Wednesday, January 3, 2018

Muslim College Buys ELCA Lutheran Seminary Campus in Berkeley



Muslim college buys Lutheran seminary campus in Berkeley:



"Spokeswoman Karin Grennan said admissions at the seminary have fallen off, but it also wanted to be able to provide its graduate students opportunities to work with social service agencies and develop urban ministries near downtown Berkeley.

Pacific Lutheran has 49 students enrolled in various degree programs. It had occupied the hilltop campus, with six buildings, for 64 years."

 Mose drawing water from a rock - Pacific Seminary.

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Berkeley Residents Worry, Cal Lutheran Says -

 "The 6.6-acre property is much larger than needed to serve the 48 degree students and its aging buildings need millions of dollars in work. Utility and maintenance costs as well as the seminary's carbon footprint will drop significantly with the move."


Chapel at Pacific Seminary


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The New Digs - Study Advocacy, Look Down at Riots

The new location in the heart of Berkeley will provide more opportunities for the seminarians to engage with diverse members of the public, work with social service agencies and learn firsthand about the needs and opportunities in urban locations. The building is across the street from Berkeley City Hall, next to a YMCA and near a high school and two colleges. As they prepare for their roles as healers, the students will be surrounded by people in need of ministry, including the homeless who gather at a nearby park. While they study advocacy, they can look out the window to see protests on the steps of City Hall. The move dovetails with a proposal in the works to revise the seminary’s curriculum to better connect students to the people and issues of the world.

All the ELCA Seminaries Are Like "Honey, I Shrunk the School"

Question: Does this move put us at a disadvantage with other seminaries?


While we don’t know the answer to this question, we do know that all of the other ELCA seminaries are taking major steps toward addressing size and space issues. None is going to stay just as they are (sic - just as it is). Two are merging, one other has merged with a university before us, and a fourth seminary has just announced such intentions. Another seminary has sold quite a bit of its property.

 Phyllis Anderson, a graduate of Wartburg Seminary,
was the first woman president of a Lutheran seminary - Pacific. She anticipated selling the campus and downsizing.


'via Blog this'

Louise Johnson, DD, Lands a Grant To Shorten One's Stay in Wartburg College and Seminary. To Dream the Impossible Dream.
This Is My Quest To Follow That Star! No Matter How Hopeless No Matter How Far


 Wartburg posted this pose as her thrilled and excited photo
when they gave Louise Johnson an honorary D.D.

Wartburg Theological Seminary has received a $497,115 grant from The Kern Family Foundation to streamline preparation for pastoral ministry for first career ministerial students in partnership with Wartburg College, Waverly, Iowa. The grant allows for implementation of a fully integrated Bachelor of Arts/Master of Divinity degree program to provide leadership, theological education and spiritual formation embedded in congregational contexts.

This new program will include 3 years of BA education at Wartburg College with at least one semester interfacing with Wartburg Seminary, Dubuque, IA. The final 3 years (which includes a year to complete an internship required by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) will be located in a collaborative congregational context.

Louise N. Johnson, Wartburg Seminary President, explains, “The generosity of the Kern Foundation and the partnership of Wartburg College offer us an extraordinary opportunity to press into our calling to form young faith leaders, who can proclaim words of hope, healing, forgiveness, mercy, grace to a world desperately longing to hear and to know the living God.”



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GJ - Without foundation grants, Mrs. Ichabod and I finished Augustana in three years and a quarter. I finished seminary, so that both degrees took six years, including a vicarage. Mrs. Ichabod earned a master's degree in German literature, where most of the classes were in German. So she also earned two degrees in six years, plus working at the UniWat library.

Reu has been forgotten. Where did he teach?
Wartburg? Really!


Louise Johnson, DD - “Vocation was a huge piece of what Martin Luther gave the church. His reframing of a sense of vocation was radical at the time, and in its own way, is still radical now,” she said. “It pushes us to think differently about how we spend our time and what God calls us to do and how we understand that. Those basic Reformation principles still sing in our culture today.”


