M.Div. Graduates: A Diploma in One Hand, Debt in the Other>
What Gets Planted in Mission Fields?>
Outreach Fund: ‘Moving beyond ourselves and into the needs of the most vulnerable’>
Connecting with Jesus, Engaged in the World, Working for Justice >

 

M.Div. Graduates: A Diploma in One Hand, Debt in the Other
by Janet Lunder Hanafin

The tale is told of a new pastor who prayed, “Lord, please help your poor, humble servant.” A member of the church council added a postscript: “You keep him humble, Lord, and we’ll keep him poor.”

It is a joke, of course, but the truth is that education costs are keeping seminarians poor. “The high cost of seminary education is a significant challenge in becoming a pastor,” said the Rev. Peter Rogness, bishop of the Saint Paul Area Synod.

“On the day of graduation last spring,” said Dr. Patricia Lull, dean of students at Luther Seminary, “the M.Div. graduates at Luther Seminary held a diploma in one hand and an average educational debt of $45,000 in the other. This is simply too extreme a debt load for those going into ordained ministry.”

A first call to a parish does not come with a signing bonus, stock options, or a fast upward track to middle management. For both young pastors and those who are taking up a second career in mid-life, debt is the proverbial millstone around their necks. It determines what kind of call they can accept, whether they can purchase a home, how they can support their children and plan for their education, and decisions about retirement.

“The realities of the debt they will leave seminary with will stay with them for a very long time,” said Sister Noreen Stevens, candidacy coordinator for the Saint Paul Area Synod.

Educational debt informs choices
A seminary senior who is pursuing ministry as a second career and waiting for a first call said that the financial aspects of a call must take priority over her preferences for the type of ministry she would like to pursue. Her family needs a location where they can afford to live, a parsonage or significant housing assistance, and loan repayment help.

A young pastor serving an urban congregation stated that his consolidated educational debt will not be paid until his child is 20 years old. He and his wife have little hope of owning a home for many years, and because of their financial situation have decided not to have more children. But, he said, parish ministry is his passion and what he believes he is meant to do.

Katie Keller is a senior at Luther Seminary, working toward an M.Div. degree and anticipating a call to ordained ministry. Newly married, she lives with her husband who is serving his first call in northwestern Minnesota. As she completes her studies online, making regular trips to St. Paul to meet with her professors, she is also working full time as a licensed lay minister in two parishes near the Canadian border.

Keller grew up in a family that experienced poverty, but heard God’s call and dared to believe that she could become a pastor. As a seminary student, an almost daily decision was whether to put gas in her car or pay for food, and, she said, “I didn’t have a back-up plan of asking my parents for financial help.”

Scholarships, loans, and working, often more than one job at a time, have brought her close to fulfilling her dream of ministry. But educational debt is the backseat driver. For Keller and her husband it will determine whether they can ever raise a family or buy a home, and whether they can serve God in a foreign country as they feel called to do.

Removing impediments to ministry
Bishop Rogness recalls that when his father, Dr. Alvin Rogness, attended Luther Seminary in the 1930s and later became its president in the mid-1950s, candidates for the ministry did not pay tuition. Preparing young men (and in those days they were all men and mostly young) for the ministry was considered an obligation of the church, the parishes, and the people those pastors would eventually serve.

Over the past half century, seminary students have gradually assumed full individual financial responsibility for their education as educational costs have increased and funds from synods and the ELCA have been reduced. Today students at seminaries of the ELCA pay upwards of $10,000 per year in tuition and nearly all of them accumulate debt as they prepare to answer God’s call. This debt has profound implications, potentially keeping students from a seminary education or burdening them significantly as they enter ordained ministry.

“We understand the vocation of ordained clergy to come from both the ‘inner’ call of the candidate and the ‘outer’ call of the church,” Rogness said. “If the church invites someone to consider ministry, it is only logical that we would seek to remove significant impediments, and certainly debt is that.”

