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
Wake Up Running! A Call to Ethical Leaders in Quest of Democratic Space
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
Building a Third Space in the Age of AI: A Conversation with Dr. Walter Earl Fluker
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
What Does Ethical Leadership in a Changing World Require?
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
Lutheran Colleges: Past and Prologue
Paul J. Dovre
No. 30 · Fall 2009
Dovre offers a reminiscence rather than a research paper, drawing on Aristotle’s ethos, logos, and pathos to trace fifty years of change at Midwestern Lutheran colleges through the key issues of survival, respectability, faithfulness, and relationship to the church — from the dependence of the 1950s through the independence of the late twentieth century to the partnership of the 2000s — and identifies key variables (the student marketplace, faculty formation, and the identity/diversity paradox) for shaping the identity and mission of Lutheran colleges into the future.
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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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Reflection
Confessions of a Collaborator
Chuck Huff
No. 3 · Summer 1997
Huff of St. Olaf offers a tongue-in-cheek public confession of his lifelong sin of collaboration—from elementary-school reports on dinosaurs and Cliff notes on Faulkner, through high-school algebra and college group projects, to borrowed syllabi, group work imposed on resentful students, tutorials, independent studies on every form of self-reliance, and circulated drafts. Even this confession was collaborated on, and (he confesses) he enjoyed it.
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Response
Response to Bishop Olson and President Tipson
Robert Benne
No. 16 · Winter 2003
Benne responds to two articles in the Winter 2002 Intersections: former Bishop Stanley Olson’s “The Marks of an ELCA College,” whose narrow reading of the two kingdoms cedes all epistemological claims to secular knowledge, and President Tipson’s engagement with The Future of Religious Colleges, whose “rather unchastened Enlightenment spirit” underestimates how loaded the social sciences and humanities are with their own philosophical and religious assumptions. Drawing on Reinhold Niebuhr, John Milbank, and William Buckley, Benne defends a “critical mass” of pervasively Lutheran colleges and calls on bishops and pastors to take the schools seriously lest they drift from their religious heritage.
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Article
Hope in the Face of Ecological Decline
Jason Peters
No. 32 · Spring 2010
Peters reads our ecological crisis—a campus “Birth Control Tree,” feminized fish, population, climate, water, and soil—through Alexander Pope, William Blake, Søren Kierkegaard, and C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, and argues that the modern project of mastering nature has made despair (the unconscious form Kierkegaard named) our condition. He calls for three reorientations: practical (assigning value to domestic arts and place over disciplinary specialization), philosophical (dismantling the Baconian/Machiavellian/Cartesian project of control), and theological (recovering the Church’s rejection of Gnosticism so that grace comes to us by means of nature, not in contempt of it).
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Article
"Annoying the Student With Her Rights:" Human Life Coram Hominibus; Reflections on Vocation, Hope, and Politics
Caryn Riswold
No. 32 · Spring 2010
Riswold takes a student’s course-evaluation complaint that she had been “annoyed with her rights” about voting as the entry point for reflection on fear of change, mistrust of difference, and right-wing extremist violence—Poplawski, Von Brunn, Roeder, and the Sotomayor hearings. Drawing on Gerhard Ebeling’s reading of Luther’s fourfold relationality (coram Deo, mundo, meipso, hominibus), Brian Gerrish, Alister McGrath, Gustaf Wingren, Philip Hefner, Mary Rose O’Reilley, and bell hooks, she argues that the vocation of the Lutheran college is precisely to “annoy students with their rights” by forming them for socially responsible voice grounded in faith active in love.