Tag: failure

The grief is real. But the question underneath the grief is more important.

I’ve been watching the reaction to the sale of Concordia University Ann Arbor this week. The alumni posts, the lament threads, the old yearbook photos dusted off and shared one more time. For some the grief is real. Alma maters matter. The place where your faith was sharpened, where you met your spouse, where a professor looked you in the eye and said “you can do this.” That place is sacred ground in a way that defies a spreadsheet.

But I need to say something plainly, even if it’s uncomfortable:

The loss of a memory is not the issue. The loss of a mission is.

And if we stop at the nostalgia, if we cry our tears and then move on, we will have missed the harder and more essential question. And since I’ve never been one to avoid a hard question, let’s go there.

Ten Became Six. Six Became Five. What’s Next?

The Concordia University System was founded in 1992 with ten institutions. That number was itself the product of a century of church investment. These were academies built to train pastors, school teachers, deaconesses, church workers. Brick by brick, generation by generation, the LCMS built a network of places where Lutheran young people could be shaped for a life of faithful service.

Then the erosion began.

Concordia College Alabama was closed in 2018. A historically Black Lutheran college, the only one of its kind. Gone. Voices silenced as if nothing ever happened.

Concordia University Portland was then closed in 2020. Faculty and staff displaced. Five thousand students scattered. A second-largest teacher preparation program in the state of Oregon was extinguished in seconds.

Concordia College New York closed in 2021. Its campus sold to Iona College.

Concordia University Ann Arbor was absorbed into Wisconsin in 2013. Its historic Geddes Road campus of 140 acres on the Huron River in one of Michigan’s fastest-growing university corridors has since been sold to the University of Michigan this month for $60 million.

And Concordia University Texas, which tried to govern itself independently and found itself in a protracted legal battle with the Synod for the privilege. Now no longer part of the LCMS Concordia University System.

Ten institutions. Now, generously, five with full standing. And a denomination in a courtroom fight with one of its own universities.

Someone explain to me how this is a picture of flourishing.

We didn’t lose a campus. We lost a post. And the question no one wants to answer is: who gave the order to abandon it?

The Official Story and the Smell Test

The official explanation from Concordia University Wisconsin and Ann Arbor is tidy. Years of operating losses. Extended careful analysis. Prayerful discernment. Consultation with the Board of Regents. A decision to steward resources faithfully.

Those phrases are true enough, as far as they go. Small private colleges are under enormous pressure across the country. Enrollment declines, tuition dependency, bloated administrative costs. These are real structural problems in higher education, not merely invented ones.

But here’s what doesn’t add up.

When Concordia Ann Arbor’s story began to unravel in early 2024, the new university president announced the campus needed to be “reimagined.” Eleven of eighteen board members were brand new at the time. Some hadn’t even received their board orientation yet when this announcement was made. Board members who reportedly felt the financial story was being shaped to justify a predetermined conclusion. One insider described it plainly: “I think they thought they could sell CUAA to make Concordia, Wisconsin all the more viable and then were trying to weasel to tell the financial story, to make it seem like our hands are tied.”

Hands are never fully tied. Hands are positioned. And the position here looks less like stewardship and more like consolidation.

The question worth asking: was this campus sold because it was unsustainable, or was it sold because it was inconvenient to a larger plan to concentrate resources, reduce complexity, and centralize institutional power within the Synod’s preferred structures?

I don’t have a smoking gun. But I have a pattern.

The Pattern Is the Problem

Alabama. Portland. New York. Ann Arbor. Each one announced with careful language about financial realities. Each one mourned and then absorbed into the institutional memory of the Synod. Each one a place that had educated pastors, teachers, nurses, social workers, people who went into communities and built churches and taught children and loved their neighbors in the name of Jesus.

And each one: gone.

Meanwhile, the Synod’s gravitational pull has been increasingly toward centralization. A 2021 proposal was made to dissolve the Concordia University System and replace it with a new “Commission on University Education,” a structure that would give synodical leadership more direct oversight of “ecclesiastical functions” at each school. Governance battles. Legal fights. A denomination in a lawsuit with its own university in Texas.

Is anyone else seeing what I’m seeing?

The issue is not just whether individual campuses were financially viable. The issue is what vision is being pursued, and whether that vision was ever put to the church for its discernment, or whether it’s simply being executed from the top while the rest of us are handed press releases about prayerful consideration.

