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| You're not funding the sacred music program and the PhD? |
Here is the email from Interim President Rick Foss:
March 19, 2013
Dear colleagues,
This is a hard day at Luther Seminary, as we announce very difficult decisions. You may have already heard some of the news of staff reductions. In an effort to be clear and candid, I’d like to share the situation more fully in this letter. Let me start by acknowledging how painful it is to be saying goodbye to talented and faithful friends and colleagues.
Background
In mid-October, it became clear that Luther Seminary was spending well beyond our means. When we investigated the situation, we found we were over-spending on an annual basis by several million dollars. Unfortunately, we were relying on loans from financial institutions, as well as from our endowment, to cover our expenses. While the money was being spent on excellent initiatives, including personnel, programs and innovative missional work, it was clear we could not sustain this rate of spending.
In the early part of 2013, we realized we need to reduce our annual operating expenses by at least $4 million. In addition, once we do that, we will need to make additional adjustments to begin paying back our loans and fund our deferred maintenance. In light of this stark financial reality, the administrative cabinet created a comprehensive plan to evaluate all program, faculty and staff expenses. As you know, there have been numerous discussions with faculty, staff and students to explore our options, as we address our immediate and long-term financial challenges.
In February, the Board instructed us to reduce the expenses for Fiscal Year 2014 (July 1, 2013-June 30, 2014) by at least $3 million. Yesterday the Board affirmed our recommendations for meeting that requirement. This means the following difficult decisions have been made.
Decisions
Staff: We are making changes to 30 positions out of 125 staff positions. We notified 18 people today, in individual conversations, that their positions are being eliminated. As you can imagine, those were extremely difficult discussions. In addition, three people have decided to retire and nine open positions will not be filled. Many of these colleagues will be leaving around April 5, though others may be staying until the end of June. Each person was given a severance package, along with outplacement services. We will have time over the coming weeks to say goodbye to people whom we love and respect. Please keep them in your prayers as they begin this transitional time in their lives.
Faculty: Eight faculty members have announced their decisions to retire or take a new call by June 30, 2013. In total there are 44 faculty positions. Additional faculty members have declared their plans to retire in the following year. While we were aware of some of these retirements, it is still sobering to see so many gifted professors leave at the same time. As with the staff, we will have opportunities to express our appreciation to them in the coming months.
Programs: As previously announced, the Master of Sacred Music program will remain on hold. We will accompany the two remaining students as they complete their degrees. In the Ph.D. program, we will not admit new students for the next three years. During this time, we will continue to support our current Ph.D. students as usual. The faculty has committed to exploring new options for the Ph.D. program, seeking a model that continues to offer high-quality curriculum and is financially viable for the future. I will send out a more detailed letter about both programs within the next few days.
Other: We have also made the difficult decision, for financial reasons, to close Wee Care, our early childhood education program. It was originally opened to provide care for the children of our students, faculty and staff. Over time, the makeup has shifted and now the vast majority of children come from elsewhere in the area. Parents of Wee Care children have been notified today that the program is closing on June 30, 2013.
What then are we to say…
As we make these announcements, I am deeply aware of the sadness in our community. I wish things were different. I will never think of this day as a good day; it simply isn’t. There will be good days ahead, but this isn’t one of them.
I keep returning to the verses in Romans that have been my anchor these past months: “… The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words … We know that in all things God works for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose … What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? ... Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? ... No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” - Romans 8:26ff
May God’s blessings be with us all as we seek his guidance, comfort and peace.
In Christ,
Rick
While the particular issues that beset Luther are not those that beset other seminaries, can / will residential seminaries survive with the panoply of issues that the 21st century is throwing at them? How will / can they thrive? What issues do seminaries have to deal with? What suggestions could be made to improve their service to the church in providing trained pastors?
Scott Yakimow
- ALPB Forum Regular
Associate Professor of Theology
Concordia University, Portland
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I am old enough to remember when the seminaries of the ALC and the ELC were wholly owned by their respective national church body and the majority of the costs of operating those seminaries were provided out of the national church body's annual budget. (I suspect something like that may have also been true in the LCMS.) If I remember correctly, in 1960 about 80% of the total cost of operating the ALC's seminaries was paid for out of the ALC's budget. Apparently, preparing pastors and other workers for the church was a high priority for those church bodies at that time. If the work a residential seminary does were to be valued that highly by its church body again, then that seminary would be just as viable as our seminaries were when I was young.
