Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary : 2004 Seminar
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Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary (LTSS) is a seminary of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA), founded in 1830 and located since 1911 in Columbia, SC. Traditionally quite small, it has grown in recent years to just under 200 students, with a full time faculty of 15. While the majority of students still come from the comparatively small community of Lutherans in the South, the student body is increasingly diverse in origin. Directly owned by the ELCA (as are all ELCA seminaries), it understands its primary mission as forming pastors and lay leaders for the church and has shaped it life around that mission.
LTSS has understood itself to be a residential seminary, i.e., the paradigmatic student around whom the curriculum and life of the seminary is built has been the full time student who spends extensive time on campus most weekdays and is thus available during the day to interact with faculty and other students, attend chapel, and participate in a variety of activities. The seminary owns extensive student housing and is located in an affordable residential neighborhood, so most students live on or close to the seminary. For most of the seminary’s history, this commitment was assumed without debate and fit well with the predominantly younger student population. In recent decades that commitment has been questioned by the rise in the number of non-traditional students who cannot commit to full-time study, whose family lives do not permit extensive time on campus, and who thus do not fit the assumptions upon which the total life of the seminary has been built. . .
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