Opening the Digital Doors

It’s 8:00 p.m. on a Thursday. After a long day of meetings and family responsibilities, the executive director of a nonprofit organization opens her laptop. As the screen light fills her office, she feels refreshed; a renewed sense of excitement logging into Project Starling for an evening of theological exploration. 

This experience will soon be available to lifelong learners everywhere, thanks to a research collaboration between LSTC and the ELCA Innovation Lab. The two teams have come together in a pathbreaking partnership to reimagine theological education through asynchronous online learning.

Project Starling is a first-of-its-kind online learning platform, developed by LSTC and launched in the summer of 2025. Offering a stackable pathway with a wide variety of courses including certification programs, workshops, and training opportunities, the goal, purpose, and mission of Project Starling is to make theological education accessible to everyone. 

Lifelong learners, pastors-in-training, church leaders, retirees, and others can work towards continued education or candidacy programs like TEEM, Synod Authorized Ministers (SAMs), and MDiv when and how it fits into their lives and schedules. 

“The church understands that the way it formed leaders in the past is no longer sustainable,” said Keisha Dyson, LSTC’s Vice President for Enterprise Innovation. “At LSTC, we’re expanding our digital reach and offering new pathways for leadership formation. Project Starling is that strategy in action: the culmination of years of planning.”

The seminary was committed to making Project Starling accessible, user-friendly, and intuitive for students of all ages, geographies, and experience levels. To achieve this goal, the developers knew the courses need to be tested by real people, in real time—and with a team whose members have real-world experience examining innovation in action. 

Enter the ELCA Innovation Lab at Churchwide, focused on finding the best solutions through experimentation, observation, and understanding. When Dyson reached out to the Innovation Lab, the team at the Lab knew Project Starling was the right project with the right partners at the right time. 

“This research project is the first time that we’re working directly with a seminary, so it’s kind of a pilot in itself,” said Emilie Moravec, Innovation Partner, Organizational Innovation at Innovation Lab. “The more we can work with every expression of the ELCA, the better and more innovative we’re all going to be.”

Rahel Mwitula Williams, Interim Executive Director of Innovation, felt a personal calling to the project. 

“TEEM education has played a major role in my spiritual growth,” Mwitula Williams shared. “When this opportunity to help strengthen and serve leadership development [came to the Lab], I knew it could be a meaningful and powerful way to honor my own journey, as well as a core component of Innovation’s work.”

The user study will assess Project Starling’s asynchronous courses by collecting and analyzing input from TEEM learners, SAMs, and those seeking professional development in theological education and church leadership. Across four waves of the process—before, during, and after learning, as well as additional follow up—the lab will evaluate content and overall user experience with the goal of improving course delivery and in-platform engagement. 

“The surveys provide us with important information, but they can’t always give us the why behind things,” Moravec said. “We might see that a large number of students say time constraints are hard, but in an interview, we can ask about their day-to-day lives and how the courses fit into their schedules. 

“Once we hear those qualitative stories, we can unpack the why a little bit better, which can help inform future iterations of classes and how information is delivered.”

Seventy-five unique learners will take part in the yearlong study. With the first wave currently underway, the teams are already uncovering a series of unexpected findings. 

“I was both surprised and encouraged by the diversity of learners taking part in Project Starling,” Mwitula Williams shared. “There are ordained pastors who want a refresher, others who are using it as part of their discernment before making the decision to go to seminary, and a good number of younger adults interested in starting the candidacy process early.”

And while the team has found that over 40% of participants are interested in the TEEM program, many of them were unsure how to qualify for it. 

“We’ve already started to uncover that there may be processes within our ELCA system that are barriers to these learners,” Moravec explained. “This is the first time I’ve been part of a research project that has taught the team so much so early in the process; we’re not even through our first full round of user interviews.”

The initial findings and ongoing research offer opportunities to improve Project Starling—but the impact of the partnership has the potential to extend far beyond LSTC. 

“Leadership development is the heart of Innovation’s work, and this partnership is an experiment in bold collaboration,” Mwitula Williams said. “There is an opportunity here for the three expressions of the church to come together and really change the direction of continuing education.” 

Dyson agrees. “This partnership and study are not just changing the way we think about curriculum development,” Dyson said. “We are learning how to relate to one another in the absence of a governance structure and discovering new pathways for ministry formation together.” As Project Starling evolves, LSTC and the ELCA Innovation Lab are shaping the future of theological education: one learner, one course, and one digital door at a time.