Diversity, Rigidity, Opportunity

Attending a national conference of colleagues is not necessarily highly inspiring. However, the one I attended last week was stimulating, affirming and thought provoking. More than 2,300 teachers and administrators in Lutheran schools from around the world were in attendance. It began with a day-long consultation of global leaders. It was great to hear reports from schools in Canada, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Hanoi, New Guinea, India, Australia, So. Africa and Palestine. That is where the variety came in. Hong Kong International School has nearly 3,000 students with another thousand on the waiting list even with an annual tuition of some $25,000. At the other end of financial spectrum are the Lutheran schools of India which serve the still discriminated against lower caste families (even though the caste system is supposed to be a thing of the past.). These students often do not even have a desk for each student. Then there was the report of emerging Lutheran colleges from the highland of New Guinea to the concrete wall-enclosed containment of Bethlehem, Palestine where the Lutheran university there is the largest building project in Bethlehem since the days of Herod the King. An added bonus was to listen to the various dialects in which the reports were given, from Australian English to the heavily German-accented English of South Africa. Even a sometimes jaded old teacher like me could not help but feel admiration, gratitude and enthusiasm for the many ways in which the Lutheran church’s traditional commitment to education and schools at all levels is manifested in wondrous new venues and contexts.

It was not all good news. Lutheran schools in the major cities of America are becoming an extinct species. While there used to be hundreds of them from the Atlantic to the Pacific now they are missing from the city limits of even major cities like Los Angles and Detroit. One reason for their demise is the inability of some of those urban folks and other leaders to image new models for emerging contexts. When Marlene Lund of the Center for Urban Education Ministries gave a detailed list of options for faith-based American urban schools there was almost no-one there to listen. Some stayed away because they simply did not want to consider any option not based on a 19th century model. Rigidity is leading to rigor mortis.

It was then that I saw an opportunity. Many Lutheran jurisdictions are selling off Lutheran schools properties in the city, often generating millions in revenue. I challenge the leaders involved in these transactions to invest the money from the sale of any urban church properties back into a Lutheran neighborhood school operated on any one the models presented by Lund. Hope could be be made available for many city kids and their families for whom a good education today is a denied reality.

What is required is a movement from rigidity to a grasping of the opportunity to an inspired new vision, a vision which is now being brought from outside the borders of the USA to the very heart of the cities of our land.