Michigan Lutheran Seminary Brochure

A layman mailed me the Michigan Lutheran Seminary brochure. I found it sad, touching, and disturbing as well. Doubtless the Luther Prep situation is almost the same, but I have direct connections to MLS through our son. Besides, MLS will be closed immediately if Wayne Mueller still has the last word on the subject. Luther Prep is slated to go as well, but that will take a few more months.

Whenever MLS students wear their logo around Saginaw, residents ask them, "Are they really closing your school?" A residential school develops quite a spirit among its students, faculty, parents, and alumni. Each question must be painful to hear. Naturally, this funereal atmosphere keeps enrollments depressed and gifts on hold. Why would someone give to a school that is closing?

I was still in the Michigan District, WELS, when the DP and his loyal robots provided the district meeting with four different ways to close Northwestern College. All four were soundly defeated, even though they were presented as if an angel from heaven wrote them. Nevertheless, the same DP, Robert Mueller, showed up at the WELS convention and spoke in favor of closing NWC.

MLS anticipated the budget pressures against the school. This is clearly a case of Wayne Mueller and Company funding their missionaries all over the world, a huge budget for technology, needless magazines, and other frills, while saying, "We cannot afford two preps, or even one." The Church Growth people will turn Luther Prep into Marty's Live Bait Shop as soon as they can get the sign painted.

MLS had a plan to create self-support for their school, but the synod leaders aborted that by announcing the closing. According to the brochure, members of the synodical council were kept ignorant of these plans when the closing was being discussed and approved. I sense personal animosity and vindictiveness behind the plans to close MLS.

I wrote this before: Church Growth people hate schools. This is the fruit of Church Growth tolerated and supported. More than one Lutheran pastor has been mugged while opposing Church Growth. Too bad so many fellow pastors stood by and watched. Now no one is left with any fight.

From a distance, I interpret the sudden drop in national giving to a complete rejection of the Mueller/Gurgel regime. The closings I interpret as retaliation by Mueller, the way school boards threaten communities with the loss of their favorite programs if the millage is voted down. As Wayne wrote on his gaseous blog, "Does it hurt enough yet?"