How Norm Berg Killed Martin Luther College

I remember the old days, when WELS was entirely foreign to me. No one paid attention to WELS because the synod was almost absent where I lived and worked. I used to walk by a WELS church near a cornfield on my way to college. In my second call there was a small WELS church in Sturgis. I went to meet the pastor there.

A WELS church usually opened with a small school. Apparently they funded the building, the pastor, and a teacher. Bronze Age Lutherans remember schools with no tuition - it was part of the budget. When schools turned to tuition, they soon became private schools or even reform schools for the general public. That is the source of the lawsuit against California Lutheran High (WELS). Girls were kicked out for allegedly being lesbian, on very shaky grounds. The school was not all-WELS, so the normal excuses for abusing authority could not be used. California has strict laws about public institutions. One may expect this case to cost a bundle.

Getting back to Norm Berg, veteran of Fuller Seminary. How did I know? Do I have video of him on the campus? Do I have his tuition bill? No, I have a letter from him where he confessed. Berg was the head of Home Missions for WELS. He promoted "New Mode" evangelism, based on felt needs. Google "felt needs" and you will get Fuller material. I attended a brain-washing session where Berg bragged about taking mission church money away from the teachers. If the buildings were tinier (WEFs) and only one person funded with a pitiful salary (the pastor), then Berg could conquer North America with his missions. I was at a conference where Berg hoped out loud that he could defeat higher salaries for mission pastors to have more money for his missions. Pastors were costly overhead, but home office drones were not.

So WELS wasted millions on the ugliest, cheapest WEFs and stopped building schools. They did overfund one church in Coral Gables, Florida, filled it with Church Growth gurus, and sold the beautiful church building to Catholics when the experiment collapsed. Those gurus are not even Lutheran today.

So Berg effectively took away the need for Dr. Martin Luther College as a teacher's college. After a few decades, the need for training parochial school teachers dropped. DMLC refused state certification for years, so a degree from DMLC was pretty limiting.

WELS schools are closing right and left now. The parochial schools are closing for various reasons (costs, greying of the denomination). The preps will probably be gone soon, throwing more teachers into the secular workplace. "You mean we can't haze students in public school? Drop them upside-down from a window on the second floor? I miss my prep school."

Norm Berg is not the only Church Growth leader to put a hex on the school system. His work at 2929 N. Mayfield (The Love Shack) was all Church Growth. If you seek a monument for Church Growth in WELS, look around you. Count the empty pews, the empty buildings, and the many lawsuits.