Baneck accepts call to be LCMS Pastoral Education director

LCMS North Dakota District President Rev. Dr. James A. Baneck of Mandan, N.D., has accepted the Divine Call to become executive director of LCMS Pastoral Ministry, effective Jan. 1.

Rev. Dr. James A. Baneck

The Pastoral Ministry position has been vacant since June 2014, when the Rev. Dr. Glen D. Thomas left to accept a call to St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Des Peres, Mo.

Baneck is serving his third and final (due to term limits) three-year term as the North Dakota District president. The district’s first vice-president, the Rev. Arie Bartsch of Minot, N.D., will complete the term as president, leading up to the election and installation of a president at the district’s next convention in January 2018.

In an email to Reporter, Baneck wrote that he is “honored and humbled to be selected for this position. I look forward to working with the universities, seminaries, the LCMS Post-Seminary Applied Learning and Support [PALS] program and others, as we give particular focus to pastoral education in our beloved Synod.”

LCMS Chief Mission Officer Rev. Kevin Robson — announcing Baneck’s acceptance of the call in a Nov. 1 memo to LCMS staff members — referred to him as “a highly capable servant of the Church [who] brings a wealth of strong educational and work experiences, relational strengths and personal skills, and a deep-rooted heart for pastoral formation, all of which will serve the Synod well in the provision of crucial leadership, coordination and oversight for pre-seminary, seminary and post-seminary continuing education, and in advocacy for pastoral education and health within the Synod.”

Robson noted that “among other activities, [Baneck] will serve as the advisory member of the recently constituted [by 2016 LCMS Convention Resolution 6-01] Pastoral Formation Committee, … whose task is to ensure that the Synod’s objective of training pastors is fulfilled consistently.”

“Let us also prayerfully give thanks for Rev. Bart Day, who over the past several years has ably and diligently fulfilled these Pastoral Education unit-executive responsibilities on an interim basis,” Robson wrote in the memo. Day is executive director of the Synod’s Office of National Mission.

Baneck indicated that he plans to relocate to St. Louis in December to assume the Pastoral Education post at the Synod’s International Center. He said his wife, Myrna, plans to make the move after completing her teaching contract next May. The Banecks are the parents of four grown children.

Posted November 4, 2016