What Gets Planted in Mission Fields?
by Janet Lunder Hanafin

The answer? Churches! The riddle may seem corny, but “church planting,” a new term for mission development, gives an accurate description of both the philosophy and technique used for spreading the gospel and establishing new congregations in the 21st century.

New Life! Lutheran, Lakeville, is the newest church in the Saint Paul Area Synod. This community of faith—think of it as a garden—has been planted by four Dakota County congregations in partnership with the Saint Paul Area Synod and the ELCA. The partners have taken the initiative to identify a fertile field, select a pastor developer—a gardener—and then support the new church with the seeds and nutrients of spiritual and financial resources.

In the past, the national organizations of the ELCA’s predecessor church bodies looked over likely “fields” for starting new churches, frequently areas of suburban growth where significant numbers of Lutherans could be expected to be found. The church sometimes purchased land to hold in reserve for a future building, and a pastor was sent into the area to cultivate relationships and bring in the sheaves.

Hosanna!, Lakeville, has taken the master gardener role in planting New Life!, collaborating with Shepherd of the Valley, Apple Valley; Easter, Eagan; and Community of Hope, Rosemount. Community of Hope was, itself, a planted congregation, sponsored five years ago by those same congregations plus Prince of Peace Lutheran, which it has since replaced in the continuing partnership. Prince of Peace is now partnering with Shepherd of the Lake, Prior Lake, to launch a congregation in Credit River Township in Scott County.

“Any church that isn’t devoting energy to starting or planting new congregations has lost its zeal for the gospel,” said Peter Rogness, bishop of the Saint Paul Area Synod. “Jesus said that the good news should be preached to all nations.”

“There’s a diverse population out there that does not attend church,” said Cathy Townley, director of church planting at Hosanna!. “There is lots of room for new churches that will reach those potential mission fields.”

Before it welcomed its first worshipers on Sunday mornings, New Life! began reaching out to the community by offering Alpha. Designed to invite people of various backgrounds into a relationship with Christ and one another by teaching the basics of the Christian faith, Alpha has been received enthusiastically, the Rev. Steve Gartland, pastor developer of New Life!, said.

Townley began the Judea Network in Lakeville five years ago when Hosanna! decided to begin a church planting ministry.“To have a lasting ministry, the most important thing we could do was train, coach, and send church planters,” Townley said. “The Judea Network supports mainline church planters that are trying to start new communities of faith [by providing] training, coaching, internships, and strategic partnering opportunities.”

In rapidly growing Dakota County, parents in their 30s and 40s with school-age children are a significant percentage of the population and offer a fertile field for the seed of the Holy Spirit.

New Life! welcomed some 300 people to its first regular Sunday morning worship service on December 3, 2006. Since then Sunday attendance in rented space at Lakeville South High School has been between 50 and 100. The atmosphere of the services is relaxed and upbeat. Contemporary music, such as might be heard on a Christian radio station, is led by a band and vocalists.

The new church is in its sprouting phase and does not yet have a stable population, Gartland said. “We see some people every week. Others just want to come and go.”

“Rent-a-Member” is one of the unique features of the relationship between New Life! and its planting partners and helps to stabilize the turf necessary for a new faith garden. Members of the established congregations are encouraged to join New Life! to provide temporary leadership and take care of housekeeping details. The rented members organize and teach Sunday school, usher, operate audio equipment, set up and take down the “sanctuary” and welcome visitors. Townley compares the experience to that of being a missionary.

“Instead of going to a foreign land, you go to the church ten miles down the road, serve for a certain time, and then go back to your home church,” she said. “It gives the new church help launching and gives the home congregation a mission mindset.”

To promote its presence in the community, New Life! is planning a series of “taste and see events,” Gartland said. Rented members and those who are becoming active in the new congregation will give away free hot dogs and beverages at a Cub Foods store on a Saturday morning, bag groceries for shoppers and drop in a card telling about the church, and offer a series of free community concerts featuring the New Life! musicians.

