Last month, we shared the story of how Luther House of Study began, back in 2006, as a grassroots response to a very real need in many congregations.
Pastors were getting hard to come by, and traditional pathways to seminary education were increasingly inaccessible for lay people who were already serving faithfully in their congregations.
Twenty years later, that same problem persists, and our mission of strengthening Lutheran leadership and ministries for the proclamation of the Gospel continues to shape our work.
Over the last two decades, one of the defining characteristics of LHOS has been its willingness to adapt while keeping the mission at the forefront.
From the outset, we have understood that seminary education exists for the sake of the Gospel — not the other way around. The goal was never to preserve a particular educational model or institutional structure. It was, and still is, to raise up and support preachers and congregations.
That means paying attention to what is happening on the ground.
As the landscape of higher education, ministry and technology has changed, LHOS has adapted alongside it, not simply for the sake of change, but because serving congregations faithfully requires it.
Rather than beginning with a standard educational system and asking students to fit themselves into it, LHOS has developed its model around the issues students and congregations are actually facing.
As the cost of higher education increased, as technology changed and as fewer students could realistically relocate for seminary, we kept asking a simple question: What barriers can we remove without compromising the theological depth and rigor of pastoral formation?
The answer, over time, has led to significant changes in how seminary education is delivered, even when those changes were not necessarily the preferred approach of faculty or staff.
In the early years, the structure of our program was much more traditional. The number of credits and coursework mirrored those of residential seminaries. The major difference was that students did not have to uproot their lives, leave their congregations or relocate their families in order to attend. That alone reduced the financial burden many seminarians faced.
Over time, we also reduced the number of outside courses students were required to take and eventually moved into a competency-based model that focused less on checking boxes and more on whether students were actually prepared for pastoral ministry.
The need remained the same: a fully accredited Master of Divinity degree grounded in traditional Lutheran theology and confession. What changed was the delivery method, in response to what students and congregations could realistically sustain.
Dr. Chris Croghan acknowledges that some of those adaptations required letting go of methods faculty personally valued.
“It’s fair to say I prefer the old method, lecturing in front of a live audience,” he said. “But changing the mechanism doesn’t change the mission. Just because you make the plow differently doesn’t mean you stop plowing.”
For LHOS, technology was never embraced simply for innovation’s sake. It became useful because it allowed the institution to continue delivering serious theological education to people who otherwise would not have access to it.
What once required a physical classroom with 30 or 40 students can now reach hundreds of people across the country and around the world through recorded lectures, online coursework and live Zoom discussions. Rather than reducing connection, we have seen that the shift to a “flipped classroom” has increased opportunities for meaningful engagement.
Because the students consume academic content on their own time, our faculty can spend the same amount of time they used to devote to lectures on in-depth discussion groups.
A productive Zoom discussion, Croghan noted, usually maxes out around 15 people. So, LHOS adjusts the number of discussion groups each semester based on enrollment, in order to preserve the quality of interactions.
That flexibility is visible in every aspect of the program. At the start of each semester, our community coordinator Deirdre Lapp works directly with students to build schedules around their availability, using tools like Doodle polls to coordinate discussion times across multiple states, time zones and countries.
Students get the same rigorous teaching and direct conversation with faculty and peers, all built around their own schedules.
At a time when many congregations cannot afford to send future pastors away for years of residential education, and many students cannot afford to take on debt in order to pursue this vocation, we have continued adapting to make seminary education accessible.
The methods have changed over time, but the work itself remains the same: forming solid Lutheran pastors and supporting Lutheran congregations in the proclamation of the Gospel.
