Affirming, Entrusting, and Acting: A Baptismal Grounding of Affirmative Action in Lutheran Higher Education
Intersections No. 60 · Fall 2024
“How do you define affirmative action in the context of Lutheran (NECU) higher education, and what are its main objectives?”
This provocative question was asked to those of us who attended this past summer’s Vocation of Lutheran Higher Education Conference at Augsburg University after a panel discussion on our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion at institutions of the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities (NECU).
We were asked to respond to this question while gathered in small groups with colleagues who occupy similar positions at other NECU institutions.
When this question came up on the screen, it immediately stimulated my imagination.
I thought perhaps, as the whitest Christian denomination in North America, institutions of the ELCA had little to say about the practice of affirmative action in our society.
As institutions grounded by the vision presented in “Rooted and Open: The Common Calling of the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities,” I began to imagine how it was that Lutheran theology and practice might support and affirm the ways our institutions strive to create spaces for all students, particularly for those who come from under-represented populations on our campuses.
To this end, I asked myself, “Where in the shared practice of Lutheran communities do we make affirmations and where do we take action?”
As a Lutheran pastor, I immediately thought of the sacrament of baptism because it is through baptism that individuals are welcomed and incorporated into the community of the church.
Baptism is a sign of radical welcome into a community, where the baptized now unconditionally belong.
To do this, the Lutheran baptism liturgy includes a moment where the pastor presiding over the baptism asks the entire gathered assembly to make a profession of their faith.
“Where in the shared practice of Lutheran communities do we make affirmations and where do we take action?”
In this profession of faith, the pastor asks the assembly a series of six questions. The first three ask the gathered assembly to renounce ways of the world that defy God’s desire for humanity and creation, including evil and sin. The second three ask the assembly what they believe, using the words of the Apostles’s Creed to affirm faith.
The assembly is ritually asked what they say “no” to and what they say “yes” to. In their responses, they make affirmative statements about the content of their belief.1
Earlier in the liturgy, the presiding minister lists the responsibilities that are entrusted to those who are baptized, concluding with the effect these responsibilities have on the baptized, namely “so that [they] may learn to trust God, proclaim Christ through word and deed, care for others and the world God made, and work for justice and peace.”2
In the sacrament, the act of affirming belief entrusts the baptized with responsibilities, through which they are called to action in the world.
Action that promotes care, justice, and peace in our world.
As all these thoughts swirled in my head, I shared some of these initial ideas with colleagues at the conference. Speaking together, they helped me articulate a connection between my thinking and our shared work. Because similar to the way the gathered assembly affirms what they are for in the baptismal liturgy, our colleges and universities are also called to affirm what it is that we are for.
“Because similar to the way the gathered assembly affirms what they are for in the baptismal liturgy, our colleges and universities are also called to affirm what it is that we are for.”
In “Rooted and Open,” the authors affirm that “In their appreciation and cultivation of diversity in its many forms, Lutheran colleges and universities welcome all and learn from all.”3
This is an affirmation echoed by many of our schools in mission statements and college or university values. At my own school, St. Olaf College, our mission statement specifically names that we strive for our students to learn in an “inclusive, globally engaged community.”4
In this mission, we make an affirmative statement about the community of which we are a part.
“As the sacrament of baptism reminds us, our affirmations also entrust us with responsibilities, which move us towards action in our communities and the world.”
But, as the sacrament of baptism reminds us, our affirmations also entrust us with responsibilities, which move us towards action in our communities and the world.
The questions for our communities, then, are: What responsibilities do our affirmations to create diverse, inclusive communities create for us? And what actions do our responsibilities call us towards?
A Lutheran perspective on affirmative action argues that we will create truly inclusive and just communities when we clearly affirm our commitments, name the responsibilities that our affirmation entrusts to us, and act in ways that embody our affirmations.
May our work be grounded in such affirmations, responsibilities, and actions that we continue to move our communities to be places of belonging so that all our students may flourish.
Endnotes
1. “Holy Baptism,” in Evangelical Lutheran Worship (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2006), 229.
2. Ibid, 228
3. “Rooted and Open,” May 18, 2018, https://elcamediaresources.blob.core.windows.net/cdn/wp-content/uploads/Rooted_and_Open.pdf.
4. “Mission,” About St. Olaf, June 7, 2023, https://wp.stolaf.edu/about/mission/.
-
Editorial
From the Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes
Windham-Hughes welcomes newcomers and seasoned colleagues to the conversation, lifts up Mary Elise Lowe’s three Lutheran “whys” for educational access, and commends Rev. Jen Rude’s “Sacred Pause” practice as a way to humanize one another and make opening access both easier and more joyful.
-
Editorial
From the Publisher: Reflections on the 2024 Vocational Leaders in Higher Education Conference
Lamont Anthony Wells
Wells reflects on the 2024 VLHE Conference theme — “Educational Access: Lutheran Roots, Contemporary Practices” — tracing today’s commitment to inclusivity back to Martin Luther’s radical 16th-century insistence that both boys and girls be educated, and previews NECU’s expanded engagement of student leaders alongside faculty and administrators.
