When the ELCA’s churchwide organization and the institutions of higher education related to the ELCA agreed to establish the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities (NECU), the presidents and church leaders did not have in mind the 2017 commemoration of the five-hundredth anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation. The topic of Lutheran identity in higher education did receive focused attention in the formation of NECU and that attention has continued during our initial two years of operation. But NECU did not take up this work because the five-hundredth anniversary year was pending. Interest among the presidents caused us to focus attention on the topic of Lutheran identity.
A survey of the presidents taken in the years leading up to the establishment of NECU revealed their hope that the new association could help them explain the Lutheran identity of their schools. This topic was the only one that all the presidents agreed was a priority for NECU among an array of activities historically offered by the churchwide organization for ELCA colleges and universities. In a time when all ELCA schools are no longer populated mostly by Lutherans, the presidents wanted assistance in personally understanding and professionally articulating to their diverse constituencies Lutheran identity in higher education. They knew their schools had been founded by the Lutheran church and remained formally part of it. But what did it mean for schools to be Lutheran in the twenty-first century? Now that most schools were no longer connected to the Lutheran church through personal and cultural ties, why and how were they Lutheran?
A faculty working group spent the last academic year developing a short document that responded to those questions. NECU presidents gathered in June 2017 at the Lutheran Center in Chicago to review a draft of “Rooted and Open: Our Common Institutional Calling.” A revised document, edited in light of comments made during the June meeting, will be presented to the January 2018 annual meeting of NECU.
The document describes Lutheran higher education as an institutional commitment that is held in common by NECU institutions but not dependent on the personal religious commitments of those at NECU institutions. The shared commitment is to certain educational practices and outcomes derived from Lutheran intellectual and educational traditions. Those traditions developed in the wake of what we now call the Lutheran Reformation. NECU’s work on Lutheran identity may not have arisen because we wanted a project appropriate to the five-hundredth anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation, but I cannot think of a better way to commemorate the anniversary of that movement.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
Mahn returns to Luther’s opening thesis on whole-life repentance to argue that the deepest critique of the indulgence economy — and of our own American meritocracy — is the very assumption that grace and human striving can be measured, exchanged, and earned.
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Article
Why Martin Luther and the Reformation Matter 500 Years Later
Kathryn A. Kleinhans
Adapted from a 2017 address to Wartburg College’s entering class, Kleinhans surveys Luther’s lasting impact in vocation, education, social service, and the necessary work of repentance — closing with the Lutheran World Federation’s Windhoek assembly and the Reformation World Exhibition’s call to live reform forward into the next 500 years.
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Article
Celebrating the Reformation: The Lutheran Foundation of a Called Life
Mark D. Tranvik
Tranvik traces vocation from the monastic impulse through Luther’s rejection of the monk’s vow as the only true calling, and translates the “called life” for twenty-first-century Lutheran colleges — institutions that see students as made in the image of God, enlist the whole community in discernment, and make room for faith and its convictions.
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Article
Reforming Our Visions of City Nature
Lea F. Schweitz
Through a Chicago story of Canada geese at North Pond, Schweitz takes up two Reformation-era ways of reading the “Book of Nature” — Konrad Rosbach’s moral readings and Philip Melanchthon’s scientific ones — and proposes a third: Luther’s sacramental principle that the finite is capable of the infinite, worn as “reading glasses” for an urban planet.
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Article
Both Priest and Beggar: Luther among the Poor
Martha E. Stortz
Reading Luther’s deathbed remark “We are all beggars” against his “priesthood of all believers,” Stortz argues that priest and beggar are two sides of a human reality — one that locates civic responsibility for the poor at the heart of the Reformation legacy and that pushes beyond paternalistic service toward the systemic question of justice.
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Article
In the Beginning of the Reformation Was the Word
George Connell
Drawing on a Concordia faculty pilgrimage to German Luther sites, Connell appropriates John’s prologue to frame the Reformation as a movement about words — the printed page, the university classroom, the Marburg confession, the Wartburg translation, Bach’s music, and the dining-room conversations of Table Talk — while soberly noting that words can wound as well as heal.
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Article
Luther's Sutra: An Indian, Subaltern (Dalit) Perspective
Surekha Nelavala
Nelavala traces how Luther’s “sutra” — grace alone, faith alone, scripture alone, Christ alone — reached the mud hut of her Dalit grandparents in rural India, transforming three generations, and then reads the parable of the vineyard laborers from a subaltern perspective in which grace for all is the heart of God’s alternative kingdom.
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Article
Reforming Lutheran Higher Education: Ecclesiological Reflection and Theological Leadership
Brian Beckstrom
Beckstrom diagnoses an “identity crisis” at ELCA colleges and universities rooted in inherited Enlightenment assumptions and a thin functional ecclesiology, and proposes that a Trinitarian, perichoretic understanding of God offers an ecclesiological foundation that holds together unity and diversity in a pluralistic, post-Christian context.
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Article
Why All This Talk About Understanding the Mission of NECU Member Institutions as a Vocation?
