Mission Statement
Trinity Lutheran Seminary forms leaders for Christ's church at work in the world.


Goals
To accomplish this mission, Trinity Lutheran Seminary is committed to these goals:

  1. To educate men and women for the ordained and lay ministries of the church.

  2. To witness to an understanding of ministry that serves the ongoing renewal of the church for the sake of God's mission to a world that is secular, pluralistic, and global.

  3. To foster theological education that is contextual, cross-cultural, inclusive, international, and ecumenical.

  4. To serve the life of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, seeking to preserve its heritage and contribute to the shaping of its future.

  5. To build and support a community of common life, worship and study, service and witness, understanding that such experience of community is foundational in preparing persons for ministry.

  6. To care for the totality of the person while pursuing its fundamentally academic task.

  7. To encourage and support persons preparing for specialized multiple-staff ministries (especially church music, education, and youth).

  8. To encourage and support persons preparing for or engaged in theological scholarship and teaching.

  9. To advance theological knowledge and the creation of resources for the life and witness of the church.

In pursuing our goals, we exhibit our theological and formational values:

Theological Values

As a seminary of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Trinity Lutheran Seminary uses the ELCA's constitutional statement of faith as a standard for its teaching, namely: -This church confesses the Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

  • This church confesses Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and the Gospel as the power of God for the salvation of all who believe.

  • Jesus Christ is the Word of God incarnate, through whom everything was made and through whose life, death, and resurrection God fashions a new creation.

  • The proclamation of God's message to us as both Law and Gospel is the Word of God, revealing judgment and mercy through word and deed, beginning with the Word in creation, continuing in the history of Israel, and centering in all its fullness in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

  • The canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the written Word of God. Inspired by God's Spirit speaking through their authors, they record and announce God's revelation centering in Jesus Christ. Through them God's Spirit speaks to us to create and sustain Christian faith and fellowship for service in the world.

  • This church accepts the canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as the inspired Word of God and the authoritative source and norm of its proclamation, faith, and life.

  • This church accepts the Apostles', Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds as true declarations of the faith of this church.

  • This church accepts the Unaltered Augsburg Confession as a true witness to the Gospel, acknowledging as one with it in faith and doctrine all churches that likewise accept the teachings of the Unaltered Augsburg Confession.

  • This church accepts the other confessional writings in the Book of Concord, namely, the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, the Smalcald Articles and the Treatise, the Small Catechism, the Large Catechism, and the Formula of Concord, as further valid interpretations of the faith of the Church.

  • This church confesses the Gospel, recorded in the Holy Scriptures and confessed in the ecumenical creeds and Lutheran confessional writings, as the power of God to create and sustain the Church for God's mission in the world." (Chapter Two, "Confession of Faith," of the Constitution of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Sections 2.01.-2.07.)

Formational Values

  1. Proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ through word and sacraments is the foundation of all expressions of Christian community, including seminary communities.

  2. Life in Jesus Christ is one of continual appropriation of God's gracious call to discipleship through rebirth, growth, and repentance.

  3. Formal preparation for all the ministries of the church entails the nurturing of personal faith through active participation in the worship, learning, service, and witness of the Christian community.

  4. Faith active in love strives for peace, justice, human dignity, reconciliation, hospitality, personal trustworthiness, appropriate attention to health, compassion, courage and hope in life and death, and the stewardship of all creation.

  5. Integrative and holistic education for every ministry of the church encourages the formation of Christian personhood through active participation in community life, trusting God's baptismal justification in self- and peer-evaluation, acquiring competence in academic study, appropriating internally the whole Christian heritage, and engaging in the contextual formation of ministry.

  6. Readiness for both lay and ordained ministry entails a life nurtured in the Scripture, leading to a Reformation perspective of Christian Scripture and doctrinal tradition and a responsible hermeneutic for interpreting the texts in the dialogue between word and world.

  7. Readiness for both lay and ordained ministry means progress toward becoming evangelical, faithful, reforming, pastoral, ecumenical, and ethical.

  8. Readiness for both lay and ordained ministry means learning to experience the gifts of women and men, of various ages and representative cultures, classes, ethnic groups, and conditions of humanity, in order to offer theological and pastoral leadership to the church in its witness to that catholic and universal vision which is its calling and its promise.

The seminary is a center for reflection, scholarship, and teaching that both sustains and helps in the continual renewal of the church. The seminary seeks to develop and sustain the highest possible level of theological expertise in its faculty and the greatest possible opportunity for educational achievement in its program resources.

Effective preparation and continuing education for leadership ministries require an interactive partnership between seminary, synods, congregations, agencies, and churchwide units of the church.

Our self-understanding and purposes are measured by their faithfulness to the mission called into being by the Good News that Jesus is the Christ.


History
1923 Dorm Dedication Trinity's history is rich and varied, spanning over a century and a half. In 1830, the "German Theological Seminary" of the Ohio Synod, later known as the Evangelical Lutheran Theological Seminary, was founded to meet the need for educating pastors in the Ohio region. It began its life at Canton but soon moved to Columbus. During its first decade it had but one theological professor, Wilhelm Schmidt.

In 1840, Ohio Lutheranism suffered schism. The English Synod of Ohio and the Joint Synod of Ohio represented the two halves of the church that emerged, and that eventually became part of the Lutheran Church in America and the American Lutheran Church respectively.

In 1845, the English Synod of Ohio founded Wittenberg College at Springfield. From the beginning it was designed to provide pastors for the church as well as members of other professions. Ezra Keller was the first theological professor, and first president, of the fledgling college. In 1906 the theological department was named Hamma Divinity School in recognition of the generosity of Michael and Almira Hamma. In 1964 Hamma received a large measure of autonomy within the Wittenberg structure and was renamed Hamma School of Theology.

By the early twentieth century, Hamma and ELTS had converged in many ways. They were united by a shared allegiance to the Lutheran Confessions, by the Common Service used by several Lutheran bodies in North America, and by much common history. They were still divided, however, by their respective ecclesiastical affiliations.

As the American Lutheran Church and the Lutheran Church in America came to work closely together in theological education in the 1960s and 1970s, it became apparent that in the long run there should be only one Lutheran seminary in Ohio. In 1974, the decision was made that Hamma and ELTS should consolidate even before merger by the national churches. Trinity Lutheran Seminary opened its doors on September 1, 1978.

As a seminary of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, successor to the ALC and the LCA, Trinity stands essentially for that which its predecessors, ELTS and Hamma, stood for--commitment to the gospel of Jesus Christ, to educational excellence, and to thorough preparation for Christian service.

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