-
Article
Access, Accessibility, & Change: A Call for Trustworthy Leadership in Higher Education
Emma Jones
Jones surveys the converging pressures on higher education — cost, the enrollment cliff, shifting demographics, and declining public confidence — and uses Reichheld and Dunlap’s four factors of trust (transparency, capability, reliability, humanity) to call campus leaders to rebuild trustworthy leadership from the inside out.
-
Article
Creation, Justice, and Communio: Lutheran Insights Empowering Educational Access
Mary Elise Lowe
In her VLHE keynote, Lowe names three Lutheran commitments — continuing creation, neighbor justice, and communio — as the “why” that empowers ELCA colleges and universities to pursue equitable access for students often left behind by persistence and graduation gaps.
-
Article
Committed to Paradox
Caryn Riswold
Riswold lifts up paradox — saint and sinner, lord and servant, Rooted and Open — as a distinctive Lutheran root that lets institutions honor the complicated truth of who their students are and embrace the messy, ever-reforming work of access and accessibility as a theology of the cross.
-
Article
2024 VHLE Conference: "Rooting Access" Panel Talking Points
Guy Nave
Nave reads “access” across Deuteronomy 23, Ruth, Isaiah 56, Acts 10, and Matthew 15:21-28 as an ongoing biblical conversation that evolves from exclusion to ever-widening welcome — and presses ELCA institutions to shift their focus from “student readiness” to “institutional readiness.”
-
Reflection
Reflecting on Belonging
Melissa Woeppel
Woeppel, campus pastor at her own alma mater, wrestles with a Bethany student’s plea — “I want to feel like this is my home, like I belong” — and Mindy Makant’s reminder that we don’t choose the story of the past but do choose how we tell it forward, opening space for students from 35 faith traditions to find Lutheran institutions to be their home.
-
Article
“A Decolonizing Conversation”: Indigenous Engagement at Luther College at the University of Regina
Marc Jerry, Sarah Dymund
No. 58 · Fall 2023
Jerry and Dymund describe Luther College at the University of Regina’s response to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission — Land Acknowledgments, a Starblanket ceremony, the Project of Heart, an Elder in Residence, and the unedited video conversation with Elder Lorna Standingready that anchored their 2023 VLHE keynote.
-
Book Review
Richard T. Hughes: How Christian Faith Can Sustain the Life of the Mind
Tom Christenson
No. 13 · Winter 2002
Christenson reviews Richard Hughes’s How Christian Faith Can Sustain the Life of the Mind (Eerdmans, 2001), which argues, drawing on Tillich’s notion of “religion breaking through its own particularity,” that faith is a means to the open pursuit of truth rather than its enemy. Christenson reads the argument as a natural fit for a Lutheran tradition of semper reformanda but notes Luther’s own dogmatism toward fellow reformers, and wishes Hughes had drawn a sharper line between an absolute truth that relativizes all human truths and a postmodern abandonment of truth altogether. The book was the most-cited title at the November meeting of North American Lutheran academic officers.
-
Article
Vocation Outside of Career: Discovering Purpose through Comics
María Evelia Emerson
No. 53 · Spring 2021
Emerson recounts building an Augustana Vocational Discernment course around G. Willow Wilson’s Ms. Marvel series, using Kamala Khan’s juggling of family, friendship, faith, and superhero identity to help sophomores see vocation as not what they do for a living but how they want to live.
-
Book Review
Assessing the Value of Liberal Arts: A Review of The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs, by Richard A. Detweiler
Robert D. Haak
No. 55 · Spring 2022
Haak reviews Richard A. Detweiler’s The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs, in which the former president of the Great Lakes Colleges Association analyzes 240 college mission statements and interviews more than 1,000 graduates to argue that liberal arts educational experiences have a measurable impact on adult lives of consequence, inquiry, and accomplishment — and invites NECU institutions into a further conversation about how Detweiler’s methodology applies to Lutheran higher education.
-
Article
The Ought
Ned Wisnefske
No. 19 · Summer 2004
Wisnefske observes that students and faculty raise contradictory objections to moral education—that students are already morally formed, and that teachers must not form them—and argues that both share the same fear of “the Ought.” He proposes that the Ought is best encountered not in front of us but behind us, nudging us, as we exercise impartiality, sympathy, and free will and discover that the persons participating in moral inquiry deserve respect; the Ought can then reform our past formations and transform our wants, so that it is never too late, or a mistake, to be shaped by it.
-
Article
"We're Looking for a College—Not a Vocation": Articulating Lutheran Higher Education to Prospective Students and Parents Seeking Relevance
Karl Stumo, Tom Crady
No. 38 · Fall 2013
Drawing on Sallie Mae and UCLA enrollment data, the websites of competitor institutions, and candid voices from the field, Crady and Stumo describe a recruitment landscape in which yield rates have collapsed, discount rates have soared, and the word “Lutheran” often presents an obstacle until it is patiently unpacked. They survey mission language at Augsburg, PLU, Gustavus, and Wartburg and argue that strategic message development is the only way for ELCA schools to make vocation and Lutheran identity “credible, relevant, differentiating, and compelling” to prospective families.