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| Maywood is a small town attached to Chicago. |
I found an alumnus of my tiny seminary, Waterloo Lutheran in Ontario, Canada. We had a big class - 10 students, which including one Episcopalian and a pastor's daughter. I found him in California, but we could not figure out what his profile meant. He did have a DMin from McCormick Seminary in Chicago, so that led me into a study of the Chicago seminaries.
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| Foreshadowing the genius of Tim Glende, the Presbyterians left their Lincoln Park campus for something they could not afford at LSTC. |
McCormick Presbyterian had a beautiful campus in Lincoln Park, funded by the reaper fortune man himself. When they left their buildings to move to Hyde Park (U. of Chicago and LSTC), an association formed to preserve the homes and keep them single-family.
Likewise, the ULCA campus in Maywood, another suburb, was spacious and attractive. To form the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, the ever-so-progressive LCA combined:
- Maywood
- Augustana
- Suomi
- Grand View
- Central
- Seminex later
- McCormick as an add-on.
McCormick does not like their situation, which initially meant being an annex to LSTC. My reaction was - looking back at 50 years of folly - they wasted millions of dollars
- to get rid of attractive, appealing campuses;
- to alienate the residents by removing them for the glory of God;
- to concentrate the radicals and decimate the finances.
Some of the readers will say, "So what, they were liberals anyway. Let them dissolve away." Not so fast. I vicared with a man who served in WWII, built up the largest Lutheran church in Canada, and served his synod as well.
The following generations betrayed what he and others did in that congregation, which had been independent for a long time. The new progressives had an Episcopalian bishop as an interim pastor and the congregation told the synod they would have gay marriages whether anyone approved or not.
When I was there, confirmation was taught from the Bible for three years, midweek, suppers provided. German services were provided every Sunday, and I helped with a few. Home and hospital visitation was constant. The sermons were Biblical.
Some people today could not imagine how tradtional the mainline congregations were. Some mainlines were far ahead of the rest. The Congregationalists, who were strong in Moline and Canada, were catching up to the Unitarians and emptying their vast churches.
Mergers made everything worse. The radicals capture the property and endowments while losing some of the members. They celebrate the loss of traditional members because the radicals no longer have to pretend - and they get far worse.
The Internet stories about ELCA-Presbyterian-Episcopalian-UCC seminaries today are a combination of -
- Big endowments, but financial crises
- Tiny enrollments
- Feeble interest in parish ministry
- Lots of non-parish programs
- Raw meat tossed to Social Justice Warriors
- Pansexualism.
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| Maybe the Lutherans should have kept a piece of this land, which Passavant bought for them, and asked for free tickets to Cubs games. This is now Wrigley Field. |
