O arch-pastor.

[Brian Stoffregen]

I have a complete set of Kittel that I'm not using. If anyone's interested, drop me a note.

They would make a nice background for zoom meetings.

[PrTim15]

So funny, somewhere someone has the last 4 Volumes of Kittel's TDNT...I only have first 6 volumes, Alpha through Lambda I'm fairly strong...after Lambda not so much:)

[Dave Benke]

I have a complete set of Kittel that I'm not using. If anyone's interested, drop me a note.

They would make a nice background for zoom meetings.

There you have it!  I have actually recently explored the camera angle to focus on my bookshelf where the Kittels reside.  But I'd have to remove the golf tournament trophies, and that's just not going to happen.  I do have the last four volumes, Tim - but I am pretty sure there's a full set at the Concordia Bronxville library with your name on it.

Dave Benke

[peter_speckhard]

Just as a reminded from about four years ago. The main company involved with the printing of library cards went out of business long ago, but their very last order was for a hard copy backup set of a complete library card catalog system, to be delivered to Concordia College, Bronxville. I remember telling John Nunes on facebook that a great fundraiser would be to auction off the framed cards for people's favorite books as the very last such card ever commercially printed. The perfect gift for any bibliophile on your Christmas list who doesn't necessarily need more books to store. I guess Iona now owns them.   

[peterm]

Bishop Benke's point about the decline of spiritual formation of our youth in the home
and church is a key factor in the low enrollment at our seminaries.  My Quinta year at
Concordia High School in Milwaukee, i had 5 room mates in my dorm. Four of them
were the sons of pastors.  PK's (Pastor's Kids) were  numerous on the campus.  It was
almost like they were continuing to build the family   business. 

Today, how many pastors encourage their sons and daughters to prepare for church work
in one of our Concordia universities?    How many parents in our parishes encourage their
children to become church workers?  The Lutheran families in our local Lutheran parishes
are still the best pipeline to our Concordia universities.  The local Lutheran pastor is still
a key component in the recruitment of our youth for full-time church work.

I had a professor make the same point. He asked all the PK's in the class to raise their hands. Only a few went up. He said in his seminary class the majority would have gone up.

Family devotions have waned as a normal thing that your kids could mention in the course of conversation with their friends without having to explain or being looked at like some sort of fanatic. Assign memory work in Confirmation and it is just as often the parents saying memory work is a waste of time as it is the kids. We're like an old classic volume, but the glue in the binding has dried up and the pages are starting to fall out.

I know the good old days were never as rosy as they exist in lore. The church culture that Dave Benke describes in Milwaukee or that my mom experienced in Seward-- not just the schooling, but the homelife, worship experience, and life expectations of the typical student one might meet-- it was by no means perfect. In some ways it might have been far to insular, limiting, or sectarian. But they grew up in a comprehensive, cohesive culture (or subcultural) that knew what it was doing and why. They had a clear sense of mission purpose to everyday life. It started running out of steam maybe the late 60's or so and continued on momentum into the late 80's or early 90's, but we've been grasping about at purposes ever since. We just sort of lost interest in being who we were and became like Peter Brady trying on new personalities. Church growth. Confessional renewal. Social activism. Preservation of moral standards. But it is all disjointed and has no central sense of identity animating it anymore. At least it seems that way to me.

We can't do what we used to be able to do, and it isn't because we have less money or fewer people. It is because to dedicate yourself to anything self-sacrificially with any kind of zeal, you have to be sure you want to do it. You either have to see the point or take it on faith that it is self-evident.

I think RJN saw this coming and wrote about how to deal with it all the way back in the late 70's in his book Freedom for Ministry. It's one of the reasons I'm far more up on The Benedict Option than many others, who see it as repristination, shrinking from challenge, disengaging the world or whatever. I don't think it is any of those things. I think many of the Lutherans who speak against the Benedict Option as Dreher presents it do so because they already have what the book recommends Christians be deliberate about finding-- a close-knit community of fellow believers who share their lives, not just their worship space on Sunday mornings. It is the willingness to work within the sphere of vocation in community, not alone. It means living among people who know what they're doing and why as Christians and thereby building up one's own faith, the Church, and ultimately the world.   

Good stuff here.  I wonder to what extent we can help create that setting that brings faith into daily life and conversation beyond Sunday or even Wednesday?  I think this might be critical as more and more folk don't have that experience in life.  We've done some of that during this pandemic time with Advent and now Lenten family activity boxes that replace some of our normal prepandemic activities.

[Richard Johnson]

So funny, somewhere someone has the last 4 Volumes of Kittel's TDNT...I only have first 6 volumes, Alpha through Lambda I'm fairly strong...after Lambda not so much:)

Funny you should ask. On the PBS Newshour tonight they were interviewing a gentlemen from Texas about his experience with the current freezing weather. They didn't really identify his vocation, but he was sitting in front of a book case. One could see a set of Kittel behind him, but now that I think of it, it looked like only four volumes. . . .

[PrTim15]

Love this...wonder who it was... BTW enrollment is issue

[Dave Likeness]

I have a complete set of Kittel.  The late, great, Dr. Fred Danker told his N.T. Theology classes
at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis: "Kittel offers outstanding definitions of the Greek that even
first-rate N.T. commentaries cannot match."

[Dan Fienen]

My library is so déclassé that it only has the abridged one volume edition of Kittel. Even so, still has been useful.