Trinity Lutheran Seminary

'"This is ministry," Ford said, "because you're meeting needs beyond the scope of what the job description says on paper."'

Click on the link in the comments to read more about Trinity Master of Divinity Student, Vince Ford.

How can churches better understand and support refugees and immigrants?

Join us for the Trinity Days Panel Discussion on Friday, October 2, as Capital University scholars and community experts explore what church leaders should know about immigration and how faith communities can respond with care and understanding.

📅 Friday, October 2
⏰ 11 a.m.
📍 Gloria Dei Worship Center

The panel will feature faculty and leaders from across Capital University and the The Ohio Council of Churches, moderated by Dr. Mark Allan Powell.

Come early at 10 a.m. for Dr. Powell’s lecture, “The Bible on Borders and Immigration: New Testament.”

All are welcome!

Viewing Party of the Fretheim Lectures at Luther Seminary in Hamma Library, Trinity Lutheran Seminary at Capital University!
We are grateful for this time to learn and engage.

CORRECTION! Tonight's lecture will be streamed at 7PM not 5PM. The librarian apologizes for not understanding how time zones work!

Trinity will be live-streaming the Fretheim Lecture from Luther Seminary, Tuesday night at 5pm, in Hamma Library. Join us, we'd love to watch with you.

Today the ELCA Commemorates, The Rev. Dr. Nelson W. Trout, Bishop, a vital individual in the history of Trinity Lutheran Seminary at Capital University.

The Rev. Dr.Nelson W. Trout (1920-1996) grew up in Urbancrest, Columbus, OH. His mother was a preacher. He was a 1948 alumnus of Capital University, a 1952 alumnus of Trinity Lutheran Seminary, a member of the Trinity faculty, and the first African American elected to serve as a Lutheran bishop in North America. His vibrant preaching and commitment to social ministry inspired hundreds of seminary students and touched thousands of lives. In 1989 he received the Distinguished Alumnus Award.

Trout was elected bishop while serving as a member of the faculty and staff of Trinity Lutheran Seminary (1975-1983). He was bishop of the South Pacific District of the American Lutheran Church, a predecessor body of the Evangelical Lutheran Church
in America (ELCA). His mission territory was California, Texas, and Hawaii where he presided over more than 600 Rostered Leaders and 314 congregations.

To purchase your very own Trout Icon click on the link below.
https://www.themodernsaints.com/all-saints/nelson-trout

Nelson W. Trout Lectures Each year Trinity Lutheran Seminary at Capital University holds the Nelson W. Trout Lectures, honoring the life and legacy of The Rev. Dr. Nelson W. Trout.

Enjoy this Capital Story, A Calling Within a Calling: Dr. Middleton's Journey from Medicine to Ministry, about one of our students, Dr. Jen Middleton.

A Calling Within a Calling: Dr. Middleton's Journey from Medicine to Ministry Dr. Jennifer Middleton, a Columbus family physician, is pursuing a Master of Divinity at Trinity Lutheran Seminary at Capital University, driven by a call to serve healthcare workers she sees as spiritually underserved. Prompted by grief and the toll of the pandemic, her story explores what it means...

At Trinity Lutheran Seminary, we talk about AI. Not because it is the future of ministry, but because our students are already navigating it, whether they have been using these tools for years or are encountering them for the first time.
Every fall, we gather new seminarians for a Writers' Workshop as they begin their studies. This year, Head Librarian Elli Cucksey offered a reflection on what it means to use AI with integrity in a place that exists not to produce professionals, but to form them.
The question is not whether AI is allowed. The question is what we are willing to let do its work in us, and what we are not. Here is that text:

Writers' Workshop: Information, Formation, and the Tools in Front of You

I want to start by naming something that is true about every incoming class in any institution but is especially true at this seminary. You are not all coming from the same place. Some of you finished college in the last few years. Some of you are making a mid-career shift. Some of you have been in ministry for years without a seminary degree and are here to formalize what you already know in your bones. You bring different life experiences, different comfort with technology, and different assumptions about how academic work gets done. All of that is welcome here.
I bring all that up because what I want to talk about today is artificial intelligence, and I know that even the phrase lands very differently depending on who you are. For some of you, AI is just part of the landscape. You have been using tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, or Gemini for years, maybe without thinking much about it. It is woven into your search engines, your email, your phone. It is not new to you. It is just ordinary.
But for others of you, AI still feels like the scary new thing. Maybe you have heard about it but never used it. Maybe you have tried it once and were not sure what to make of it. Maybe you are worried that seminary is going to require you to master a technology that feels foreign. Or, on the other hand, maybe you’re worried that the students sitting next to you have an advantage you do not have. I want you to hear me say this now: both of those experiences are completely valid, and neither one puts you ahead or behind.
What I want to offer today is not a technology tutorial, and it’s not a prohibition. I want to hand you a framework for thinking about these tools that should serve you well regardless of where you are starting from.
What I’m about to say is the reality, and for some of you this will be confirmation of what you already know, and for some of you this may be genuinely new information. AI is embedded in nearly every digital tool you use. When you search for something on Google, AI is shaping what you see. When your email suggests a reply, that is AI. When a database recommends a journal article based on what you have been reading, that is AI. It is not a separate thing you can opt into. It is the infrastructure of digital life in 2026.
What that means is that the question is not whether you will use AI. You already are, whether you realize it or not. The meaningful question, the one that matters for your work here and in ministry, is how you will use it with intention and integrity. And that question is just as important for the person who has never opened ChatGPT as it is for the person who uses it every day. Because the person who has never used it may not recognize when AI is already shaping the information they encounter. And the person who uses it constantly may have stopped asking whether it should be shaping the work they are doing.

~Formation, Not Production
Last year, I talked with your predecessors about a distinction I called "formation versus production." Dean Wrenn also talks about that distinction theologically, preached on it, even wove it into her opening sermon. That is exactly where it belongs.
But today I want to talk about it from the place where I sit, which is the library, which is to say the place where you will learn to find, evaluate, and use information.
AI is, at the core, another information tool. It retrieves, it synthesizes, it generates text, based on a prediction model. And in a world that is saturated with information, that can sound like a gift. But the question you will need to learn to ask, and this is the question that will serve you for the rest of your ministry, is not "Can a tool do this for me?" It is "What happens to me when I do this myself?"
When you sit down to write an exegetical paper and you wrestle with the Greek, consult three or four commentaries that disagree with each other, read a journal article that challenges your assumptions and previously held beliefs, and then slowly construct an argument, you are not just producing a paper. You are becoming a more careful reader of Scripture. You are developing the ability to sit with ambiguity. You are learning to hold multiple perspectives in tension and to find your own voice within that tension. That is formation. That is the thing you cannot get back once you hand it over to a machine.
And this is true whether you are twenty-four or fifty-four. Formation does not have an age limit, and it does not care how much professional experience you bring. You may have decades of wisdom in ministry or in another career, and that wisdom is real and valuable. But the specific intellectual and spiritual work of seminary is designed to form you in ways that your prior experience, however rich it may be, has not formed you. That is why you are here and not just applying for credentials.
I don’t want you to hear that as prohibition. I hope you see it as giving you a framework.
There are things AI does really well that are not a threat to your formation. If you need to recall a term from a theologian you read years ago, AI can help. If you want a quick summary of a debate you have already studied so you can organize your notes, AI can help. If you are drafting a committee meeting agenda for a church committee, AI can help. Nobody's character is being formed by formatting a committee agenda from scratch.
But when the assignment is designed to make you think, to make you struggle, to make you grow, that is where you need to be the one doing the work. And you will know the difference. You will feel it. No one in this room needs to be told that pasting the prompt into ChatGPT, pasting the output into your assignment, and turning it in is cheating. You already know that.
But sit with this a minute. The assignments that are hard, the ones where you sit in front of a blank screen and wonder if you are even qualified to be here? Those are the formative ones. Those are the ones that matter. And those are precisely the ones that may be most tempting to hand off to a machine. We are all wired to avoid discomfort, regardless of our age or how many years of experience we carry, but the discomfort is the point.
So, the ethical question is not "Is AI allowed?" The ethical question is "What am I giving up when I use it here?"

~What Has Changed, and What Has Not
For those of you who have been following the AI conversation closely, you already know the tools have gotten dramatically better even in the past year, actually just in the last few months. They write more convincingly. They cite sources, sometimes even real ones. They can produce something that reads like a solid seminary paper. That makes the temptation sharper.
For those of you who are newer to all of this, I want to name directly that these tools are genuinely impressive, and the first time you see one produce a polished reflection paper in thirty seconds, it can feel either thrilling or deeply unsettling, or both, depending on your disposition. Both reactions are reasonable. But the thing that hasn't changed is that the purpose of the assignment is not the paper. The purpose of the assignment is you.
Ministry is full of moments when the work is hard and you are tired. You will write sermons in weeks when you have buried a beloved parishioner and visited someone in the hospital and dealt with a boiler repair and still shown up for your own family. The quiet gift of seminary is that you get to practice being faithful in that kind of stretch now, while the stakes are a bit lower, while you have faculty and peers around you, while there is room to stumble and try again.
That practice only works if you are the one doing it.