While the ELCA is still a key partner in developing new congregations and providing substantial financial support, an increasing amount of funding comes from established churches that see a need to plant new congregations in their communities. Each planting cooperative can vary its process according to its needs, Rogness said, a sign of the flexibility that now characterizes the ELCA.

“We want to see people’s lives being changed,” Townley said. “We want to see people recommitting their lives to Jesus Christ.”

“We are convinced of the importance of reaching out to people with the gospel and inviting them into the body of Christ,” Rogness said. “We offer the grace-filled, Word and Sacrament-centered proclamation that has always characterized Lutheranism and trust the Spirit to nurture the seeds of faith.”

Outreach Fund: ‘Moving beyond ourselves and into the needs of the most vulnerable’
by Janet Lunder Hanafin

Bridges to Ending Poverty is one of the four initiatives that will be funded by Crossing Bridges-Connecting in Mission. The initiative will establish an outreach fund to encourage collaborations among congregations to meet the practical needs of those living in poverty and bring them into the fabric of congregational life. Collaborations may develop among congregations sharing a community or between city and suburban congregations. Bishop Rogness talked with Janet Lunder Hanafin about his vision for this initiative and how it will transform ministry in the Saint Paul Area Synod.

When you talk about practical needs of the poor and churches collaborating, what do you have in mind? First of all, people living in the communities will decide what they need and how the church can help. Neighborhood ministries can provide things like parish nurses, after school and vacation programs for children and young people, or employment and financial help and counseling. Some of these collaborations are already happening. Members of King of Kings in Woodbury, for example, have connections with folks at Christ Lutheran on Capitol Hill where there are a number of African immigrants and a significant Cambodian population. Members from both churches are working with young people in this community. But churches in the same neighborhood can also work together. Their impact is going to be greater collaborating. The outreach fund will help activities that are already started continue and give other partnerships a chance to get going.

The outreach fund sounds like it goes beyond merely providing material help for the poor. What do you see as the essential component, the germ of the idea?A phrase from Isaiah says that we are called to be repairers of the breach. A breach is a separation, something once together that has fallen apart, and the breach needs to be healed. The poor and the not poor are part of the same body of Christ. That’s what our church ought to look like. Part of the fabric of our being is to keep moving beyond ourselves and into the needs of the most vulnerable.

Are rich and poor opposites here? Where’s the breach? The most obvious breach is in economics, and that becomes apparent when people in a wealthy society scramble to have basic needs met. That should be deeply offensive to a moral people.

If somebody asked you what it is to be poor in this community, how would you define poor? People are sitting outside our churches for whom our ministry might have something to offer in building relationships, inviting them into a faith community, enhancing their lives, being advocates with them in issues that shape their lives.

But the outreach fund does center heavily on economic needs? Right. Economic poverty destroys so many facets of people’s lives, and when those factors of poverty tear away at the fabric of stable and healthy life, then economic poverty is ravaging.

What about that verse in Scripture. . . “The poor you have always with you?” Deuteronomy 15 is teaching about the Jubilee in which every seven years, property was returned to its original owners. The whole point was intolerance toward the wide disparity of wealth and poverty and the unacceptability of poverty for people of faith. The witness of Scripture is that people of faith ought to find the existence of people living in poverty intolerable.

Does this initiative take on something that Lutherans, that Christians, should have been doing but aren’t? I don’t think it’s a new step. Standing with the poor, working for justice, feeding the hungry, and caring for the sick have always been a part of Christian faith and Lutheran tradition. In our complex society, large populations have moved beyond the reach of individual communities and congregations. The church is called into the public arena to fight poverty; but the call is to be in and with the poor, not just to fight on behalf of the poor. We don’t want to be a church that just does a few things for the poor. Many communities where Lutheran churches were established by northern Europeans have changed, so we find ourselves with people of different colors, nationalities, faith traditions and, in many cases, very different economic levels. We’ve got congregations whose membership is largely middle class in communities where their neighbors are poor.