Mel Harris
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There is a growing movement in the legal community to reform the legal education system by, among other things, reducing a law degree from 3 years to 2. I graduated from law school in 1995 when jobs were relatively plentiful, but now, I hear many of the same complaints from new law grads as from new seminary grads - crushing debt and few jobs. So, I think significant reform of the legal education system is around the corner.
Regarding seminary education, I was ordained in the ELCA through TEEM, which was about half online and half on campus (occasional weekends and week long classes in the summer). I actually found the online seminary courses more conducive to academic learning than the traditional lecture format because of the high level of interaction between students, and between students and the professor.
What is lacking, of course, in online classes is any real the opportunity for students and faculty to come together in prayer and worship. So, for what its worth, my thought is that for residential seminaries to survive, the on-campus environment needs to focus less on the academic model of learning, and more on fostering an environment that emphasizes communal prayer and worship. Morning chapel will not be enough. Students with a high church piety will go to seminaries like Nashotah House where they pray the daily offices and have daily Eucharist. [GJ - Nashotah is a gay-feminist seminary. Ask ELS Sem Prez Gaylin Schmeling.] Students with a lower piety will go to seminaries with a focus on fostering groups of prayer and Bible study.
GJ - Do they need a lethargic four-year program of drinking and partying on top of four years of the same in college? That point has been made on Ichabod.
I do not wish denominational slavery on my worst enemies.
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| "Brett, stop shaking your head. We are becoming more confessional by working with WELS." |
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Today, Luther Seminary posted on its facebook page thatPastor Andrena Ingram, a pastor known for giving out free condoms at her church, will be preaching at their chapel tomorrow. Here is what the Luther Seminary post said, "This week is HIV/AIDS Awareness Week. The Rev. Andrena Ingram will preach in chapel tomorrow at 11 a.m. Chapel will be followed by a conversation at 11:45 a.m. in the OCC Lecture Room (lower level)." (see here)
You should read the article Exposing the ELCA wrote about Pastor Ingram earlier this spring. (read) |
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http://saveelca.blogspot.com/2006/01/luther-seminary-brokeback-mountain-and.html
Monday, January 16, 2006
Luther Seminary, Brokeback Mountain and the ascendancy of narcissism.
A fairly well-known conference speaker, author, and professor has resigned from Luther Seminary and the ELCA Clergy Roster. She says, "I’d like to let you know that another letter from me was hand delivered, by my bishop, Peter Rogness, to the Conference of Bishops, this week. This letter informed them of my intention to resign from the clergy roster of the ELCA on the basis of my inability to live in compliance with 'Section III: Sexual Conduct' of the document titled Visions and Expectations (specifically the sentence that reads 'Ordained ministers who are homosexual in their self-understanding are expected to abstain from homosexual sexual relationships')."
In her letter, Fryer glides quickly over her divorce last year: "Some of you were aware of the cataclysmic changes in my personal life, culminating in the sad and quiet ending of my marriage very early last year. When I came to Luther three years ago, this was not something I ever dreamed would happen." There is not a word about sin, not a word about guilt. She goes on to talk about all she wants to do to bring renewal to the church. When it is viewed in the cold light of day the letter is a whole lot of "me-isms" : I am writing, I want to share, I begin to move in new directions, I want to make clear, me and my new partner want to do ministry, I am not going to change my message.
Poor Kelly and the poor people who are going to make her into a type of "the new visionary," She can be our Gene Robinson. Things just didn't work out, and her friend of 10 years is just coincidently going through the same thing (abandoning her spouse). No sin, no guilt, not adultery.
Sounds a little like Brokeback Mountain. We've all heard what a wonderful movie it is and how visionary, these two men, in a time that was so oppressive, had the courage to love each other. Beans! All the positive reviews, how many even mention that both men went on to marry after their summer of love, had children and then tore their families through their self indulgent adultery.
No, it's not called self-indulgent adultery by the politically correct. It's called self-fulfillment. Did you read Walter Sundberg's essay on Gnosticism and the ELCA? He quotes from an essay written by Leander Harding:
Now read Fryer's letter from the Luther web site:
I really don't have any personal animosity towards Ms. Fryer, but (yeah, big but) as I already pointed out (judgmentally, but hey, it is so representative, so typical of our generation) her letter, which I think was supposed to be a resignation letter, was a head-spinning piece of self-promotion (who puts their web site in a resignation letter) and you better betcha that it is a calculated moving forward of the gay movement. I doubt that she cuts any ties with the seminary and will probably find herself on campus on a fairly regular basis and will probably be adored by many students as a "martyr to the movement" (can't you picture her being mobbed as she gets lunch in the cafeteria?).
