Lutheran Education: Getting Down to the Basics (Part 6 of 8)
In 1838, five ships left Germany carrying more than seven hundred Lutherans toward America. They were not chasing land or gold. They were running toward something and away from something at the same time. What they were running from was a political school system back home that had stopped teaching their children the faith. What they were running toward was the freedom to raise their children as Christians.
Their leader, C.F.W. Walther, who would become the first president of our church body, said it directly: “Concern for the future of their children in both church and school was the most compelling reason for the emigration to America.” They crossed an ocean for this.
A schoolhouse before almost anything else
Think about what those families faced when they landed: poverty, sickness, a wilderness in Perry County, Missouri, with everything still to build. And among the very first things they built was a log cabin schoolhouse. On the ships and on the riverboats up the Mississippi, the children had already been kept at their lessons. The school was not something to get to once life settled down. The school was a focus.
These were not people with time or money to waste on luxuries. They treated a Christian education for their children as a necessity, like food and shelter. That tells you what they believed it was: not an advantage, but survival, the survival of the faith into the next generation.
“Everything depends on that”
When the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod was organized in 1847, it wrote this conviction into its founding constitution. To be a member congregation, a church was to provide “a Christian education for the children of the congregations.” Every founding congregation had a day school. This was not because schools were fashionable, but because these Christians could not imagine a faithful congregation that did not teach its own children.
Walther once said: “May God preserve for our German Lutheran Church the treasure of her parochial schools! Humanly speaking, everything depends on that for the future of our church in America.”
Everything. Not most things. He believed that if the church lost its schools, it would lose its children, and if it lost its children, it would lose its future. The Scriptures had said as much long before: God gave His testimony “that the generation to come might know them, the children who would be born” (Psalm 78:6). Walther simply took it seriously enough to build institutions on it.
They built more than buildings. They built a teacher’s seminary so the schools would have faithful, learned teachers, with men like J.C.W. Lindemann training a whole generation of Lutheran schoolteachers. They published their own pure textbooks because Walther worried about handing children books that would put their faith “in jeopardy.” Every piece of it served one end: children who knew the Lord.
The next link in the chain
St. John’s school did not appear out of nowhere. It stands at the end of that long line of conviction, the Saxons on their ships, the log schoolhouse in the clearing, the seminary, the constitution, Walther’s “everything depends on that.” Generations of families since have made real sacrifices to keep a Lutheran school open in their own town, for their own children, and for children not yet born.
That inheritance is just as important as ever. The treasure those immigrants crossed an ocean to protect is still here, still doing the same work it has always done. The next link in that two-hundred-year chain could be your child.
Next week: why all of this prepares a child not just for church, but for an ordinary, useful, God-pleasing life in the world.
Come and see. The school those immigrants sacrificed to build is still here at St. John, doing the same work. We are enrolling now, and we would be glad to welcome your family into that inheritance. To visit, ask questions, or learn about registration, contact the school office or speak with Pastor Gillespie.
Next in the series: Education for Real Life: The Doctrine of Vocation
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.