August ‘Witness’: Shepherding our students

(LCMS/Erik M. Lunsford)

It is a challenging time for Lutheran schools, as it is for most schools. Scarce funding, declining congregational attendance, shifting cultural ideologies, teacher and administrator shortages — these things worry us and wear us down.

Yet, faithful Lutheran education remains as crucial today as it was back in the 1870s, when C.F.W. Walther wrote: “May God preserve for our German Lutheran Church the treasure of its parochial schools! Humanly speaking, everything depends on that for the future of our church in America.”

During those early decades, LCMS communities faced severe hardships common to early American immigrants: harsh conditions, poverty, illness, meager resources. Nevertheless, they insisted on prioritizing schools. Every founding congregation of the LCMS had a day school. They prized education for the same reason Martin Luther and the early Reformers did: “that the next generation might know [God’s testimony and laws] … and arise and tell them to their children” (Psalm 78). An education with Christ at its center is the greatest gift we can give our children.

Since that time, LCMS schools have faced many more challenges. Yet they have endured — today, our LCMS schools make up the second-largest parochial school system in the U.S.

The August issue of The Lutheran Witness (LW) takes up the topic of Lutheran education — its purpose and its history; the difficulties it has overcome; the challenges it faces today and the ways our schools are working to overcome them; the various models of Lutheran schools; the pressure to focus on either “mission” or “Lutheran identity” and how these two can go hand in hand; how parents can and must support their children’s education at home; and more.

Faithful Lutheran communities have always been and will always be teaching communities. We have been given an immeasurable gift in our over 2,500 Lutheran early childhood centers, preschools, elementary schools and high schools. We have also been handed an incredible opportunity. May God preserve us and keep us faithful for years to come.

To subscribe to the print LW, and to read select print content and additional web-exclusive articles, visit witness.lcms.org.

Posted Aug. 12, 2024