We really need to revisit the issue of divorce. If clergy with a PhD can go through one and not acknowledge that they did anything wrong, our "I'm OK, you're OK" stuff from a few decades back took hold more than we imagined. We need to teach on cohabitation. We have couples calling churches all the time who have no hint that they are doing anything wrong by living together before marriage, and they leave after the first counselling session still not being told that it's a sin. If you can't see the ELCA doing anything about divorce, that is a pretty good reason to leave the denomination.
But, oops, I didn't mean to say that. I think you should stay and fight if possible, at least until the end of summer 2007…
It's nice to see the lc3 web site and to hear about Lutheran CoRe.
People, educate yourself, then go forth and educate your congregation and colleagues. The time is upon us.
In her letter, Fryer glides quickly over her divorce last year: "Some of you were aware of the cataclysmic changes in my personal life, culminating in the sad and quiet ending of my marriage very early last year. When I came to Luther three years ago, this was not something I ever dreamed would happen." There is not a word about sin, not a word about guilt. She goes on to talk about all she wants to do to bring renewal to the church. When it is viewed in the cold light of day the letter is a whole lot of "me-isms" : I am writing, I want to share, I begin to move in new directions, I want to make clear, me and my new partner want to do ministry, I am not going to change my message.
Poor Kelly and the poor people who are going to make her into a type of "the new visionary," She can be our Gene Robinson. Things just didn't work out, and her friend of 10 years is just coincidently going through the same thing (abandoning her spouse). No sin, no guilt, not adultery.
Sounds a little like Brokeback Mountain. We've all heard what a wonderful movie it is and how visionary, these two men, in a time that was so oppressive, had the courage to love each other. Beans! All the positive reviews, how many even mention that both men went on to marry after their summer of love, had children and then tore their families through their self indulgent adultery.
No, it's not called self-indulgent adultery by the politically correct. It's called self-fulfillment. Did you read Walter Sundberg's essay on Gnosticism and the ELCA? He quotes from an essay written by Leander Harding:
The quintessential American Religion is the quest for the true and original self which is the 'pearl of great price,' the ultimate value. Finding the true self requires absolute and complete freedom of choice unconstrained by any sources of authority outside the self. Limits upon personal freedom and choice are an affront to all that is sacred to the American Religion. When the self-determining self finds 'the real me' salvation is achieved. . .Gene Robinson was elected Bishop of the Episcopal Church in New Hampshire not in spite of being gay, not as an act of toleration and compassion toward gay people, but because he is gay and as such an icon of the successful completion of the quest to find the true and original self. . .[D]ivorcing his wife and leaving his family to embrace the gay lifestyle is not some unfortunate concession to irresistible sexual urges but an example of the pain and sacrifice that the seeker of the true self must be willing to endure. That natural, organic, and conventional restraints must be set aside is a time-worn Gnostic nostrum . . . Because Gene Robinson has 'found himself' he has. . .found God and is naturally thought to be a 'spiritual person' and a fit person to inspire and lead others.
Now read Fryer's letter from the Luther web site:
12 January 2006
An open letter to my friends and colleagues who are part of the staff, faculty, student body, and boards of Luther Seminary; and to all those across the church who are my co-learners and partners in ministry:
Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
I am writing to you with a heavy — but hopeful! — heart.
I want to share with you my decision to resign from the faculty of Luther Seminary. This decision hasn’t been easy or quick. In fact, since I arrived at Luther, three years ago, I have been wrestling with whether or not this is a place from which I can best fulfill my call to help lead the church in renewal for the sake of God’s mission in the world. In recent days, after much prayer and conversation, it has become clear to me that God is leading me in new directions. I’ve spent a lot of time talking with colleagues and the leadership of Luther Seminary about various options that would serve the seminary best and, also, my sense of call to do a new thing. Some of you may be aware of how complicated — and prayerful — this process has been. In the end, I’ve decided to make my resignation effective immediately. It has been a privilege to be a part of some important initiatives here at Luther Seminary and I hope that, as I begin to move in new directions, Luther will consider me a friend and partner in the kingdom work to which we have all been called. In fact, I want to make two things clear. First, this decision stems from a relationship of mutual respect and reflects the high regard in which I hold Luther Seminary and they hold me. And, second, although the situation I describe below has complicated this process a bit, my decision is not being driven by it. I am thankful for the warm words of encouragement and appreciation I have received from the administration and from many of my colleagues on the faculty here; and I look forward to dreaming with them about creative new ways for us to be in partnership together in the years ahead.
