Someone commented by email that both budget proposals doom the two WELS prep schools, one sooner than the other. Others have noted that Martin Luther College's dependence on prep school candidates has tied its survival to the preps, perhaps even to Michigan Lutheran Seminary alone. In other words, the loss of MLS by itself would push MLC closer to the edge.
The closing of the preps began with Norm Berg squeezing every nickel he could to start more po' folks missions - with ugly little WEFs and misery salaries. He did not want to waste his mission money on congregations with parochial schools, so he cut out financial help for a new parochial school. He made the first unit so hideously cheap that WEF stood for "water, electricity, flush toilet" - because the four cardboard walls contained little else. He wanted salaries kept low so he could have more mission starts. (However, Berg threw tons of money at the building and staff of Coral Springs, Florida, a Church Growth experiment ending in the debt-ridden church closing and being sold to the Antichrist. Rumors claim it was Berg's only attractive mission unit.)
Berg studied at Fuller Seminary, along with everyone else in missions, but he claimed that never affected his thinking. Pastors filled me in on Berg's "new mission mode, felt-needs" and Kelm's role in hyping the Fuller fads.
Cutting out the mission parochial school funds meant that Dr. Martin Luther College no longer had a job to do. It was an unaccredited school designed to create parochial teachers for WELS - period.
Eventually most congregations would close their schools. That was not the only factor, but it was a significant move against the whole concept. Catholics and Missouri Lutherans had once thought, "We will handle our own education." The larger groups eventually began recruiting any child to fund teachers' salaries. In time, WELS turned to that style of marketing.
Church Growth gurus like Berg, Kelm, and Hartman were against schools, so they began changing the percentage allotments in the budget. That change started with Mischke. Each year the schools got less money as a portion of the national budget.
No one could miss the implied message from all the Fuller veterans: "Missions are good and make us look fine; schools are bad, costly, and selfish." No one stopped to think that such slogans came from Fuller - a school, one which transformed all American churches with its idiotic slogans based on false doctrine. Education does work that way. It could work the other way, if given the chance.
The money managers want people to think that the answer is more dollars, but the real issue is the pie-chart. Clueless Voss knew enough to show seminary graduates that the school portion had been cut in half, and that was in 1987.
Berg and the other Shrinkers doomed DMLC, so they had to stage a takeover of Northwestern College to justify the New Ulm school's existence. After ignoring everyone's opinion, lying, and flipping the final vote (amalgamation lost), NWC was closed. So was the Prairie prep (now a prison). I heard that $30 million was spent on these cost-saving measures. The announced total was $8 million. Gurgel even boasted that he would shut down the process if the price tag went over $8 million. ("The check is in the mail," and other fables.)
Merging two colleges worked like a charm. Two viable schools became one failing college, thanks to the pie slice shrinking and the parochial schools closing.
More money is not the answer. WELS losts its nerve some decades ago - under Naumann, Mischke, and Gurgel. The sect decided that the Babtists and Pentecostals had all the answers. Ape them and WELS would grow again. Copy false teachers and the birth drought would disappear. If the offering money spent on Fuller, Trinity Deerfield, and Willow Creek had been lavished on school scholarships or teachers' salaries, the situation would be different today.
Fuller Seminary also taught WELS to boost The Love Shack staff every time the synod got smaller. Just like Planned Parenthood (which McGavran boosted), WELS thought the answer to the problem was more of the same. So Gurgel-Mueller cranked up school tuition for cash flow, decimated the school population, and cackled over closing MLS. In aiming at MLS, irrationally hated by Wisconsin-dwelling WELSians, they hit both preps, the college, and the seminary.
No one thought about reducing The Love Shack expenses. And every new Wild Hair world mission project was hailed as an achievement rather than examined as a cost. Fuller - thou has conquered.
Why does papa grin about GA? Does that mean Gator-Aid?"
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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Dooming the WELS Schools":
OK, you've piqued my curiosity; what is "to zechs" and what is "GA?"
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GJ - Zechsing is taken from the word sechstaner, originally the first year of prep school. Zechsing means the older classmates can impose upon, belittle, humiliate, physically and verbally abuse the first-year students. Some older students enjoy their time as bullies, repeating it in college and seminary. WELS has hazing rites all the way through, but I am not sure how many are done in the open now. GA is a not-so-secret seminary ritual where the first year students are manipulated for a week of mind games until they are sure a bunch of upper-classmen are out to get them for good. The Kinder (first-year students) break through the doors and find out it was all a joke. Some claim GA is gone or tamed, but another source tells me it went underground.
They claim GA creates unity, but in reality it creates conformity and a synod full of victims and bullies. How many synods can boast of a First VP who says, "When I get my hands on the guy who gave Greg Jackson that letter..."? That was said at a public meeting.
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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Dooming the WELS Schools":
GA is not dead. It is underground, carried out by a select few who are deemed worthy and reliable enough not to talk about it with anyone else. The hazing still happens, but not to everyone, just to a select few.
The first year students who are selected for hazing are instructed afterward to carry the tradition on when they are in their final year.
Wendland can think it's dead if he wants. But it's not.