If we bring it down to an individual level so we’re talking about a poor person or a poor family, how do we cross the bridge to a person instead of a group? The question really is who is my neighbor? The way we become transformed as congregations and encounter persons, not just groups, is to engage with our neighbors’ issues. Our mission in Iringa, Tanzania, is an example. Congregations have entered the lives of people in Iringa, not only through life issues, but through personal relationships. If that can happen so powerfully 10,000 miles away, it’s not a stretch to think that it can happen two blocks away as well.

Collaborations can be messy and difficult. What challenges do you see in collaborating? Challenge and opportunity are always two words that belong together. I see opportunity to build a culture of collaboration, interdependence, and mutual accountability. Congregations must connect with persons living in poverty because that’s what we are called to do as God’s people. So I hope we can create a culture so that this is a shared commitment throughout the synod, for all congregations, regardless of neighborhood. Neighboring congregations collaborate to engage people in their community. Congregations from outside the city collaborate with congregations inside the city. We are church together. Even the decision making will be a collaborative, shared effort. When it comes time to decide where the monies go, we’ll invite congregations with a proposal to gather with the Ending Poverty leadership team to make decisions together. It’s messy, but it has far more potential for changing the culture, to bring everybody around the table, talk about what their ideas are, and figure out what can we do. Everybody walks away from that table aware of everything we could be doing. One congregation proposes ideas for needs in its neighborhood, but then they hear what you’d like to do in your neighborhood and that sounds good too. Pretty soon people are saying we’ve got all kinds of things we should be doing here. We build a shared commitment. A lot of congregations in the Saint Paul Area Synod see their neighborhoods changing. They see work to be done in their communities. What we’re trying to do with the outreach fund is say that when you’re ready, people in this synod want to partner with you to make it happen.

Is this collaboration just churches or are you planning to bring in community groups? We would welcome collaborative arrangements with schools or agencies or other organizations.

And if it’s messy, that’s the way it is? You bet, and that’s what makes it adventurous.

How will this transform congregations and communities? Congregations that recognize ministry with and of the poor—whether it’s in their own congregation or through partnering with another congregation—will strengthen the Lutheran presence in the east metro area and affect anybody involved with it. People living in poor neighborhoods, who up to now have had no contact with Lutherans, will be invited into a life and a community of faith, and be changed by it. Living in this community as people of faith is going to take on a fuller dimension, a more scripturally authentic dimension, of who we are as God’s people. You don’t do work like this and remain unchanged by it.

Why is an outreach fund needed? If an affluent congregation ministers well, it draws more people, bigger attendance, more money, more staff. If a congregation is effective in ministry among the poor, the number of people grow and the financial resources are stretched even further, so the financial need is greater not less. We recognize that we need to surround these ministries with additional income streams. We must have congregations that are linked and collaborating, so we also need an ongoing fund that will sustain these ministries and allow us to launch new efforts among the poor. They aren’t going to pay for themselves. If congregations are doing it well, they will need additional financial support.

Is there a time period for this project? I think all of these emphases on Crossing Bridges, if they are successful, are going to be ongoing. I hope we’re always going to be launching new congregations. I hope we’re always going to support seminarians from our synod. And I hope we’re so effective in ministry among the poor that we’re always scrambling for resources to keep those ministries strong, growing, meeting the needs that we have discovered are out there. If good stuff is happening that’s worth supporting, then we’ll find the money will be there.

Where does preaching the gospel come in? That’s what congregations have at their heart, the proclamation of the Word, the celebration of the Sacrament, the gathering of the people of faith around the faith itself. The outreach fund has its heart in congregational ministry. The sharing of life story and faith story happens when people in congregations touch folks in their neighborhoods and each learns about the people that they thought of as “them.” The gospel then becomes proclaimed in the conversation. This isn’t simply raising money for a few projects. This is a part of changing our whole self-understanding and our culture of how we do church. There are questions or misgivings among some who I think hear inaccurately what we are about. Some people think our ending poverty efforts sound like a political action committee of the church and where is God in the middle of this? We are talking about this because God is in the middle of this. The gospel sends us into people’s lives with good news. I don’t think you can draw the point from Scripture that there is a notion of separation of public life from private life.

