As a former middle school band teacher and lifelong musician, Robin Steinke knows that the only way you can improvise well is to know the fundamentals. “Sometimes people think improv is just making stuff up,” she observes. “It’s not making stuff up— someone improvising well has mastered scales, harmonies, and rhythms and knows how to quote the great jazz musicians who’ve gone before.”

Steinke’s journey to leadership at Luther Seminary, where she recently completed 10 years as president and received an additional five-year contract, reflects a robust Lutheran vocational theology and a few unexpected turns.

Her leadership philosophy is shaped by a deep trust in where God is leading, even when the way forward isn’t obvious. “Just when you think you know what’s going on, how to do your job, things change. So we listen—we listen a lot for the Holy Spirit—and we improvise,” Steinke says.

From music to ministry

When she was young, Steinke’s parents were active churchgoers in a Missouri Synod congregation in rural southwestern Minnesota. “Immanuel Lutheran is still there, just east of Courtland, Minnesota. I attended Immanuel’s parochial school from kindergarten through eighth grade, so I essentially had nine years of confirmation!” she laughs.

She’s often asked how she got from the Missouri Synod to become president of the largest seminary in the ELCA. In a way, it started with simple hospitality—a theme that comes up over and over in conversations about Steinke’s leadership today.

After studying music at Augustana University–Sioux Falls as an undergraduate, Steinke took a teaching job in Georgia. “When I started teaching, the nearest Missouri Synod congregation was 30 miles away,” she recalls. But she lived just one mile away from an American Lutheran Church congregation—Resurrection Lutheran Church in Marietta, Georgia. One of her teaching colleagues noticed she had attended Augustana and invited her to church.

On her first visit to Resurrection, the organist found out Steinke was a band teacher who played trumpet and asked her to play in church. “This is how I ended up in the ALC, which became part of the ELCA,” she says. “It wasn’t a big theological decision. It was simply that they welcomed me and asked me to get involved. I did not realize at the time how big a shift this was.”

While Steinke loved being a middle school band director, a desire to support her family financially led her to add a second vocation as a financial planner and licensed stock broker in the Atlanta area. She had always been good with numbers and had also learned how to have conversations with people around sensitive topics.

Around this time, still active at Resurrection Lutheran, she also began to discern a call to word and sacrament ministry. In the spirit of exploration, she enrolled part- time at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology. It turned out that her day job in the financial world and her theological education unexpectedly reinforced each other.

“It was good to be in both worlds—a classroom some of the week while also in deep conversation with people wrestling with issues around their healthcare, life insurance, retirement savings, and so on,” she remembers. “My nascent seminary training got real in those conversations, and just like teaching middle school students, I knew they were holy conversations.”

“Those earlier jobs gave me the confidence to go into ordained ministry in the first place,” she says.

She moved to Columbus, Ohio, and enrolled full-time at Trinity Lutheran Seminary. Halfway through an internship at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Akron, Ohio, things got complicated when the financial company she was working for asked her to become full-time, a choice that would necessitate leaving behind preparation for ordained ministry.

Steinke felt stuck thinking that God’s plan for her life was either one path or the other—that she had to figure it out, make the “right choice.” One day on campus, she ran into Fred Meuser, retired Trinity Seminary president and a trusted friend.

Meuser assured Steinke that she couldn’t make the wrong decision. “He said we have to trust that God will accompany us on whatever path we take. This idea was so freeing. I felt complete freedom to say no.”

She left the financial firm knowing she was going to serve wherever the church needed her as a pastor.

What the church needs

But Steinke’s vocation as a teacher was still unfolding. When she returned to Columbus for her final year of seminary, three faculty members in three separate conversations each suggested she continue her studies in a Ph.D. program, despite her insistence on becoming a parish pastor.

When Steinke found out they had not been talking to each other about this, she felt the Holy Spirit at work. “They each said that the church needed people who cared about parish ministry but also needed those capable of completing a Ph.D. to do so and come back to teach at seminary,” she shares.

