Another mainline Protestant seminary is beginning plans to move from its longtime campus in an effort to “remain sustainable over the long term.”
Luther Seminary, the flagship school educating students for ministry in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), plans to relocate from its 120-year-old St. Paul, Minnesota campus.
A unanimous vote by the seminary’s board of directors moved “to begin the process to shift to a more nimble model and divest from its current physical campus in Saint Paul.” The vote was announced June 10 on the seminary’s website.
“Seeking new space … will allow us to steward our resources more effectively,” the announcement read.
Sale and move from the 8.5 acre urban campus will not be immediate, with the board expecting to remain at the current site through the 2026-2027 school year. According to county records cited by the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal, the campus has an estimated market value greater than $8.7 million.
The announcement notes “an ongoing commitment to strategic, periodic in-person learning” referencing hybrid models that have become more commonplace among formerly residential seminaries. Such models involve online programs paired with on-campus intensives at different points in the school year. Today, 70 percent of Luther students primarily engage online, Tuesday’s announcement states.
Since its formation in 1988 as the merger of three predecessor bodies, the ELCA has seen its membership decline from 5,288,048 to 2,793,899 baptized members in 2023. Two other Lutheran churches, Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC) and the North American Lutheran Church (NALC) broke away from the ELCA in 2001 and 2010, respectively. The denomination counted a total of 8,498 local churches in 2023.
The Episcopal Church’s General Theological Seminary is among those formerly large institutions that have rapidly scaled down and shifted to hybrid education, functionally sharing leadership with Virginia Theological Seminary, which retains a traditional residential model. Other seminaries have merged, such as Andover Newton Theological School, which in 2017 affiliated with Yale Divinity School and sold its Massachusetts campus.
Luther Seminary remains significantly larger than those institutions, however. According to data provided by the Association of Theological Schools, the main accrediting body for North American seminaries, Luther enrolls 371 students, with the full-time equivalent enrollment of 188.90 (two half-time students equal one FTE student). This is down from a headcount of 747 students in the 2003-2004 school year, which had an FTE of 568.2, or an enrollment decline of half of headcount and two-thirds of FTE.
The school has 21 faculty and has programs offering MDiv, MA, ThM, and PhD degrees. Additionally, Luther offers M.A., M.Div., and Graduate Certificate students a scholarship covering the entirety of the $19,343 annual tuition and fees, placing it in a peer group among even more heavily endowed mainline Protestant institutions such as Princeton Theological Seminary (the PTS enrollment is less than Luther at 291, but it has an endowment of nearly $1.4 billion). In the 2024-2025 school year, Luther reported long term investments totalling $136 million, ranking it among the moderately wealthy mainline Protestant seminaries. That financial largesse has not translated into growth, however.
Ranked by enrollment, six of the top 10 U.S. seminaries affiliate with the Southern Baptist Convention, with four of those six reporting a full-time equivalent enrollment of more than 1,000 students. Luther’s long-term investments exceed all but one of those schools. All of the top 10 seminaries ranked by enrollment are Evangelical.
“The way students learn and prepare for ministry has changed. Now is the right time to align our resources with that reality and evolve how we deliver on our mission,” Luther Seminary President Robin Steinke said in the school’s announcement.