Ethical Leadership for a Changing World: A Shared Calling from Cradle to Career
Cory Newman
Evangelical Lutheran Education Association
Janelle Rozek Hooper
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
Intersections No. 62 · Fall 2025
A recent ELCA Barna-funded survey found that parents are looking for shared values when it comes to their children’s education. The “ask” was to parents of young children as it relates to early learning centers, but the answer of “shared values” reverberates in our Lutheran higher education as well.
Those shared values, stemming from our baptismal vocation, are what make for ethical leaders. And now more than ever, we recognize these must be cultivated from the earliest ages through the highest levels of education. Yet until recently, our educational ministries have operated in surprising isolation. At the 2025 Vocation of Lutheran Higher Education Conference, a college president learned that there are 1,200 Lutheran schools and early learning centers across the ELCA. Their surprise revealed more than an awareness gap—it highlighted our untapped potential to develop ethical leaders across the entire educational continuum.
This discovery emerged during conversations between NECU attendees and the ELCA’s Program Director for Ministry with Children, Janelle Hooper. As part of her role, Hooper also serves as a board member for the Evangelical Lutheran Education Association (ELEA), which supports weekday education programs for children from birth through 12th grade in ELCA congregations. While Hooper led her workshop, what became clear was that our institutions don’t just share a Lutheran identity—we face identical challenges in preparing ethical leaders for our rapidly changing world.
United by Common Challenges
Both ELCA colleges and early learning centers grapple with identical challenges in today’s changing world. Most significantly, we’re both hiring increasing numbers of non-Lutheran directors, staff, and faculty to broaden our leadership diversity. Yet neither sector consistently provides “Lutheran identity onboarding” for these crucial team members. We speak of being “rooted in Lutheranism” while leaving staff to discover what that actually means in practice.
Cultivating Communities of Curiosity
Higher education faculty expressed a desire for students who arrive on campus to be more comfortable questioning their faith as part of spiritual growth. Meanwhile, early childhood educators are perfectly positioned to nurture these “communities of curiosity” from the earliest ages. Imagine the possibilities of intentional rubrics used by campus pastors like Lisa Kramme at Midland Lutheran, with the school’s observatory for stargazing reflection, that build from preschoolers similarly lying in wonder beneath star-covered ceilings.
A Call for Connection
As we face an increasingly complex world requiring ethical leadership at every level, the time has come to bridge the awareness gap between our educational ministries. Creative programming could flow both directions—bringing college innovation to early learning and early childhood wonder to higher education. Our shared mission demands intentional partnership. When college presidents and early childhood directors discover their common ground, when faculty and preschool teachers share best practices, when students and children experience seamless Lutheran formation from cradle through career, we fulfill our calling, as President Pribbenow says, to be “small to our students and big for the world.”
To explore partnership opportunities between your institution and ELEA, contact Cory Newman or Janelle Hooper, or visit elcaschools.org.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Lamont Anthony Wells
Wells frames the issue as a record of the 2025 VLHE Conference at Augsburg under the theme “Ethical Leadership in a Changing World,” arguing that vocation is never solitary but a collective, public witness of ethical formation, theology and care, flourishing and belonging, and leadership rooted in God’s grace.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes
Windham-Hughes plays on the shared Latin root of “education” and “seduction” (ducere, to lead) to warn against the No-saying seductions of giving up or condemnation, and to call educators to the riskier Yes of showing up to build third-space communities of truth-telling and hope.
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Article
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Walter Earl Fluker
Abridged from his VLHE keynote, Fluker draws on Habakkuk and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower to call a new generation of ethical leaders to “wake up running” toward democratic futures, packing their runaway bags with love-filled-justice, grace-filled-empathy, and hope-filled-resiliency for the soul-filled work the moment requires.
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Article
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Elizabeth Kubek
Prompted by AI chatbots being marketed to students as a safer alternative to messy human relationships, Kubek interviews Fluker on how Howard Thurman’s vision of common consciousness, somaesthetics, and nature-rooted learning offers educators a “third space” alternative to AI’s hall of mirrors.
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Article
Ethical Leadership: Rooted, Open, Generative, and Mindful
John Arthur Nunes
As he prepares to teach an Ethical Leadership First Year Seminar at California Lutheran, Nunes organizes his pedagogy around three mutually-reinforcing “turns” — inward, outward, and intellectual — grounded in Luther’s mandatum dei and larvae dei, Bonhoeffer’s estates, and Howard Thurman’s call to hear “the sound of the genuine” in oneself.
