Bruce Church sent me an email about Concordia, St. Louis. Enrollment has gone from 150 grads and 150 vicars to 100 incoming pastoral students. That is a 33% drop.
I wonder if that Leonard Sweet conference in 2007 was a cry for help, the death rattle of a dying, misdirected seminary.
Lutherans are ashamed of Luther's doctrine and disinterested in the Book of Concord.
The newest mission counselor for WELS (which, translated, means Church Growth salesman) is indifferent about the Confessions.
The attitude about doctrine is illustrated by one WELS pastor, who earned a D.Min. in Church Growth from Fuller Seminary. No wait, it was from Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, the Midwest version of Fuller. He bought a case--yes, a case--of books by occultist Paul Y. Cho, to sell at a WELS conference.
What happens to these people? Many of them do very well in a material sense, so they stop trusting in God's Word. Why should they when marketing has worked so well with them? Many of them tumble for women or men and become such an embarrassment that they are forced out of the ministry. One prominent member of the North American Society for Church Growth, Lutheran Section, was arrested for soliciting in a men's public restroom.
Some of the Church Growth zombies do everything right and fail. They also lose faith because nothing worked for them. They blind themselves against the Word. They harden themselves against the Word. And then they ask why God has abandoned them.
The fatal enrollment figures at Concordia (probably at both of them) will bring pressure to merge the two schools. Both could easily be combined at St. Louis with Bethany and the Sausage Factory thrown in. They could be the Lutheran equivalent of this seminary:
Colgate-Rochester-Crozer-Bexley-St. Bernard. This mega-merged school has a total of seven faculty members. Some distinguished alumni of the school/schools are:
"Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Dr. Howard Thurman.
Leonard Sweet, author, preacher, scholar.
Dr. Johnny Douglas Turner, author of Rebuilding the Walls: A Call to Teaching in the African-American Church and The Sacred Art." (Wikipedia. The seminary's website lists people I have never heard of.)
