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eBook details

• Title: How My Mind has Changed
• Author : Currents in Theology and Mission
• Release Date : January 01, 2011
• Genre: Politics & Current Events,Books,Religion & Spirituality,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 50 KB

Description

I joined the faculty of Concordia Seminary in July 1973. Hence, I was not subjected to the interviews, the accusations, or the personal and corporate attacks that my former teachers and then my colleagues had to face. My family and I moved into #3 Seminary Terrace very shortly after the New Orleans Convention, and it was immediately, tangibly evident that the life of the seminary community had changed radically since I graduated three years earlier. While I missed the faculty interrogations, I was present when the conflicts within the seminary and the church body reached their high point; when John Tietjen was suspended from office; when the students called a moratorium; when Martin Scharlemann, who asked for the initiation of a fact-finding process during my senior year at Concordia Seminary, became interim president; and when I, like my colleagues, had to decide whether I would honor the student moratorium and, shortly thereafter, whether I would submit to the Board of Control's dictum that the faculty resume teaching on the campus of Concordia or face dismissal. My presence here and now indicates the choices I made in consultation with my family. I felt that I had very good reasons for making these decisions. My seminary studies, which I had completed only three years before being invited to return to Concordia to teach, had been a wonderfully enlightening, affirming, and freeing experience, intellectually, theologically, and spiritually. That was ultimately God's gift, of course, but God used the faithful men--and they were all men--who taught me at Concordia as God's means through whom the gift was given. My love for the biblical languages, for the critical study of Scripture, and for the gospel had been awakened at Concordia Senior College, but it was nurtured and truly blossomed at the seminary. My new attitude toward other Lutherans, even other Christians, was formed by the ecumenical perspectives of my teachers and of the leadership of the Missouri Synod. My growing conviction that women should be pastors was not simply a visceral response of someone who, after twelve years of doing so, was tired of going to classes only with males. Rather, it was due to new scriptural insights that I had gained; to a clearer understanding and experience of the freedom of the gospel; and to a growing awareness that women had always been important leaders in the church, albeit often behind the scenes, without the public support of the institutional church and without the grateful affirmation of the men who exercised leadership in the church. While we had a strong faculty advocate of the Vietnam War on campus, most of us had opposed that war from the beginning as we watched friends and former classmates going off to fight for a cause that we, and many of them, could not support. There were very few African-Americans enrolled at Concordia Seminary, but my seminary graduating class, impressed by the bold, yet peaceful, witness of Martin Luther King Jr., refused to attend a graduation banquet sponsored by Concordia Publishing House until this institution of the church promised to hire African-Americans, not only as dock workers and janitors, but also as white-collar employees and administrators. They did make that promise, and our graduating class participated in the banquet, eagerly anticipating the ministries to which we would be called.

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