Is online the future?

In May of 2022, Gordon-Conwell Seminary announced that it was selling its main campus on the North Shore of Boston and switch to an online presence.  A little over a year later, they had changed their mind and sold housing units but not the seminary campus.  In the ELCA, Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, has sold now all of its campus after having sold part of it earlier.  After 100 years in the St. Anthony Park neighborhood, the school will become an online presence.  The LCMS is replete with online schools with some residential presence who want to service its congregations (they seem to be popping up daily!) and has a very limited online program through its residential seminaries serving the SMP Pastor program.  There is a drumbeat to do something to create an online route to general ordination although the seminaries and conventions of the Synod have resisted an official path.  It is highly unlikely that any of the competitors will become a semi-official school of the Synod but that has not stopped those who think the "gold standard" of residential seminary education has lost its luster.

So who is right and who is wrong about the future?  Is Gordon-Conwell the smart bet or Luther?  Which seminary is better situated to serve its churches best and provide the best pastors?  It is a big bet.  Once you sell a property or close down a residential route in favor of an online presence, there are a great many hurdles to going back.  Are we in the LCMS prepared to bet the farm that what we see in the future is the only future for us?  I for one would not want to cover such a bet.  If we had long ago decided to merge our two seminaries, where would we have been in 1974?  Then, a generation later, it seemed that Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, just might innovate itself from the center to the fringe in Missouri and now that same Seminary is slowing down that side of things in order to consolidate and grow in tune with the Synod.  It is perhaps no secret that its former President, Dale Meyer, has signed on to the faculty of one of those upstarts trying to beat Missouri at its own game (along with one or two other former faculty).  Who has their ear to the ground and their eye on the future?  That is the million dollar question.

Apart from everything else, the question at the core is whether or not an online program can produce a better pastor for the churches than a residential seminary.  No one in their right mind would dispute they can do it more cheaply and faster but are cost and speed that which defines success?  Everyone knows that Missouri has a sentimental attachment to the campus that will soon celebrate its 100th anniversary but we all know it is not an inexpensive piece of real estate to maintain.  Everyone knows that the Ft. Wayne campus was the dream of the future until the future dried up the feeder schools and the big numbers of pre-sem students and then the Synod reinvented the campus as a seminary.  It is newer but in better shape and less costly to maintain.  One seminary has a $200+ million dollar endowment and the other a little less than half.  What would happen to the money that makes tuition largely free at both campuses?  How would we evaluate the readiness of the online candidates to serve our ministerium without knowing them face to face for more than weeks at a time?  We are barely recovering from the time when we knew the pre-seminary students for at least 8 and before than 12 years before laying hands on them.  How would we make the big shift from four years to a year's worth of weeks spread over even more years?

My point is simple.  Unless we are absolutely sure that this is the best path and the wisest path before us, we need to slow things down.  It sings great to run where the brave dare not go but it may not be the smartest thing to do.  The future is a mine field more than a racing track.  Success is defined less by speed than faithfulness and less by cost-effectiveness than what is good, right, and salutary.  As one of those in the midst of the transition from high school starting gates to ordination to college, I know how hard it is to recover from changes made too quickly.  The loss of Concordia Senior College and its feeder system through the Concordias (plus St. Paul's and St. John's) was hard to swallow and we are still digesting some of the after effects nearly 30 years later.  The loss of one or both seminaries in favor of an online option (probably impossible to prevent from being the primary path) would be even more difficult to process.  My plea to the Synod is to slow down.  The race between the tortoise and the hare is not a Biblical one but it can remind us that what seems a nobrainer now could leave us on life-support later.  Maybe we ought to read Proverbs 21:5 a few times before voting on something that is a stab into the darkness.  Steady plodding brings prosperity; hasty speculation brings poverty.