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| One Luther Seminary president was losing money in the millions. |
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| Someone spontaneously danced at a New York ELCA meeting. |
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| This male dancer at the Luther Seminary chapel was ordained, after he boasted about his chapel dance on Facebook. His buddies in the pews loved it. |
Watch each ELCA seminary, the product of mergers upon mergers, will end up on the second floor of a cheap boarding house.
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| "We are not done shrinking yet. We turned seven Lutheran seminaries into one porta-seminary, lodged at a Catholic merger site of similar mergers." |
After more than a century in St. Paul, Luther Seminary plans to sell its remaining upper campus and look for property elsewhere in the Twin Cities as it cuts staffing and rethinks the way it delivers education to its students, officials announced Tuesday.
The St. Anthony Park neighborhood has housed the school ― the largest Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) seminary in the country ― for more than 100 years. Officials don’t yet have a buyer in mind for the property.
The seminary’s lower campus is already under a purchase agreement with Lifestyle Communities, a residential developer, and the sale is expected to close in early 2026, said the Rev. Robin Steinke, the president of the seminary, which was founded in 1869 by Norwegian Lutheran immigrants.
The school will also cut 11 staff positions as it reorganizes its structure and educational strategy, she said. The upper campus, which has three buildings, a chapel and nine houses on 10 acres, also has aging buildings in need of significant capital investment, she said.
Some of the school’s 370 graduate students are local and take classes on campus while others attend online and visit a few times a year. In 2012, the school enrolled nearly 800 students.
The mission of Luther Seminary “remains as vital and necessary as ever,” Steinke said. The seminary has about 8.3 million users around the world who access its website and online resources, including podcasts, journals, classes and daily devotional materials.
“The ‘what we do’ and ‘why we do it’ is remaining the same,” she said. “But how and where is changing.”
Last month, the board voted unanimously to prepare the upper campus for sale and to begin the sales process, she said, in part because they have more space than needed.
Steinke added that the seminary wants to remain in the Twin Cities on a residential campus and is looking at properties.
Current students will still be able to finish their academic work on campus, which won’t change hands for another two years. It’s hard to give up beloved, shared spaces, Steinke said.
“We’ll have time to mourn the space,” she said. “That’s not an easy thing.”
Partner churches in countries where Christianity is growing regularly send students to Luther Seminary for online and in-person classes, she said.
The seminary committed to fully funding tuition for all qualified students seven years ago to reduce student loan debt, Steinke said.
“We need to reimagine the campus footprint so we can continue to provide [that] support,” she said.
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