You cannot tell me with a straight face that $60 million from a single campus sale in a growing university corridor, in a region with a young population represents a story where every option was exhausted.

What Is the Vision? Because I Can’t Find It.

Here is what I want someone to answer publicly, clearly, and without the language of corporate discernment:

What is the LCMS’s vision for Lutheran higher education in the United States in 2030?

Is it five campuses? Three? One online platform and a seminary? Because the trajectory we’re on leads somewhere, and I want to know where church leadership believes it leads and whether they believe it’s good. Better yet is it God honoring?

If the vision is to consolidate and strengthen what remains, then fine. Make the case. Argue for it. Show your work. Tell the church what you believe a sustainable, faithful model of Lutheran higher education looks like in a disrupted landscape.

But don’t shut down beacons one by one, collect the assets, and call it stewardship. Don’t let 140 acres on the Huron River, in one of the most university-dense corridors in the Midwest, in a city that is growing, not shrinking go to the University of Michigan for $60 million while telling us there was no other way.

Because I’ll tell you what I see when I look at that sale: I see a growing area. I see a young population. I see a university-saturated culture hungry for an alternative. Looking for a place grounded in something bigger than credentials and career tracks. I see exactly the kind of context where a Lutheran witness should be leaning in, not cashing out.

And I see $60 million which, let’s be honest, is not going to build a new campus or launch a new model of mission. It’s going to service debt and fund operations somewhere else. The kingdom did not just gain $60 million. It lost a post.

The Price Tag on a Baptized Life

There’s something theologically grotesque about putting a dollar value on the loss of a place where young people were baptized into faith communities, formed in Lutheran catechesis, sent out as pastors and teachers and nurses and musicians and parents and neighbors.

I’m not being sentimental. I’m being precise.

The Great Commission is not a metaphor. “Go and make disciples” is not a strategic aspiration. It’s a mandate. And a Lutheran university, however imperfect, however financially stressed, was a mechanism for that mandate. It was a place where the church said to the next generation: we will invest in you, because you matter to the mission.

When we sell that place, not to another mission-minded institution, not to a church partner, but to the University of Michigan and we bank the $60 million and call it responsible stewardship, we have made a choice about what we value. We have revealed something about our priorities.

We have put a price on a beacon of the Gospel in a growing region. And that price was $60 million and a politically worded press release.

Has our leadership lost their way? I don’t know. But I know a leader who has lost their way will never stop to ask the question. That’s on us.

The Hard Question We Cannot Avoid

I want to be careful here, because I am not inside the rooms where these decisions were made. I don’t have access to the debt schedules or the enrollment projections or the full burden of what the board knew. Good people can make difficult calls under real constraints.

But I am a pastor in an LCMS congregation. I preach the Word. I baptize children and adults. I send people out into a world that is desperate for something true and enduring. And I need to be able to tell my congregation with a straight face that the institution we belong to is governed by people who share our priorities.

Right now, I’m not sure I can.

What I want, what I think many faithful LCMS pastors and laypeople want, is not nostalgia. It’s accountability. It’s transparency. It’s a leadership that will stop announcing decisions with pastoral language and start actually pastoring the church through the hard questions.

What is our vision for Lutheran higher education?

What happened to the proceeds from Alabama, Portland, and New York?

Who is asking whether the consolidation trend is a strategy or a slow institutional collapse dressed up as discernment?

And if the answer is that we’re down to five universities and comfortable with that trajectory, then for goodness sake just say so. Own it. Defend it. Let the church weigh in.

Because right now, it feels like the decisions are being made, the assets are being converted, and the rest of us are being handed processed grief and told to feel grateful for what remains.

We deserve better than that. And more importantly, the mission deserves better than that.

One More Thing

I am writing this not as a voice of despair, but as a voice of conviction. The church of Jesus Christ is not dependent on institutions. It has outlasted empires. It will outlast the Concordia University System and the LCMS itself if it comes to that.

But stewardship is not merely financial. It is missional. And a church that measures stewardship only by balance sheets and not by the number of pastors formed, teachers sent, communities served, lives changed has already lost something more important than a campus.

It has lost its north star. It has lost God.

God grant us leaders who know the difference. And God grant us the courage to demand they lead accordingly.