Principles for Western Mission Cluster Governance

Timothy F. Lull, President, Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary
David L. Tiede, President, Luther Seminary

Adopted by a Joint Vote of the Board Executive Committees of the two seminaries

January 17, 1998

For more than a decade, since before the formation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and Luther Seminary have been working together on the future course of theological education, first as paired seminaries and more recently in the formation of the Western Mission Cluster. In this work we have come to know and respect each other very deeply, have taken initial steps for cooperation and planning, built faculty and board relations, and have (with several other partners) launched an ambitious expansive venture—the Fisher’s Net—a Distance Learning Network.

An important next step in our mandate from the ELCA is to develop an initial form of Cluster Governance before the Churchwide Assembly in Denver in August of 1999. This is chiefly the task of our Board Executive Committees which have been meeting together periodically for some time. We hope also to have suggestions from faculty, students, institutional partners and the church at large as we complete this task. The final agreement will need to be ratified by both full boards, possibly in a special joint meeting in the Spring of 1999.

We want this process to be characterized by the growing respect and trust that has been part of our work to this point, although we know that questions of governance raise old fears about what this linkage may mean for each institution. To reassure our communities and to channel our energies into the positive possibilities of working together, we offer the following points as a basis for our cluster governance formation:

  1. In a dynamic system like the one that we intend, governance must follow program in order to guide and sustain our mission. The wrong sorts of control will work against the very missional and imaginative energies that we want to develop in working together. This principle has already been adopted by our seminaries in the document, "Principles and Strategies Toward Clustering". (March 1993)
  2. The Western Mission Cluster is still under construction and will be for the next decade. Its probable genius lies in its being a constituency based, leadership development system:

The differing locations, histories, and institutional strengths of PLTS and Luther are two of the greatest resources for theological education in our region. We have already been learning how well we complement each other—especially when we turn from past images to the common future of our mission. These differences preclude merger or takeover as initial governance strategies. At the same time each school is sufficiently healthy to preclude bail-out or socialization of resources as an initial governance strategy.

  1. In the short term the Cluster needs to be able to allocate funding from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America to the seminaries, to oversee the Fisther’s Net and other cooperative programming, to spur the seminaries toward cooperation at every point of mutual advantage, and to work out generous and realistic partnerships with other providers of theological education in our region. A fairly simple structure should be able to do this, avoiding the dangers of inventing a new, and expensive level of governance.
  2. In the longer term, no limit should be set to the ways in which the seminaries may grow together and need to adjust these initial arrangements. An important feature of cluster governance, therefore, will be its provision for regular review and relatively simple amendment of the initial structures when something different is needed.

We look forward to this next stage of our common assignment from the church and offer these comments in a spirit of hope and openness to surprise along the way.