Ramstad: Leaving St. Paul campus after a century-plus is an act of faith for Luther Seminary

The opposite of faith isn’t doubt. It’s certainty.

The June announcement by leaders of Luther Seminary that the school for church leaders will move away from the hillside campus in St. Paul where it’s been for 124 years is a true act of faith — especially because they’re not certain where it will end up.

Earlier this month, the seminary contracted with a real estate broker and an architecture firm to identify and design its future space. As students and faculty return in the next couple of weeks, they’ll be asked to meet with the outside experts to describe their ideas and desires for Luther’s next home.

“All that visioning work we will be doing with the community in the month of September, which will really lay the foundation for how we approach finding that new space,” Robin Steinke, the seminary’s president, told me last week.

Luther Seminary for well over a century has occupied one of the most beautiful spots in the Twin Cities, a 16-acre hillside on the west side of the St. Anthony Park neighborhood. Looking out from a grove in front of Bockman Hall, its main building dedicated in 1902, the Minneapolis skyline appears like Oz in the distance.

More than most institutions of higher education, seminaries confront declining demand for traditional ways of teaching and learning. For a half-century across the country, the number of regular churchgoers has been shrinking, beginning a spiral in the business of religion.

Churches needed fewer ministers. Then young people got the signal, and fewer chose to go into ministry. Eventually, the pipeline of young people shrank. Seminaries and churches increasingly count on people who enter ministry as a second career. Some churches now rely on lay people with some theological training.

Until the early 2000s, Luther Seminary seemed above those changes. It is the nation’s largest educator of ministers for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, or ELCA, which has a huge presence in the Midwest but experienced membership declines later than other mainline Protestant denominations.

A decade ago, Luther enrolled about 800 students. Today it’s about 370. Many of them are only on campus part time, a change accelerated by the pandemic.

Even so, the seminary is in relatively strong financial shape. It agreed to sell 16 of its 26 acres earlier this year, space that will be redeveloped into 197 units of apartments, condos, single-family homes and a senior-living co-op. And it received a $21 million donation in 2018 to help reimagine its educational approach.

Since then, the school expanded its digital resources to four websites that serve churches, leaders and parishioners. Those services have grown to nearly 8 million regular users who, as they do at church, donate when and how much they wish.

“The seminary is a ministry that relies on the benevolence and support of the congregation, whether that’s one of our digital properties or degree programs,” said Heidi Droegemueller, vice president for seminary relations.

“It was so hard to get any traction because we weren’t coming out publicly to say we’re making this big move,” Droegemueller said. “So, while it seems counterproductive to many people, I don’t think we could have done this any other way.”

They’ve studied recent restructurings of about a dozen other seminaries. One lesson, Droegemueller said, is that “it’s really easy to, in order to try to keep your community together and feeling good, land somewhere with more space than you need. That just drives up your costs.”

Steinke worked earlier in her career as a financial planner in the Atlanta area with the company that’s now Ameriprise, work that forced her to think decades into the future on behalf of her clients.