This month we celebrated the life and mourned the death of longtime faculty member Jim Nestingen, professor emeritus of church history. Jim influenced a generation of pastors, deacons, teachers, and everyday disciples—including, I suspect, many of you.
Several of Jim’s former students took time to reach out after his death. Their notes about how his teaching continues to shape them remind me that so much of our work, at the seminary and in Christian communities, is like planting seeds.
“In the morning sow your seed, and at evening do not let your hands be idle; for you do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether both alike will be good.” (Ecclesiastes 10:13) I’m drawn to this text in the cold, dark winter, when we long for spring in Minnesota! When I was growing up in rural Minnesota, it was about this time of year the seed catalogs came and we could dream about what our garden needed for the spring. We would pore over the colorful fruits and vegetables on the pages in the evening hours and carefully plan what we would plant.
This practice of sowing is always an act of faith that snow will melt, sun and rain will come at the right time, and hail and wind will leave enough healthy plants to harvest. Teaching and the mission of Luther Seminary are also acts of faith. A good teacher is never sure which bits of the course content will take root and which will be discarded. Good teachers cultivate the ground as the Holy Spirit is at work. This is what we do at Luther Seminary to prepare pastors, deacons, teachers, and everyday disciples for God’s work through the church.
A significant new initiative to “cultivate the ground” is a set of curricular changes that our faculty recently approved in a unanimous vote and that the Board of Directors will consider next month. These changes will simplify and streamline the curriculum while remaining faithful to the theological and rigorous academic core of a Luther Seminary education. They reflect the exciting findings of our accelerated MDivX pilot program and respond to the charge to the faculty in our strategic plan: to strengthen the curriculum in service of our degree-seeking students and the communities they serve.
I look forward to sharing more details in the months to come. In the meantime, please join me in a prayer of gratitude for the hard work, vision, and faithfulness of our outstanding faculty. Their teaching, service, and leadership change lives, in the classroom and for years afterward.
In these deep winter days, what seeds lie below the surface of your life, preparing to grow into something new?
Wishing you a fruitful and blessed 2023,
Robin J. Steinke, President
Luther Seminary