My years of experience at WELS preparatory schools have given me some insight on the gifts that pastors bring to the classroom.

WELS preparatory schools have approximately the same number of pastor-trained men and teacher-trained men and women teaching side-by-side. Observing those dynamics over the years has led to some conventional wisdom. “It is good when the teachers are a little more pastoral,” say the school administrators, “and it is good when the pastors are little more, well, teacherly.”

“A little more teacherly” means a willingness to engage in the science of education. Martin Luther recognized the benefit, suggesting that men training for the pastoral ministry would first be teachers for ten years. Famously, he wrote, “Schoolmasters (teachers) have learned to speak in school with their pupils. They know how the passages of Holy Scripture are properly to be handled and explained. I wish that no one would be called as a preacher before first being a schoolmaster.”

When Lutherans moved to the frontiers of the United States and set up their elementary schools in places where the public school system had not yet been organized, they often called on their pastors to be schoolmasters. The histories of the earliest WELS elementary schools usually list the pastor as a teacher. Although it became clear that people with teacher training were also necessary, there was usually still a role for the pastor in formal education.

The observation “it is good when teachers are ‘a little more pastoral’” tells you, fellow pastors, that you bring something important to your role as a teacher. You understand that Lutheran teachers are ministers of the gospel. You know that the Lutheran school is Church, where the gospel is taught in truth and purity. You have come to a personal conviction about teaching the gospel of Jesus Christ to every student. You have come to the understanding that the law applied in the structure of the classroom is primarily to bring a student to repentance. The Holy Spirit has given you Privatseelsorge, a pastoral care for individual souls, and your view of the student as a soul to be cared for by the application of law and gospel is of greater value than anything else. For what good is it for students to gain an A+ for the semester, yet forfeit their souls? Or what can students give in exchange for their souls?

As our schools find it necessary in this time of rapid growth to press faithful teachers with limited or no ministerial education into teaching positions, you may share these insights into distinctively Lutheran teaching. This is the Lutheran birthright in education, always to be treasured, never to be sold.