It was announced yesterday that I have been appointed Dean of the Chapel of Luther Seminary effective September 1, 2024.

Following the cloud is a wild adventure. I never, ever thought it would lead here, and yet, here we are.

If you are new to my blog then you might not recognize the phrase “following the cloud.” It has been my life motto for nearly thirty years. It is a spiritual attitude that I try to hold that is based on two stories from scripture. The first is from Exodus and Numbers when God led the Israelites through the wilderness in a pillar of cloud and fire. The second is from Acts in the way that the Spirit led the apostles into strange new worlds, often by disrupting and redirecting their best-laid plans. Read more about my spirituality of this phrase here.

Allow me to provide a little context for how the cloud led me to this strange new world of the Dean of the Chapel. I’ll first tell Luther Seminary’s side of the story (as best I can). Then I’ll tell mine, and how these paths intersected in an unexpected way.

Luther Seminary has had a Campus Pastor since the 1970s. The campus pastor served a function that you would imagine from the title. They served much like any pastor of any congregation. They led worship services along with a team of musicians and sacristans. They provided pastoral care for the campus community. They served as an embodied leader of the spiritual life of the campus as an oasis of spiritual care within a community of intense academic training.

The model of the Campus Pastor makes a lot of sense when there are hundreds of students living on campus, spending all of their time dislocated from their home congregations and experiencing the pressures of academic life. A campus like that needs a full-time pastor to lead a team of pastoral care-givers.

Things have changed dramatically over the past 15-20 years at Luther Seminary. The shift the Seminary is experiencing is a reflection of the larger cultural shifts that are affecting all institutions, both secular and religious. (see my review of The End of Theological Education here to learn more). Luther Seminary no longer has hundreds of students living on campus. Most of our students are distance learners who converge on the campus for 3-day intensive sessions once per term. The majority of our classes are offered in multiple modalities of synchronous online, asynchronous online, hybrid in-person and online, traditional in-person, and various travel courses.

We have a small, but vital and wonderful group of students who live on campus or close enough to be involved in daily campus life. The majority of those students are international students who have disrupted their lives, moved half way around the world, struggled with getting visas, and language/cultural adaptations to study at Luther Seminary. The rest of our students find themselves in a hybrid world of living their everyday lives within their own context while trying to maintain connection and focus on their studies at Luther.

Pastor Jeni Grangaard has served as our campus pastor for the past five years. She came to Luther just before the pandemic disrupted everyone’s lives. She has done the difficult work that all of us who served as pastors during that time had to do. She had to lead the pivot to online worship in an already complicated system. She did a fabulous job and I am so grateful for the work that she did.

Two years ago, starting August 1, 2022, I became a full-time member of the faculty of Luther Seminary as the Associate Professor of Spiritual Formation. That is when I met Pastor Jeni. We immediately connected at both a professional and personal level. Simply put, we get along really well. I attended chapel regularly and it was a very important part of my experience at Luther. Pastor Jeni often invited me to collaborate with her in creative ways to lead worship, both in the traditional setting and in the experimental Thursday Lunch Church.

I was shocked and saddened when I received the news that Pastor Jeni was leaving Luther to take a call as an associate pastor at Mt. Olivet Lutheran Church in Minneapolis. I was shocked because she was doing such a great job and everything seemed to be going well. I was saddened because I really enjoyed working with her. I will miss Pastor Jeni, but I must, begrudgingly admit that I am happy for her. She was longing to be in a local congregation where she could be involved in the full array of pastoral life. I get it. Blessings on her ministry.

Now, let’s back up the story a little bit and see how I got here.

I served Easter Lutheran Church from May 2017 to July 2022. Think about all that happened in our world during those years. Add to the geopolitical trauma the fact that one of the associates, a friend of mine, had to leave because of a family crisis, and the next month the beloved lead pastor that invited me to serve with her got sick and had to resign. Within 9 months of starting there, everything shifted. We had an interim lead for 22 months. That ended with the pandemic lock-down. We called our new lead during lock-down and we spent our first year together in social isolation.

We made it through. God allowed our pastoral team to help the congregation adapt and survive the pandemic. Things were just opening up in the Spring of 2022.

And I was exhausted.

When Luther Seminary called me and said that they had just written a job description that sounded like me, and invited me to apply, I was overwhelmed with gratitude. I miss the beautiful people of Easter, but, to be honest, I needed a break from the pressures of the office of pastor.

The last two years serving as a professor and content-creator at Luther Seminary and Faith+Lead have been life-giving for me at every level of my existence. I have been able to do all the things that I love to do without the administrative burdens that were killing my soul.

It has been a sabbatical of sorts.

In January of each year I ask for a word to find me that will set the theme for my spiritual adventure. The word for 2023 was WONDER. 2023 was a year full of wonder, and I am so grateful for the healing it brought to me and my family.

The word that came to me in January of 2024 was SEEK. It came on January 1 as I started a new devotional book that led me to read Isaiah 55:1-9. I encourage you to read that text. The first five verses speak the words of the LORD to an afflicted people and remind them of the steadfast love that God has for them. In verse six it says, “Seek the LORD while he may be found, call upon him while he is near;”

This is my journal entry for that day…

Seek the LORD.

Since that day there has been a subtle gnawing in my soul. “Lord, I am so grateful for the work you have called me to do as a professor. And, there is something missing. I feel detached from the missional work that I know has always been part of my call.”

I thought that perhaps God was calling me to start a house church in my neighborhood.

No, that wasn’t it.

I thought that it was my ongoing experimentation with digital discipleship. It is that, to be sure. This year God led me to work with a wonderful company called TidyCo Creative to help me become more intentional with my online ministry. They helped me bring my years of online work together as The Art Pastor, and I am thrilled to host a growing online community of people who seek to explore spirituality and scripture through visual art and creativity. I will continue to follow the cloud in that ministry, to be sure.

Yet, there was something in me that said I needed something grounded in place.

When Dean Jacobson called me into his office in late June I was shocked. He said that the Seminary was contemplating a shift in models from a campus pastor to a Dean of the Chapel model. He thought that I would be a good fit. I hit all the markers: ordained rostered ELCA pastor, full faculty member, specializing in spiritual formation, 30 years experience in various modalities of church life (evangelical mega church, emergent house church, ELCA in two Twin Cities suburbs).

Honestly, I did not see that coming.

Hmmm…so, Lord, this is the place that I’m supposed to be present?

I took the next few weeks to enter a discernment process. That means lots of journaling, prayer, conversations with my family and trusted advisors, discussion with my spiritual director, a 48-hour silence hermitage at Pacem in Terris, and more journaling.

Is the Dean of the Chapel where the cloud is leading?

At every turn, in every discussion, the answer was yes.

Serving as Dean of the Chapel will give me the opportunity to practice what we teach in our leadership courses and spirituality courses. It will be a chance to teach through mentorship of chapel staff, not just through academic channels. It will also serve as a laboratory where we can learn collaboratively as a campus community how to practice communal discernment and spirituality. It makes sense.

OK, then.

Here we go.

I honestly don’t know exactly what this means. No one knows what a Dean of the Chapel at Luther Seminary looks like, because we’ve never had one.

It’s probably a good thing that I’m a visual artist. I love a blank canvas.

I ask for your prayers for our community at Luther Seminary–our students both residential and distance, our staff, our faculty, our alumni, and the congregations that they serve around the world–as we seek to discern what God is doing in this time and place and how we might join in on the action.