Interesting Details on the ELCA Seminaries Closing

This campus is now a Muslim school.
How few seminaries do they need in ELCA?

The Rev. Steven P. Tibbetts, STS

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Re: ELCA Seminaries Enrollment

« Reply #32 on: Yesterday at 11:53:51 PM »

When I was at PLTS (1988-92), it was barely economically viable.  That was with 120 full-time students, and wasn't accounting for real estate issues.  It survived by building up its gifts and endowment and by getting economies of scale by being linked with Luther Seminary.  When Luther discovered that it was close to financial collapse, Cal Lutheran University took PLTS over and has, in the last year, moved the school and sold the property.  (The Muslims have a lot of work to do to make it again a usable campus.)  Even then, some of its recent new faculty have been jointly hired with the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, the Episcopal seminary in Berkeley (which makes PLTS look like the picture of institutional health).  But PLTS exists only as long as Cal Lutheran thinks a graduate school of theology makes sense.

Southern Seminary (as Lenoir-Rhyne's graduate school of theology) and Trinity (as Capital's) are in the same boat.  Trinity may have a slight advantage in being across the street from Capital, rather than hundreds of miles away.

The ELCA had too many seminaries (8, plus programs in Texas and Washington DC) when it began in 1988.  Frankly enrollment would have fit at Luther and (at most) 2 others.  Today's enrollment, especially given the projections for the future, certainly can't justify 7 seminaries.

Pax, Steven+

Mark and Avoid Jeske has united ELCA-LCMS-WELS-ELS with
his Church and Change or Die! pan-Lutheran events.
Jeske is a nominal WELS pastor,
but WELS is nominal Lutheran, quite fitting for the UniSynod.