Mark Wilhelm
No. 56 · Fall 2022
In his valedictory keynote, retiring NECU Executive Director Mark Wilhelm argues that Lutheran higher education is, properly understood, vocation-based education — outlining four core practices recovered over the past fifty years and naming the constructive and corrective work still to be done, including a fuller embrace of DEIJ and of the diverse vocations of NECU’s 27 institutions.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 55 · Spring 2022
Wilhelm announces his planned retirement on January 31, 2023, after serving as the founding executive director of the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities, and gives thanks for the privilege of helping NECU articulate a shared vision for Lutheran higher education in twenty-first-century North America.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 53 · Spring 2021
Wilhelm reflects on an NPR report of teenagers’ pandemic diaries and the fraught Christian history of struggling to live out Jesus’s ethic of love, framing the issue as a record of NECU institutions working out how to act for the common good through the pandemic of 2020–2021.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 52 · Fall 2020
Wilhelm argues that the “hackneyed” expressions of higher education — “you are not just a number,” “the college experience,” “risen to the challenge” — tell the simple truth about NECU institutions even as the Covid-19 pandemic has pushed budgets, employees, and campus life to the breaking point.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 51 · Spring 2020
Wilhelm frames the issue by tracing how Lutheran educational ideals — once a primary source of contemporary higher education — were masked in the United States, and introduces a NECU initiative that uses the case of business ethics to explore Lutheran social teaching as an academic resource.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 50 · Fall 2019
Wilhelm frames the issue by noting that a federal court’s vindication of Harvard’s race-conscious admissions process is a win for higher education’s commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion — and argues that for Lutheran higher education, the commitment to diversity is an old and foundational claim, rooted in Christianity’s openness to all and reflected in the four diverse gospels of the New Testament.
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Article
Academic Vocation: What the Lutheran University has to Offer
Wendy McCredie
No. 19 · Summer 2004
Writing as a practicing Lutheran, a trained literary scholar, and the associate director for interpretation at the ELCA churchwide office, McCredie articulates a vocation for ELCA colleges and universities grounded in the dialogical tension Gilbert Meilaender names between “bonds of particular love” and “a love which is open to every neighbor.” Drawing on Berube and Nelson, Marsden, Pelikan, Schwehn, Toulmin, Simmons, Hughes, MacIntyre, and Wolterstorff, she argues that Lutheran tradition resists both the easy separation and the collapse of sacred and secular, that human reason errs while God’s grace makes action possible, and that listening to the marginalized and to those outside the tradition is itself a theology of the cross enacted in classroom and collegial life.
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Article
Civic Engagement and Faith Perspectives
William O'Brochta
No. 63 · Spring 2026
15 min audio
Guest editor William O’Brochta introduces the section by overviewing the ELCA’s call to civic engagement, recapping the Fall 2025 Civic Engagement and Faith Perspectives conference at Texas Lutheran University, and previewing the participant essays that follow.
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Article
Say Something Theological: A Meditation on the Vocation of Lutheran Colleges and Universities to Serve the Common Good
Paul C. Pribbenow
No. 42 · Fall 2015
Pribbenow expands Luther’s “priesthood of all believers” into a meditation on doing theology with the Bible in one hand and the New York Times in the other — reading Luke 14 alongside walls, immigration, and hunger in his Minneapolis neighborhood — and argues that the leadership of Lutheran colleges demands a willingness to engage the theological issues at the heart of their public vocation.
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Article
The State of Civil Discourse on Campus and in Society
Terence S. Morrow
No. 33 · Spring 2011
Morrow examines the troubled state of civil discourse in the United States and on college campuses, drawing on three deep traditions — the liberal arts, Lutheranism, and the Anglo-American legal tradition — to argue that Lutheran colleges can serve students and society by acknowledging the tensions inherent in civil discourse and helping students navigate them, and surveys promising campus programs at St. Thomas, Tufts, Loyola, and Harvard.
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Article
The Literature of Spiritual Reflection and Social Action
Shirley Hershey Showalter
No. 10 · Fall 2000
Showalter, president of Goshen College, opens with Garrison Keillor’s “Singing with the Lutherans” and Walter Sundberg’s account of the Anabaptist “radical reformers” to locate Mennonite identity in a theology of suffering, humility, narrative, and song—tracing it through John S. Coffman’s 1904 “The Spirit of Progress,” Harold S. Bender’s 1944 “Anabaptist Vision,” John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus, and J. Lawrence Burkholder. She uses her Senior Seminar “Pedagogy of the Holy Spirit” reading of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Madeleine L’Engle’s “Be a namer” and Walter Wink on the angels of institutions, and a Goshen Study-Service Term (SST) journal entry by student David Roth returning from Haiti—closing with two poems by Sarah Klassen—to argue for naming as the redemptive practice of church-related education.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 31 · Winter 2010
Wilhelm traces his decades-long enthusiasm for the Lutheran doctrine of vocation from his St. Olaf days reading Luther’s Open Letter to the German Nobility, notes Parker Palmer’s lecture-circuit ministry and Mark C. Taylor’s reflections on calling, and argues that ELCA colleges should claim vocation as the defining mark of Lutheran higher education—yet warns that vocation risks becoming “the program du jour” rather than a permanent hallmark.