World Mission Professor
*This article first appeared in the 2008 edition of the Ќηρυξαтε magazine
The Lord has truly blessed the worldwide outreach of WELS, and with those blessings has come a new and different role for Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary. Consider:
A seminary of our fellowship in Nigeria asks WLS to formally recognize the program that its new graduates have completed.
A seminary in Hong Kong needs to borrow professors for up to a semester at a time to supplement its staff, which is stretched beyond its limits.
A training program in Latin America needs a “WLS connection” as it explores its options in distance education.
WLS courses in missiology need a living link to WELS world missions in the 21st century.
Overseers of gospel outreach in Nepal want ideas on how to provide trained workers for new Lutheran congregations that are springing up rapidly.
A gifted national evangelist in Bulgaria needs to find a way to continue his theological education while he serves his flock.
A WLS professor is developing an online dogmatics course. He wonders who within our worldwide fellowship might find it useful.
Previously, helping with needs like these might have been anybody’s job—which can easily become nobody’s job. Today, requests like these are regularly channeled through the World Mission Seminary Professor.
The World Mission Seminary Professor (WMSP) position was created in response to the increasing demands placed on WLS faculty by programs of ministerial education around the world. Currently, nearly all WLS professors have done at least some teaching overseas; many have taught multiple courses in multiple countries. A former WLS president used to wonder aloud whether one day he might come to chapel on the Mequon campus and find the entire faculty row empty, as professors were filling temporary teaching assignments around the world. More manpower and more coordination were clearly needed.
As the position was designed, the WMSP is part of the Pastoral Studies Institute program at WLS. I teach a full load on the Mequon campus about half the year, and I have a full slate of the other responsibilities that come with being a member of the faculty—student advisees, committee assignments, preaching engagements, etc. The other half of the year, my time is available to programs of ministerial education on world mission fields. Either I travel and teach overseas myself, or I free up a colleague to travel and teach. Requests for professors come from places like Hong Kong, Japan, India, Central Africa, Nigeria, Russia, Ukraine, and Sweden. The manpower represented by the WMSP makes meeting these requests possible—either by WLS professors or by MLC professors, whose overseas service the WMSP has also helped to arrange.
Consulting on matters of curriculum and instruction is also part of the WMSP’s responsibility. I’m certainly not adept in every language, culture, and ministry situation in which WELS missionaries are involved. But having been a world missionary myself and a director of an overseas training program, I do appreciate the challenges—as well as the unique blessings—that the work involves.
Often, one challenge is the relatively small size and isolation of many training programs on world fields, which can easily lead a program to question itself and its direction. Is anybody else doing what we’re doing? Are there new materials or technologies that could help us? How has this kind of work been done in the past? If we go this route, where should we look for blessings, and where for pitfalls? As we adapt our program to our unique culture and circumstances, exactly what can change and what must not? Nobody can provide ready-made answers to all these questions from an office in Mequon, Wisconsin. But the WMSP can provide a listening ear, an outsider’s perspective, and a nexus with a program well into its second century of training confessional Lutheran pastors for its own time and place.
The benefits of that nexus flow in both directions. The Lord of the Church has enriched WLS in many ways through the overseas experiences of its professors. Notes for courses in dogmatics that were once stolidly Western in perspective now include quotations from Eastern Orthodox theologians, from Hindus, from the Koran. Professors return to the U.S. deeply moved by the zeal with which new Christians share their faith in settings that are sometimes hostile, and with the sacrifices they make in order to follow Jesus. Such zeal is infectious; professors can’t help but pass it along to their students. One colleague at WLS, newly back from a teaching stint overseas, said to me, “My first thought was, ‘Lord, why did you bring me back here? The work right now is there!’”
He’s very much aware, of course, that the work is both there and here. Our vision is an ever-stronger link between “there” and “here,” through the continued service of WLS professors overseas—and through the role of the WMSP in making such service possible.
World Mission Seminary Professor Kenneth A. Cherney teaches Old Testament and systematic theology.