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
5 min audio
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
5 min audio
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
44 min audio
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
11 min audio
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
25 min audio
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
15 min audio
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
5 min audio
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
12 min audio
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
8 min audio
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
Finding Flourishing: Teaching Self-Care as Course Content
Emily Kahm
No. 49 · Spring 2019
Kahm argues that teaching self-care, self-awareness, and stress-coping as explicit classroom content embodies the “radical hospitality” of Rooted and Open and supports vocational formation against a consumerist culture, then offers concrete classroom techniques — a one-to-five energy check-in, ninety-second silence exercises, and full-day spiritual practices — that can be adapted across disciplines at NECU institutions.
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Article
Perspectives on Institutional Service: All Hands on Deck
Ruth Henricks
No. 12 · Summer 2001
Henricks, President and CEO of Lutheran Family Services of Nebraska, uses Annie Dillard’s image of Christians tourist-like on Deck C to call colleges and social ministry organizations to “all hands on deck” in a church standing at a threshold of shifting demographics—a growing rich-poor gap, a coming Hispanic majority, an aging baby-boom, dual-career families, contingency workers, and for-profit Lockheed Martin-style competitors entering human services. Drawing on Foster McCurley, Andrew Grove’s Only the Paranoid Survive, Justo Gonzales’s Manana, Arthur Becker, Bob Bacher, David Tiede, and the ELCA constitution, she argues that SMOs and colleges are the “hands” of the body of Christ and asks whether we have courage to require Spanish, partner ecumenically, cut services to Caucasian clients, and lead the church from the front rather than the rear.
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Institutional Focus
Interfaith Campus Organizing at California Lutheran University
Allison Bermann, Mehak Sachdev
No. 44 · Fall 2016
California Lutheran University students Allison Bermann and Mehak Sachdev describe how interfaith participation at CLU grew from a grassroots movement into a sustained, integrated part of campus identity — with an intern program, Interfaith Allies, co-curricular events from Diwali dinners to Hunger Banquets, and a classroom practice of storytelling that opens the required Introduction to Christianity course to students of every faith and none.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 36 · Fall 2012
Wilhelm argues that the rhetoric framing ELCA higher education as a binary between “secular” and “religious” is “hokum”: there is a third way of doing higher education from a Christian perspective that is religious in motivation and practice but on the ground looks secular. After more than half a century of debates, he calls on ELCA presidents to “do something” in 2013 to move forward in shared mission and vocation.
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Article
Negotiating Legitimate and Conflicting Values
Eboo Patel, Katie Bringman Baxter, Mark S. Hanson
No. 44 · Fall 2016
In a closing-day conversation at the 2016 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference, Mark Hanson and Eboo Patel — moderated by Katie Bringman Baxter of Interfaith Youth Core — share case studies in which legitimate religious values come into tension with one another, and make the case that Lutheran colleges should teach interfaith leadership through the hard cases rather than the easy ones.
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Response
Response to Mark Wilhelm: Distinguishing Between Identity and Vocation
Andrew Tucker
No. 56 · Fall 2022
Tucker proposes that NECU’s next most faithful step is to faithfully and effectively differentiate vocations and identities — arguing that identity is who you are, vocation is what you do, and that recognizing the plurality of both helps Lutheran institutions name which work is theirs to take up and which is good work that belongs to someone else.