CHAPTER ONE
PREPARING GOOD SOIL When the first students and teachers came together at the end of January 1981 for the start of the first school year of Trinity Lutheran Primary School at Ashmore, it was not only the beginning of an exciting adventure in school building but also the culmination of many years of dreaming, planning, researching and working by a number of Lutherans on the Gold Coast. A diverse range of people, conditions and circumstances converged to bring the school into existence. The first was the importance assigned by the Lutheran Church to Christian education. Education has always been valued highly in the Lutheran Church from its very beginnings, when Martin Luther declared that he esteemed “the calling of schoolmaster” above all others. He considered that literacy was essential for the nurture of Christian faith and that literacy was therefore the right of both women and men, girls and boys. The Lutheran Church in Australia has a rich history of Christian schools. Both in Queensland and in South Australia the first Lutherans were missionaries who established schools to instruct the aboriginal children.
Among the German Lutheran pioneers in South Australia and Victoria, Lutheran schools were regarded as essential to the life of the congregation. The teacher (usually only one) was held in esteem, next only to the pastor, and the two invariably worked closely together. The stakes were high – the Christian instruction and nurture of the coming generation and the preservation of the Lutheran faith and practice. Lutheran schools flourished until the devastation of closure by government legislation during World War 1. In Queensland the church culture and the immigration history were very different. As a result, although many Lutheran schools came into existence, competent teachers were in very short supply, and the schools failed to thrive. As a result, when the wartime decree to close them came into force, there were only a few Saturday German language schools still operating. The modest post-war revival of Lutheran primary schools in the southern states failed to eventuate in Queensland. Not until 1945 and 1946 did Lutheran schooling reemerge, this time as secondary schools at Indooroopilly and in Toowoomba. The soil for the growth of Lutheran schools seemed barren and unpromising.
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