A few years and hundreds of hours studying German later, having earned a doctorate from the University of Cambridge in England, Steinke was a newly minted Bonhoeffer expert looking for both a parish to serve and a seminary teaching position. An offer for a part-time academic position and a call to serve a congregation in the Metro D.C. Synod came from Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg in south-central Pennsylvania.

Her first teaching experience was a three-hour Monday evening introduction to theological ethics. “The class hadn’t been taught in a few years, so all the senior M.Div. students had to take it,” Steinke says. “I was an unknown, and the students were terrified of me. I just lectured them like we were at Cambridge.”

She remembers a courageous senior who raised a hand in the third week of class: “‘Dr. Steinke, we don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.’ I thought they meant my last few sentences, but they meant the entire three weeks! They thought I was going to be mad. I apologized and thanked them for their bravery—it was a great moment. From then on, we reset the course and learned a lot more from each other.”

During her time at Gettysburg, from early 1999 through the spring of 2014, Steinke taught as a lecturer, then was promoted to full professor, and by her third year teaching, became academic dean. She served both the national and global church—listening to early merger conversations between Gettysburg and Philadelphia seminaries, and serving on and chairing multiple committees and boards for the Association of Theological Schools and the Lutheran World Federation.

Steinke was happy in her academic work and leadership roles at Gettysburg. In 2013, she’d begun a project with the state and commissioner of prisons in Pennsylvania to do theological work in the state prison system.

“It was exciting work and it was all lined up,” she recalls. “But so often, we are actually the beneficiaries of the improv, of the Holy Spirit calling others to new things and then something unexpected happens to us.”

Trusting in the Holy Spirit

On March 26, 2014—serendipitously the anniversary of Steinke’s baptism and confirmation—the Luther Seminary board unanimously elected her to be the seminary’s president, the first woman to serve Luther in that role. “It’s been a wonderful, delightful, complicated, surprising call that continues to strengthen, deepen, and enrich my sense of who God is in the world,” Steinke says of her first 10 years.

The seminary has accomplished a lot in those 10 years, from deepening connections to the global church to completely rethinking how theological education is delivered.

“In her time at Luther Seminary, Robin has continued to receive full support from the board, worked tirelessly with donors to secure the seminary’s financial picture, fostered relationships of deep respect with senior administrators, and led faculty and students into a completely different era of theological education,” says Marge Hegge, chair of the Luther Seminary board. “Her creative leadership has made all the difference in where Luther is today.”

Major developments during Steinke’s tenure include the launch of the Jubilee Scholarship and Faith+Lead, the accelerated MDivX experiment, a significant expansion of distributed (remote) learning, the successful $92.8 million “Listen! God Is Calling” campaign, a refresh of the seminary’s Ph.D. program and master’s curricula—all while navigating a global pandemic and ongoing changes in both the church and higher education.

“We’ve worked together as a team to lean into what God is up to,” Steinke shares. “If our mission is to educate servant-leaders, then our institutional accomplishments are those our students. They have braved a tumultuous time for the church and the world and have said yes to God’s call and claim for their lives.”

Since those first days teaching on Monday nights at Gettysburg, Steinke has mentored countless individuals who have gone on to prominent leadership roles in Christian churches and institutions around the world. One notable mentee is Kristin Johnston Largen, a faculty colleague at Gettysburg who now serves as president of Wartburg Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa.

Largen says she is always struck by the depth of Steinke’s trust in the Holy Spirit. “She doesn’t look back to try recreating what was before, to hold on to what we have now,” Largen says. “Robin is fearless in letting go and trusting in the Spirit. She doesn’t see challenging trends in higher education through a lens of despair or loss but looks forward to the work and abundance of the Holy Spirit. And she is a leader in calling on the church to be a community of hospitality and welcome, to be ever more inclusive.”

Steinke knows that, especially in times of disruption, we want our leaders to fix things. “We’re asked to ‘Say something, do something.’ But Jesus doesn’t fix things. He calls us to faith. He promises to be present in our journeys as we walk with others in the church, many of whom are quite different from us. This isn’t always easy work,” she says.

“But in staying focused on how the Holy Spirit is calling and stirring us, we can remain together as the body of Christ, mutually consoling one another in our human imperfection and in our trust that God is guiding us to a future we cannot imagine.”