City: Louisville, KY

Category: Education

Telephone: (800) 626-5525

Address: 2825 Lexington Rd.

Description: Founded in 1859 in Greenville, South Carolina, as the first seminary of the Southern Baptist Convention, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is the oldest of the six seminaries related to the SBC. Often referred to as “the mother seminary” in Baptist circles, it relocated to Louisville in 1877 after the Civil War left the seminary holding worthless Confederate war bonds in a newly impoverished area. Despite shaky times, Southern was able to grow and prosper, becoming one of the first seminaries in the nation to offer a PhD program. During the 1970s and ’80s, it had the largest accredited PhD program in religion in the United States. It was also the first in the nation to offer courses in church social work and religious education, and it counts as one of the few seminaries in the country to offer a full degree course in church music. Its department of missions is one of the oldest in the world, and the Billy Graham School of Missions, Evangelism and Church Growth opened in 1994. Today, men and women from around the world and across the United States study at its attractive campus near Seneca Park. Laid out in the 1920s, the campus features a number of neo-Georgian and Colonial Revival structures.