• • Associate Professor of Pastoral Ministry and Missions
• • Vice President of Institutional Assessment and Accreditation
• • The Wakefield-Kroemer Director of Library and Information Services

Biography

The Rev. Prof. Robert Roethemeyer has served as Director of Library and Information Services at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne Indiana since June 1997. From May 1988 until May 1997, he served as Public Services Librarian at Concordia Seminary in Saint Louis, from where he earned his Master of Divinity in 1986. His Master of Arts in Library Science is from the University of Missouri in Columbia.

A tenured associate professor at CTSFW, he led the institutional self-study processes that culminated in ten-year reaffirmations of accreditation from both the Association of Theological Schools and the Higher Learning Commission in 2010 and 2020. He also has worked to integrate traditional and non-traditional information resources into the teaching and learning life of the campus and ultimately into the library renovation and expansion project that culminated in the dedication of the Wayne and Barbara Kroemer Library complex in 2015. In May 2018, he became the inaugural holder of the Wakefield-Kroemer Director’s Chair in Library and Information Services.

On campus, he has served in many other capacities beyond the library. Since the fall of 2014, he has served on the President’s Executive Leadership Team, first as Vice President of Strategic Planning and Mission Execution, and, since 2022, as Vice President of Institutional Assessment and Accreditation. From 2017-2019, he directed the Educational Models and Practices in Theological Education Innovation Grant awarded by the Association of Theological Schools. The focus of the grant was to re-envision, expand, and integrate contextual education for the pastoral formation programs.

Away from campus, he served five years (2010-2015), two as chair, on the Board of Directors of the Midwest Collaborative for Library Services. MCLS is comprised of 840 libraries of all types and sizes in Indiana and Michigan. He is currently serving a three-year cycle in the chair role for the Private Academic Library Network of Indiana Board of Directors. PALNI is a collaboration of twenty-four private and seminary libraries. He also serves on the Indiana State Library Resource Sharing Committee and the Academic Libraries of Indiana Shared Collections Committee. In August 2022, PALNI honored him with the “Outstanding Achievement Award for Leadership in External Partner Building.”

Nationally, he has served as a Mentor in the “Creating Leaders of Tomorrow” program of the American Theological Library Association (Atla). In 2017, Atla appointed him as Co-chair of the Local Host Committee for the 2018 Annual Conference in Indianapolis and to a three-year term on the Annual Conference Committee. The 2019 LCMS Synod Convention elected him to a six-year term on the Concordia Historical Institute Board of Governors.

Internationally, in August 2013, he formally launched the Chemnitz Library Initiative at the International Lutheran Council Theological Seminaries World Conference in Palanga, Lithuania. Aligned with LCMS President Harrison’s Global Seminary Initiative, the Chemnitz Library Initiative reaches seminary to seminary and library to library to uplift global theological education. He has made evaluative and consultative visits to sister seminaries in Siberia, Lithuania, Latvia, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, India, Togo, Ghana, Ethiopia, South Australia, England, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, and Hong Kong. With his wife Kay, he has overseen the development of library collections for partner seminaries in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, the Dominican Republic, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Tanzania.

Professor Roethemeyer and his wife, Kay, have a grown daughter, Christina.