Do you have a time or place that shaped your faith? Where were you, and why was that experience so powerful?
Did that mountain-top experience have an impact on the calling or vocation that you are living out in your current context?
Do you have a time or place that shaped your faith? Where were you, and why was that experience so powerful?
Did that mountain-top experience have an impact on the calling or vocation that you are living out in your current context?
I began my seminary education at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis in 1971. At that time, 50 out of 55 seminary professors were in the middle of 3 years of trials for teaching heresy. While I was on internship in Los Angeles, the student body of 500 students decided that the Board of Control, in charge of the heresy trials, had spent enough time examining the faculty. "Either convict them as heretics and dismiss them or exhonerate them and let us get on with our education. Until you make up your mind, we will be on moratorium and will not attend classes." After 5 days of having no students in class, the faculty decided not to attend class. That action gave the Board legal reason to fire the faculty. 50 faculty members and 500 students walked behind the processional cross which now stands in the chapel at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. I needed to decide to which seminary I would return after internship. If I returned to Concordia, I would certainly have received a safe, secure and probably prime first call. If I returned to the Seminary in Exile, Seminex, there were no guarantees of any calls to ministry. No security after 4 years of seminary training. I returned to Seminex. It was there that I had a family of faith, a community standing with the Cross for the sake of the Gospel. And here's the mountaintop experience: When I returned that fall, we were in the process of making a new home for our seminary. We rented space on the top five floors of a building that hadn't been used for 11 years. We shoveled and swept; polished and painted; built furniture for a chapel. Students and spouses, faculty and their families, all together took up brooms and brushes to build a tabernacle in our desert of learning. It was there in that setting that I knew I was exeriencing the mountaintop. Disciples gathered around the Cross, we were doing our best to follow the command of God: "This is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to him." There were many valleys of the shadow of death to come; not the least of these was having to find creative ministries after graduation. But making that decision to go to the top of that particular mountain has informed the rest of my life. And I still look to the Cross to lead my steps into the future.
Nice story! I passed this on to Ed Schroeder, and he was wondering what you were up to now/where you are.