 ELCA Bishop Liz Eaton has a lot more damage planned.
Most of her higher education appointments have been single women, so put a ring on it.

 ELCiC Bishop Susan Johnson

 Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber

Encore.
 Bishop April Larson


 Pastor Anita Hill paved the way for
Mark Hanson's career.


 Pastor Megan Rohrer is
ELCA's first openly transgender pastor.

 Dr. Robin Steinke is thrilled and excited to sell off
Luther Seminary property.


From 2013 - WELS Mission Board Waste of Funds

"I administer the Means of Grace."
Now she works at a DP's church.
This was the WELS Latte Church with the couches and "gourmet" coffee - featured in the WELS magazine, no less.




The WELS Mission Board gave St. Peter in Freedom
over $500,000 to buy this broken down bar,
just a hop from a WELS church.
But St. Peter has an annual budget of $1.4 million.


 Glende abandoned this property, which became a
healthy Eastern Orthodox congregation.

 Glende then abandoned this new building, designed to have a coffee bar, but the Babtists have already built onto it.
Glende should be on the mission board, because he started two successful congregations in Illinois. Too bad he closed the one entrusted to his care.

 Glende and Ski were inordinately proud to pose with potty-mouthed Katy Perry. Both superannuated teens published these photos on Facebook.

Lutherans in the News - Stay Tuned - It Will Only Get Worse

 ELCA Bishop Burnside lost his position with his DUI hit-and-run, but WELS protects their DUI clergy with new locations and jobs.

Supposedly, this is a computer generation. But I have often told undergraduates, "Tweeting all day does not make you an expert in computers."

Likewise, people marvel at the universe of information available, but do they avail themselves of this new experience in the cause of sound doctrine? Not often enough.

My key advantages are 

  • a general knowledge of the Lutheran church constellations and 
  • curiosity about each Lutheran group. 

I found the Luther Seminary pagan worship story by starting with Google News and inserting various ELCA seminary names. For some reason, ELCA does not post the real news on their official websites, though hints abound. But there is an army of witnesses who write about all kinds of Lutheran and denominational events.

 Latini, an ordained Presbyterian minister and former associate dean of diversity... - Stop to finish laughing. OK. Ready to continue -
heads the combined seminaries of Gettysburg and Philadelphia. Why did they split? - The issue was Lutheran/Reformed union.



One hint from ELCA about seminary decline was a note about their executive council receiving new legal papers for several seminaries. To paraphrase Kenda, "Legal papers for old established schools? Now. I. Am. Interested." That could only mean new relationships with their property, endowments, faculties, and locations. That has proven true of:

  1. Gettysburg and Philadelphia, large schools in the midst of the densest Lutherans in America - Pennsylvania. Merged. Merging is a polite word for closing, like saying, "She had work done."
  2. Southern Seminary, trying to be a school for many denominations, now a college department.
  3. Pacific Seminary, sold to become a Muslim campus, demoted to some kind of academic and cooperative program.
  4. Trinity, formerly the seminary of Lenski and other notables, now a college department with a Seminex dean.
  5. Wartburg, founded by Loehe, distinguished now by an unqualified president, Louise Johnson, perhaps chosen to close down this micro-hive and erase Loehe's name. And Reu's, too.
  6. Luther, thrilled and excited to sell off some land, making the news a while ago by canning their president at Christmas, firing staff and faculty, and hoping.
  7. Lutheran Spool of Theology, Chicago. Six seminaries merged to form a school constructed like a bridge, looking like a prison, boasting 91 MDiv students in all. 

Count them all - eight ELCA seminaries, ALC and LCA in origin, either needing to close or insolvent, burning up the bucks to pay their lazy, pagan faculty to promote the dogma of San Francisco.


Behold. Doom has come upon us all. Thrivent is the real executive council of ELCA-WELS-LCMS-ELS-CLC (sic). And Jeske is in the lead, riding a Warg.