According to the latest annual report of the Association of Theological Schools, the six seminaries of the Southern Baptist denomination educated 18.8 percent of all U.S. theology students last academic year.
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, is the largest of the six official Southern Baptist seminaries, with 3,281 students. The smallest of the six Southern Baptist seminaries, New Orleans Seminary, had 1,476 students.
The six Southern Baptist seminaries had a total of 13,471 students last academic year, out of more than 70,000 seminary students nationwide.
Only 16 theological seminaries in the country reported enrollment of more than 1,000 students for the 2023-2024 school year. Another 11 seminaries reported enrollment between 500 and 1,000, based on new data from the Association of Theological Schools, which includes 237 U.S. affiliated schools.
Liberty Theological Seminary at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, was the largest seminary in America last school year, with 5,507 students enrolled.
Liberty Seminary was founded in 1973 by Jerry Falwell, pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church. The church was an independent Baptist church at the time, but is now a member of the Southern Baptist Convention. Liberty Seminary is not an official agency of the SBC.
The interdenominational seminaries had a total of 8,278 students.
Broken down by major denominations, Catholics had 5,436 students, United Methodists 2,527, Seventh-day Adventists 1,694, Presbyterian Church in America 1,483, Presbyterian Church (USA) 1,208, Assemblies of God 1,180, Episcopal Church 1,002, and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America 988.
There were 132 Protestant, 55 non-denominational or interdenominational seminaries, 42 Roman Catholic, 5 Orthodox, 1 Jewish, 1 Eastern Catholic, and 1 other seminary reporting statistics.
In Alabama, four theological schools were listed as members of the Association of Theological Schools.
Beeson Divinity School at Samford University is an interfaith theological program that educates students from 15 denominations at a Baptist university. Its student body includes Southern Baptists, and the school recently partnered with the Global Methodist Church to train future pastors for that denomination, which split from the United Methodist Church.
According to the report, Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham had 125 theology students last school year.
The dome of Samford University’s Beeson Divinity School. (Photo by Greg Garrison/AL.com)[email protected]
Heritage Christian University in Florence, which is affiliated with the Church of Christ, had 88 students.
The Kearley Graduate School of Faulkner University in Montgomery, also of the Church of Christ, had 34 students.
Oakwood University School of Theology in Huntsville, a Seventh-day Adventist church, had 16 students.
The dominance of theological education continues even though the Southern Baptist Convention reported that membership declined for the 17th consecutive year, falling below 13 million for the first time since the 1970s.
At its peak in 2006, the SBC had 16.3 million members. Today, membership is down to 12,982,090, but it remains the largest Protestant denomination in America.
It is also the largest denomination in Alabama, where it once had over a million members. It now has only 753,653 members in 3,164 Southern Baptist-affiliated churches in Alabama.
Since Alabama’s founding in 1819, Baptists and Methodists have been the two largest faith groups with cross-cultural influence.
Both founded their first churches in Alabama in 1808 and then became a fixture in every major city in the state.