Is conquering poverty impossible? No. I’m not into a lot of proof texting, but I like the verse that says with God nothing is impossible. Ending poverty is holy work, and our idea that this ought to happen is God’s idea.

Connecting with Jesus, Engaged in the World, Working for Justice
By Janet Lunder Hanafin

When “Pastor Deb” leads 100 or so parishioners from Shepherd of the Valley Lutheran (SOTV), Apple Valley, to establish a new congregation in Farmington, she will become the Saint Paul Area Synod’s newest mission developer.

Her vision for that new church— Light of the World Lutheran—is clear. With her right elbow on the table, she points her hand heavenward. “It should be a way for people to connect with Jesus,” she says, and then she places her other arm across the first, forming a cross. “But it should also be engaged in the world, working for justice to address the needs in the community. I do feel like the gospel calls us to address human suffering. If you’re not addressing the root causes of poverty, what good are you doing? What good are you doing?”

A second career pastor, the Rev. Deborah Stehlin served her internship at SOTV and then was called as a pastor and ordained there. During her internship year, four Dakota County churches—SOTV, Prince of Peace, Easter, and Hosanna!—partnered to develop new congregations in the rapidly expanding southern suburbs. Community of Hope Lutheran, Rosemount, and New Life!, Lakeville, are now established and growing.

“That process looked really fun,” Stehlin said. “I wondered if someday I would be a mission developer.” The partnership continues and SOTV is designated lead congregation for the next “church planting.”

“I couldn’t stop thinking about what the next church in Dakota County should be like,” Stehlin said. She talked with Bishop Rogness and the Rev. Paul Harrington, senior pastor at SOTV. Through the ELCA selection process, both she and the church decided she had the right stuff to be a mission developer. “Being missional is a big part,” she said, “being really interested in what’s at the core of what it means to be church. I think a mission developer should be really good in investing in relationships, and entrepreneurial, not afraid to take risks.” A mission developer needs also to be “incarnational,” a word that Stehlin uses often. “Incarnation is what God did by becoming flesh in Jesus,” she said. “We go out into the world embodying Christ, worshiping, serving, learning, growing together, and inviting others in.”

Stehlin knows the power of invitation. Raised in a devout Catholic family in northern Minnesota, she came to the Twin Cities to attend Augsburg College. Some time later, a neighbor invited her to visit Oak Grove Lutheran, Richfield. “I went and it felt like home,” Stehlin said. She began to volunteer in the church and then joined the staff. While working there she realized the call to attend the seminary.

Light of the World will begin with a leadership core of 20 families, transplanted members of SOTV. Most of them already live in the Farmington area. By fall the new congregation hopes to begin worshiping in a public space, and by Christmas they intend to invite other members of the community to join them.

“It is important for us to become a community before we invite others to be part of this,” she said. “And I’m interested in building up other leaders. It isn’t going to be the Deb Stehlin show.”

She posed difficult questions to her core group: Of your friends who are not connected to a church, what do you think they are looking for, and what kind of a church would you like to invite them to?

“I think it is hard for us to wrap our brains around inviting people in who might not have church experience,” she said. Dakota County data indicates that 50 percent of the population has not experienced affiliation with a church.

“To connect with people who are hungry for meaning, we need to go out to them,” she said. “I believe in the power of community to connect with Jesus, engage in the world around us, and pass on the faith.”

In five years, she would like Light of the World to “be a vital force in the community, inviting others in to know that they are loved by God.”

To define a successful church planting, she turns to a mission development colleague, the Rev. Steve Bonesho, River of Joy, Elko-New Market. Bonesho expressed the idea that success is measured by stories of transformation and the impact that a faith community can have on the world around it. “I’m intrigued by that idea,” she said.

Stehlin, herself, chose the new church’s name, Light of the World. In the book of Matthew, Jesus says, “‘You are the light of the world.’ It’s not ‘you could be,’ or ‘you should be,’” she said. “It is ‘this is who you are’.”