The Lutheran Year is a one year residency at a Lutheran Seminary of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). It is required for Lutherans like myself who desire to serve as an ordained minister in the ELCA, but did not go to an ELCA seminary. During the Lutheran Year, a person takes classes mostly about all things Lutheran, like the confessional materials of the Lutheran Church, history of Lutheranism, Pauline texts in the New Testament, Polity of the church, etc. Community and relationships are also a big part of the Lutheran Year. The hope is for students to get connected to other leaders in the church, and build community.

That’s the textbook answer. But I’d like to explore more in depth what the Lutheran Year looks like on the ground, where the rubber hits road for an individual and a family like ours. In the coming days, weeks, and months, I will be building on the theme of the Lutheran Year. Tune in regularly and subscribe, for a look at what the Lutheran Year looks like, and what seminary in general looks like. Are you a past, present, or future seminarian? What was it like for you?

Lutheran School of Theology Gettysburg

Photo by Jen Goellnitz

• Patrons are a diverse group of people, many different cultures feel welcome

• Kids are welcome, and have a semi public space to interact iFood is economically priced, a real need is met

• Free wireless

• Good coffee

What’s that you say? McD’s has questionable health, environmental, and economic practices? Then why does the church let them beat us at our own game, i.e., welcoming children?

Photo courtesy of The Consumerist.

As I drove home I passed a taco truck parked in the parking lot of a gas station. People milled all around it ordering food, and eating tacos with their heads tilted to the side, their shoulders raised, and the collars of their jackets turned up keeping their necks warm from the cool night air. I looked at them eating for as long as I could, and then I jerked my head back to the road in front of me, back to where I was headed. Into the darkness of the night I drove, into an unknown future I go.

Why would someone like me want to be a pastor? Why would someone want to be religious at all, in a traditional sense of going to church, etc?

Like a taco truck exists to serve up hot and delicious Mexican food to hungry people giving them joy and real sustenance on a cold night, so I want to be part of a community which serves up a real heart warming and sustaining message of hope. Keeping this in mind I can journey through the dark night.

Do you think that the church has a real sustaining message to share with the world? If so, what is it? If not, why?

Which brings me to something else that I’ve been wanting to write about. Seminary. That too, is a lot of work. Next week, I will begin my final semester at Claremont School of Theology (CST). It’s a little sad to think about, but also exciting to prepare for the next leg of my journey of becoming a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. All told I will have spent three years studying at CST. Next, we will move to Berkeley, California and there I will attend Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary for one year of residency called, “the Lutheran Year.”

It’s been a good two and a half years so far at CST. I’ve learned a lot and been stretched both intellectually and spiritually. It’s a wonder to think that I’ve come this far, and that my family has been so supportive and patient thus far. I am deeply thankful for this. Some processes take a while to endure in order to come out the other side useful and helpful, especially if you’re a wild nut with more than your share of bitterness. That’s a bit of an exaggeration!

Our daughter Rebecca, nephew Steve, and niece Ashlee, each got an empty milk jug and we spent about an hour picking acorns off the sidewalk along our residential street. Even our baby, little Chaz helped out (shhh don’t tell Sheri). We took them home and spent some time splitting open the shells and digging out the raw acorn nut. This is a painstaking process.

Next we blended the acorn nuts in water and put them in mason jars and since I only I have one, we put the rest in plastic containers. Now, according to what I read on the internet we need to spend a few days leaching out the tannins.

So there you have it, day one of making Acorn bread. We had a lot of fun doing this on day one. It was a great way to keep the kids occupied for a morning, it was educational, and it was green. I hope the world never comes to what is described in “Parable of the Sower” but if you’re in need of stretching your dollars like we are, you might enjoy scavenging/harvesting wild acorns too!

Thanks to www.californiaoaks.org/html/reference.html for the free information in: “Acorns and Eat ‘Em.”

Stay tuned for more Acorn action to follow!

I remember as a kid visiting Melrose Avenue. We had lunch in some cafe, not sure which one it was. It was the 80′s. My mom let my sister and I walk down the street and check out shops on our own. I was from a small town in Arizona, mind you. We went into a shop with punk rocker gear. Remember that this was well before the days of “Hot Topics” in every suburban mall. This was before “Goth” was one o

f many trends a kid could adopt. This was Los Angeles in the 80′s and I was maybe seven or eight years old. I looked at young men and women dressed in leather with real mow-hawks and studded leather with spikes. It felt like I was in a movie, or a different world. These kinds of places only existed on TV, so I had thought. It felt authentic. That memory has stuck with me for years until this past week when I visited Melrose Avenue again. When I was a kid it didn’t even feel like it was a store. It was a porthole to a different world, with different people, and a different lifestyle and values. Typical of nostalgia it was disappointing to see these places from the eyes of a 30 year old. I realized that this mythic place in my mind was just a shop, just materialism. Or was it?

Fashion, music, and consumerism can be criticized for being shallow vestiges of a deeper reality. It seems like being a punk rocker in the 80′s should have involved being awarded your gear after passing a test or achieving hard core status. It’s disappointing that the mythical creatures I saw were perhaps just suburban kids who drove into LA and bought the gear and took on the look. Were they any more punk-rock than me, a seven year old small town boy?

We all make choices in life. People go in different directions. Some small town kids do move to the city and live a hard core punk rock lifestyle. Others never move. Others walk across continents searching for their identity. Even though I don’t live in the City of Los Angeles, there is something about that place that I love. There is an ineffability to it that draws one in. A mystical truth that is hard to pin down. It’s said that the post modern turn involves an assent that there isn’t an essentialist truth in reality. That the truth can’t be nailed down precisely but is subjective to persons and observers. Los Angeles is so large and sprawling, and maybe one of the places where literally buying your identity at boutique shops was first widespread that it speaks truth to our situation, a broad situation in life. The reality of Los Angeles in the 80′s isn’t less true than I remembered it. It was a harbinger to the reality of today.

Were you there? I know I have friends who were adults in Los Angeles in the 80′s. What do you remember? Did anyone else go there as a kid? What do you remember?

Two weeks ago I completed one unit of Clinical Pastoral Education. I didn’t do much blogging during that time, mostly because it was  a busy time, but also because it was intense! There was so much to process that I wanted some distance before writing about it in a public forum. But enough apologies.

Here’s my super refined answer to, “How was CPE?”

• Good. I walk away being deeply thankful for the experience, for the people I worked with, and the hospital.
• Practical. After two years of heady academic work CPE was an opportunity to get practical and get real. I liked that.
• Enlightening. I’ve got new respect for chaplains and chaplaincy. It is a powerful ministry, a justice ministry bringing grace and love to people who greatly need it.
• Hopeful. Even in the middle of the night when deeply sad things happen I found hope in God’s promises.
• Intense. One person said part of CPE is “peeling away the layers of the onion” of yourself. There is a truth to this. Self-awareness is a large part of CPE.  It’s not easy to do this, but the process is well worth it. I found that I can care better for others in a more intentional way when I am aware of my own issues.

So there you have it. CPE. If you get the chance, I recommend it.

Now I am starting my third and final year of study at Claremont School of Theology at Claremont Lincoln University. This year I’ll be taking more practical classes to prepare for ordained ministry, and I’ll also be writing a master’s thesis on youth theology. Stay tuned for more updates to come.