~Your Library and What It Can Do for You
I also want to take some time to tell you about Hamma Library, because it is here for you in ways you may not yet know.
Hamma is a theological library. That means our collection is curated for exactly the kind of work you will be doing. We have commentaries across traditions. We have journals, digital and print, in biblical studies, church history, ethics, pastoral care, missiology, and homiletics. We have a growing digital collection, and through OhioLINK, you have access to millions of volumes across the state of Ohio. If we do not have something, I can almost certainly get it for you.
But the library is more than a collection. It is a place, and I hope it will become your place. Hamma is often called the seminary's "living room," and I take that seriously. It is a space to study, yes, but also to sit, to think, to have the kind of quiet that lets ideas take root. Whether you learn best with a stack of books or a laptop, there is room for you here.
And then there is me. I am your librarian. My job is to help you find resources, and I mean that concretely. When you are starting a research paper and you do not know where to begin, come talk to me. When your professor asks you to find peer-reviewed sources and you are not sure what that means or where to look, come talk to me. When, after twenty years of ministry you know the practical answer to a question but you need to find the scholarly conversation around it, come talk to me. I would rather help you early and often than have you struggle alone or, worse, hand the whole thing to an AI because you did not know there was a better path.
I can help you navigate our databases. I can help you develop a research question. I can help you evaluate sources so you know the difference between a solid scholarly argument and something that merely sounds authoritative. And I mean this completely: there is no question too basic.
If you have never used an academic database, that is fine. If you have not written a research paper in twenty years, that is fine. If you wrote one last semester, that is also fine. The library is for all of you, and so am I.
These information literacy skills, knowing how to find trustworthy sources, how to read them critically, how to put them in conversation with each other, will serve you in every paper you write here and in every sermon, Bible study, and adult forum you lead for the rest of your ministry.
They are also, not incidentally, the skills that help you evaluate what AI gives you, because AI will give you confident-sounding information that is sometimes wrong, and you need to be formed into the person who can tell the difference.
A Word About Integrity
I want to say one more thing about academic integrity, and I want to say it without it feeling like a lecture.
Every professor here has a policy on AI use in their courses. Those policies may differ from one class to the next. Some may allow AI for certain tasks; some may not. It is your responsibility to know each professor's expectations, and if you are unsure, ask. That is just a sign of good faith, not weakness.
But beyond the policies, there is something deeper. When you present work as your own, you are making a claim about yourself. You are saying, "I have wrestled with this. I have thought about this. This came through me." That claim matters in seminary and ministry in a way it might not in other settings, because the work you do here is not just intellectual. It is spiritual. It is vocational. It is connected to the person you are becoming AND the people you will serve.
So, when you are making decisions about how to use these tools, I would invite you to ask yourself not just "Is this allowed?" but "Is this honest? Does this reflect who I am? Will this serve the person I am trying to become?"
You are beginning something important, and you are beginning it together, from very different starting points. That is one of the best things about this community.
Use the tools available to you, including AI, with wisdom and honesty. Use the library. Use your librarian. Let the work be hard when it needs to be hard and let yourself be changed by it.
The church does not need more polished content. The church needs pastors, chaplains, deacons, ministers, and leaders who have been genuinely formed, people who have done the slow, sometimes unglamorous work of learning to read carefully, think critically, and speak with a voice that is actually their own.
I believe you can be those people. That is why I am here.
Come find me in Hamma.

Please join us in welcoming The Rev. Dr. Miles Hopgood to our Trinity Lutheran Seminary faculty!

Rev. Dr. Hopgood joins us as Assistant Professor of Lutheran Theology and History. Dr. Hopgood earned his B.A. and M.Div. from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. in History and Ecumenics from Theological Seminary. His research explores the exegesis of the Hebrew Bible in the sixteenth century, the theology of Martin Luther and its reception, and the history of Jewish-Christian relations. He is the author of How Luther Regards Moses: The Lectures on Deuteronomy (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2023). An ordained ELCA pastor, he served congregations in the New Jersey and Southeastern Pennsylvania synods before coming to Trinity, and he is passionate about forming wise leaders and critical thinkers for the church today.

There's no need to have the "Sunday Scaries," when week one was this fun!