From the President

By Rev. Dr. Dean O. Wenthe

Dear Friends of Concordia Theological Seminary: I would invite each of you who receives For the Life of the World to plan a visit to our campus. Such a visit would be educational, enriching and stimulating. The entire seminary community would welcome you to worship with us, to attend class with the seminarians and deaconesses, to enjoy a meal in our beautiful dining hall and to visit the men and women who have devoted their lives to Christ's service. You would, I am confident, be encouraged by the display of Christ's life and presence as the center of our community. Seminary education is more than mastery of information about the Triune God; it is an ordering of one's life to serve the one true God and share His saving invitation with all of humanity. A recent book published by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Learning (2006) is entitled Educating Clergy-Teaching Practices and the Pastoral Imagination. It refers to such education as "professional" and states "a distinguishing feature of professional education is the emphasis on forming in students the dispositions, habits, knowledge, and skills that cohere in professional identity and practice, commitments, and integrity . . . for doctors and nurses, healing; for lawyers, social order and justice; for teachers, learning; and for clergy, engaging the mystery of human existence" (100). What this means for theological education, especially for future pastors and deaconesses, is that their character and very beings are to exhibit what religious lives look like in the flesh. At the seminary, we term this process formation. It is a process whereby the student is not only learning about the Triune God and the confession of the faith but is also shaped by worship and life in community to display a life that flows from his or her baptismal identity, a life that confesses Christ clearly and enfleshes His care for every human being. Such students-formed by Christ's living voice through prophets and apostles and shaped by daily life with faculty and classmates-can truly "teach the faithful, reach the lost and care for all." Their confession of the blessed and holy Trinity is especially suited for our day. As the Carnegie study appropriately notes: Clergy, in other words, have a special calling to reveal, make real, mediate, or come to terms with this otherwise inaccessible God. The interpretive task of clergy is to represent (to re-present; to make tangibly, verbally, physically, bodily present) through rituals, practices, and traditions a God to people who have lost a sense of mystery in their frantic, competitive, technological world, who have lost touch with their own personal significance or purpose in life, or who call out in suffering in the face of apparent cosmic silence. (358) May your prayers and lives join us in the wonderful calling of formation as it is treated in this issue of For the Life of the World. And may that formation, under God's grace, "teach the faithful, reach the lost and care for all." Cordially yours, in Christ, Rev. Dr. Dean O. Wenthe President, Concordia Theological Seminary

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