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Article
What is Required of You?: Higher Education Leadership in a Moral Key
Paul C. Pribbenow
Drawing on Micah 6:8 and Stephen Carter’s “etiquette of democracy,” Pribbenow describes the three things Augsburg requires of every incoming student — show up, pay attention, and do the work — as a democratic social ethic that prepares students for engaged citizenship in a fractured public life.
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Article
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Kristina Frugé
Frugé argues that ethical leadership in a changing — perhaps ending — world means cultivating trustworthy communities through patient, co-created relationship work, drawing on her experience stewarding the writing community behind Hungry for Hope: Letters to the Church from Young Adults.
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Article
Fostering Moral Imagination and Inclusivity: The Role of Ethical Leadership in ELCA Colleges and Universities Amid Societal Challenges
Lamont Anthony Wells
Wells argues that “moral imagination” — the capacity to envision ethical alternatives, empathize across difference, and respond creatively to injustice — is the heart of ethical leadership in NECU institutions, and that anchoring leadership in this principle positions Lutheran higher education to cultivate socially responsible citizens.
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Reflection
VLHE—Wednesday Morning Sacred Pause
Ann Rosendale
Rosendale draws on Esther 4:14 and the Lutheran practice of holding death and resurrection together — with “and” as the hardest word — to argue that the calling of Lutheran higher education for “just such a time as this” requires us to remember and name out loud that ours are places where God is at work.
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Article
Gift and Calling: A Lutheran Perspective on Higher Education
Darrell Jodock
No. 34 · Fall 2011
Jodock argues that a Lutheran perspective on higher education rests on three underlying ideas—that we are gifted (a giftedness that calls forth wonder, awe, gratitude, a sense of humor, and vocation as response to neighbor); that the Lutheran tradition affirms a particular kind of God who is down-to-earth and at work in the world for justice and human wholeness; and that a Lutheran “third path” can be both rooted in the tradition and inclusive of others. He draws out ten implications for higher education, from wonder as the heart of religion through liberal learning oriented toward the freedom of its members.
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Article
No Child Left Behind Meets Philip Melanchthon: A Reflective Conversation
Kathy Book
No. 26 · Fall 2007
Inspired by Tim Lull’s My Conversations with Martin Luther, Book imagines an interview with Philip Melanchthon in the cobblestone courtyard of the University of Wittenberg, in which the Praeceptor Germaniae reflects on his pedagogy (Socratic questioning, brevity and example, declamations, repetition, and interdisciplinary connections), his graded curriculum from primer to university, and his collaboration with Luther on the responsibility of community, parents, and government for the education of all children — and finds his vision strikingly resonant with the No Child Left Behind legislation of 2006.
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Article
Vocational Re-Formation for a Multi-Religious World
Elizabeth Eaton
No. 40 · Fall 2014
ELCA Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton frames vocational formation for a multi-religious world as one of the most significant challenges facing the church and the liberal arts today, calling ELCA colleges and universities to live into Darrell Jodock’s “third path” that is both deeply rooted and dialogical.
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Article
The Face of the Neighbor: An Interview with Four Capital University Faculty About Their Recent Visit to Cuba
Brian Forry Wallace, Michael Yosha, Reg Dyck, Susan Narita
No. 7 · Summer 1999
Four Capital University faculty—political scientist Brian Wallace (returning to Cuba a third time after the 1994 boat lift), English professor Reg Dyck, ESL teacher Susan Narita, and political scientist Michael Yosha—recount their summer 1998 trip with Pastors for Peace, describing Cuban priorities of education, health care, and military (in that order), the cultural richness of Havana from sixteenth-century cloisters to Miramar, the Cuban Foreign Service’s vision of a Scandinavian-style democratic socialism, the counter-productive U.S. embargo (including its effect on kidney dialysis machines), Castro’s 1991 reconciliation with religious communities, and a recurrent image of a little girl named Marguerite singing at a school for amputee and terminally ill children. The interview was conducted by Capital senior Jessica Brown and Tom Christenson.
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Article
Teaching as an Expression of a Love Ethic
Abbylynn Helgevold
No. 53 · Spring 2021
Drawing on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love and Kevin Gannon’s teaching manifesto, Helgevold describes how an ethic of upbuilding love—love that presupposes goodness in students—reshapes inclusive pedagogy at Wartburg College, from syllabus language to how she addresses plagiarism and attendance.
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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.