Lilly Foundation and CTS Partner to Enhance Teaching and Learning

By the Rev. Larry Rast Jr.

The year 2000 saw Concordia Theological Seminary fulfill its strategies for the implementation of $300,000 in funds from the Lilly Foundation to help it better fulfill its mission of forming pastors for The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. In February 1997, the Lilly Foundation invited CTS to participate in a pioneering endeavor with thirty theological schools from a spectrum of demographic circumstances and confessional traditions. Titled "Information Technology for Theological Teaching" (ITTT), the program encouraged CTS to explore the use of information technology in the classroom and specifically stressed the ways that technology can enhance teaching and learning in fulfillment of the seminary's purpose. One of the program's most prominent emphases was its insistence on the importance of residential theological education. In their groundbreaking book, titled Being There: Culture and Formation in Two Theological Schools (New York: Oxford, 1997), Jackson Carroll, Barbara Wheeler, Daniel Aleshire, and Penny Long Marler write, "One must 'be there' to be formed in any significant way by the culture." Mirroring this accent, ITTT underscored the fundamental relationship between effective teaching and learning and on-campus study for the successful formation of pastors. CTS received a Planning Grant in the amount of $10,000 in March 1997 and successfully framed a formal grant proposal in the amount of $200,000 later that year, which Lilly afterward supplemented with an additional $100,000. Included in the ways that CTS implemented the grant were wiring the campus with fiber optic cable, outfitting the faculty with laptop computers, creating additional public computer terminals in Walther Library, and establishing a 25 station computer lab for students. To aid in the process of pastoral formation, Prof. Lawrence Rast (Lilly Project Director), Prof. Robert Roethemeyer (Director of Library and Information Services), and Mr. John Klinger (Director of Information Systems) also planned the renovation of one of the seminary's classrooms into a prototype "Classroom 2000," a centerpiece of the ITTT program. The classroom features an integrated audio, visual, and technological center for professors both to present material to students and to stimulate reflection and synthesis. Electrical and data ports at the students' seats encourage access to both intranet and internet materials. Professors simply walk in, plug in, and pull their presentations off the seminary's server. The faculty has eagerly received the new technologies and continues to explore new ways to bring them into the classroom. Students consistently comment on the way information technology is helping them acquire the theological skills to act as pastoral theologians who minister to the congregations of our church. The authors of Being There note: "The impact of the seminary's culture on a student is in large measure a function of the extent of the student's exposure to it. One must be there to be formed by it." With the help of the Lilly Foundation in the ITTT program, CTS has continued to search for ways to improve teaching and learning on campus that augment its fundamental mission-the training of pastors to serve the congregations and missions of the LCMS with integrity, clarity, and charity. The Rev. Larry Rast Jr. is Associate Professor of Historical Theology at Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Ind.