On a separate and more personal note, I’d like to let you know that another letter from me was hand delivered, by my bishop, Peter Rogness, to the Conference of Bishops, this week. This letter informed them of my intention to resign from the clergy roster of the ELCA on the basis of my inability to live in compliance with "Section III: Sexual Conduct" of the document titled Visions and Expectations (specifically the sentence that reads "Ordained ministers who are homosexual in their self-understanding are expected to abstain from homosexual sexual relationships").
Some of you were aware of the cataclysmic changes in my personal life, culminating in the sad and quiet ending of my marriage very early last year. When I came to Luther three years ago, this was not something I ever dreamed would happen. I want to thank you for the support, prayers, and encouragement you offered to me during that time. These events, however, created space for me to see things I had never seen before. Even as our church has been publicly wrestling with the issue of sexual orientation over this past year, I have been on a private journey of my own. It has been scary and confusing, but it has also been full of joy. As it turns out, the remarkable woman who has been my best friend for over ten years has a story not unlike my own. We are looking forward to our future together...making a home, raising our kids, doing ministry.
It makes me sad that finding such happiness and wholeness in my life means that, at this point, I cannot serve as a pastor in my church. And I hope that one day I will again be a member of the ELCA clergy roster. But, in the meantime, I am committed to continuing my ministry of teaching and writing in this church, for the sake of our call to participate in God’s passionate mission to love and bless the world. In fact, I have chosen this approach to communicate with you because I want it to be clear that I have no interest in being drawn into the unhealthy fascination our culture — and our church — has with matters sexual. To be sure, I disagree strongly with the current policies of the ELCA on these issues. But, frankly, my primary concern isn't about what is happening "in here!" My passion is — and has always been — for the mission field into which God is sending us. My heart beats for God’s world "out there."
I believe the gift of salvation, which we receive through faith in Jesus Christ, is also a call to participate in God’s mission in the world. For some crazy reason, God uses people — even people like you and me! — to get it done. "Come follow me!" Jesus says, especially to those of us who least deserve it, and to all of us together. Answering this call isn’t a right any of us has. It is, however, a responsibility we all share...every single one of us. In fact, this call to be a part of God's passionate mission to reach the world is at the very core of what it means to be a Christian. It is at the heart of what it means to be the Church. As we answer this call, I believe we can be guided by these five simple principles: Jesus is Lord, Everyone is Welcome, Love Changes People, Everybody has Something to Offer, and The World Needs What We Have. This mission and these values give shape to my life and my ministry. They have been — and will continue to be — at the very center of all my preaching, teaching, researching, learning, and writing. In fact, in the months and years to come, I make this promise to you:The message you hear from me will be the same message you have always heard.
Please know that I am open to hearing from and being in conversation with you as we move forward. I am excited about what lies ahead, although I am not certain yet exactly what form my ministry will take. I am hopeful about the many good things that God will do and is doing in the midst of all these changes. And I ask for your prayers. To be sure, you are in mine.
In Christ,
Kelly A. Fryer
kellyfryer@comcast.net
www.arenewalenterprise.com
I really don't have any personal animosity towards Ms. Fryer, but (yeah, big but) as I already pointed out (judgmentally, but hey, it is so representative, so typical of our generation) her letter, which I think was supposed to be a resignation letter, was a head-spinning piece of self-promotion (who puts their web site in a resignation letter) and you better betcha that it is a calculated moving forward of the gay movement. I doubt that she cuts any ties with the seminary and will probably find herself on campus on a fairly regular basis and will probably be adored by many students as a "martyr to the movement" (can't you picture her being mobbed as she gets lunch in the cafeteria?).
We really need to revisit the issue of divorce. If clergy with a PhD can go through one and not acknowledge that they did anything wrong, our "I'm OK, you're OK" stuff from a few decades back took hold more than we imagined. We need to teach on cohabitation. We have couples calling churches all the time who have no hint that they are doing anything wrong by living together before marriage, and they leave after the first counselling session still not being told that it's a sin. If you can't see the ELCA doing anything about divorce, that is a pretty good reason to leave the denomination.
But, oops, I didn't mean to say that. I think you should stay and fight if possible, at least until the end of summer 2007…
It's nice to see the lc3 web site and to hear about Lutheran CoRe.
People, educate yourself, then go forth and educate your congregation and colleagues. The time is upon us.
