Lutheran Education in the Real World
Story: Rev. Pete Jurchen ’04
Photos: Liz Kucera
In the modern age, a Lutheran education provides not only excellent academic preparation for future vocations, but also the resources to navigate God’s world.
Most people think the purpose of education is to prepare young people for the real world. This is the world where success matters and only the fittest survive. The world where we need to navigate the complexities of finance, relationships and social conventions. The world where we seek the great ideal of happiness, where we find fulfillment and where we have the greatest opportunities to live and thrive.
It is the version of the real world which drives so many parents to actually resist encouraging their children to attend Lutheran higher education. Sure, some parents choose to put their children in Lutheran parochial preschools, elementary schools and even high schools. But only for a time. In these institutions children and young people learn the basics of faith and life in a personal, safe environment. But when the opportunities for the real world weigh heavy, including opportunities in sports, academics, scholarships and a broader social network, Lutheran schooling seems somehow lesser. Children are pulled from schools or encouraged to seek higher education that will prepare them for the real world elsewhere. They feel Lutheran higher education may not offer as many programs as other schools, it may not offer as many potential opportunities for connection to future careers, extra curriculars aren’t as numerous or it’s just too expensive. After all, shouldn’t the purpose of education to be to prepare people for the real world and to give students the best opportunity to thrive there?
Maybe you’re a parent, alumni or just a reader who feels this way. Maybe you have serious doubts about the purpose of Lutheran higher education in the real world.
But what is the real world? Really?
The real world is, actually, the one described in and defined by God’s Word. The real world is the one in which Jesus Christ reigns as king. This same Jesus is the heart and center of this reality. All history revolves around Him. He was there in the beginning; He made all things good. After our first ancestors, Adam and Eve, joined in Satan’s rebellion against their creator, Jesus’ coming was promised. The scope of the Old Testament points us to God’s plan for His breaking into the world to defeat sin, death and Satan for us. Jesus eventually did so on the cross and in the empty tomb. He sent His New Testament followers into the world to bear witness to His salvation, so that more may hear, repent and be given faith in Him. He reigns now and is coming again to raise the living and the dead. He will make all things new for those who believe in Him.
This is the real world. We live in this world now, in the final age of reality. Through the cross the debt of sin is paid for all who believe in Jesus. God has called His Church to stand firm in this real world, to teach this Gospel promise from generation to generation. The promise of the final overthrow of death is ours and cannot be unmade. Satan, the deceiver, cannot win. All that Satan can do is, like a mortally wounded animal, lash out and push against this real world. And he uses the other fallen powers of our sinful nature and the corrupted world to tempt God’s people into false security or believing downright lies about the world. Satan is on a sinking ship, and he will one day be forever banished from this reality, but until he is he will use every method and trick up his sleeve to convince us that the real world that God’s Word describes is indeed not the real world.
Because this is the real world, we need Lutheran higher education more than ever. This is not an alarmist call for retreat or an overreaction to trends in the culture wars. This is just reality as described in the Bible, God’s Word. This is the real world as it always has been, and this is what Lutheran education strives to prepare students for.
This is the real world as it always has been, and this is what Lutheran education strives to prepare students for.
The beauty of this preparation, from a Lutheran perspective, is what Lutheran education aims to do. It does not seek to remove students from all harm and danger. Lutheran educators do not seek to create a purely inward-seeking sect where we only interact with like-minded people. Lutheran education does not pull away from arts and sciences, math and social sciences, language, music, business and practical life. No, instead, Lutheran education seeks to prepare learners for these fields, but in light of the real world as described in the Bible. Lutheran schools prepare people to embrace their callings to go into the world, as Jesus commanded. But they do so with God’s plan of salvation as accomplished by Christ on their hearts and minds. To love and serve their neighbor as Christ first loved and served them. To embrace what is good and right and true in this world, while navigating and avoiding the complex sets of lies and temptations that the fallen powers of Satan, our sinful flesh and the fallen world lay before us.
Why should you consider going to or sending your children into Lutheran higher education? A Lutheran institution provides students with many resources and allies. These will help you or those you are called to care for to see the real world as it is and cling to their belief in Christ as they navigate it.
A school like Concordia University, Nebraska will provide them with daily spiritual routines, like daily chapel, prayer with professors, theology classes, Bible study groups, support groups and conversations with other Christians that will encourage them in their daily life of faith.
An institute of Lutheran higher education will provide you or your loved ones with a community that is being formed in the same worldview. Christians are meant to navigate this broken world together. All Lutheran education, but especially Lutheran higher education, provides students with a network of Christian friends that can help support and sustain that faith as they are launched into the world.
Lutheran higher education provides a proper perspective on vocation. Students attend higher education institutions to become trained for careers and meaningful work. Through the Christian lens of the real world, as defined above and not defined by the world’s false messaging, students at a Concordia will be trained to properly love and serve their neighbor through their work. As they go into the world, whatever work they do, they will be prepared to think of it as a way to enact God’s loving care for their neighbor.
Lutheran schools have some of the best education outcomes of all schools in the country on a myriad of measures. It is certainly true that Lutheran schools sometimes don’t have the same variety of majors and facilities as large state universities, but the education students receive at Lutheran institutions is of exceptional quality. Faculty in Lutheran higher education excel not only in Christian contexts, but across the higher education sphere.
Most importantly, however, Lutheran higher education is focused on Christ. Professors, leaders, administrators and fellow students are all challenged to orient their lives around the Gospel. This real world, defined by Christ and communicated through God’s Word, is the heart and center of this Lutheran institution. There is no greater focus one can have, and Lutheran higher education exists to prepare students to go into the world as Christ’s forgiven, redeemed and loved ambassadors. And as they go, gathered together as the body of Christ, forgiven and adopted into His family, continually formed, reformed and transformed by the Spirit in their hearts and minds through God’s Word, they do so with our eyes on the real world.