The Great Seminary Sorting

The Chicago Theological Seminary announced this past April that it would cease admissions. Even though the Chicago Tribune noted the decision, the increasingly familiar storyline quietly receded. Enrollment plummeted from a high of 316 students in 2016 to 189 in 2025, according to reports from the Association of Theological Schools (ATS). The roughly 40 percent drop led to deficits averaging $1.6 million over the past two years. The seminary board and administration are trying to find a path forward. 

Something similar happened to Memphis Theological Seminary with more drastic consequences. Financial challenges led the board to close the school entirely at the end of the 2025–2026 school year. These two schools are the latest casualties in the shift in Protestant theological education. 

Over the past two decades, many Protestant seminaries have had to sell their properties, merge with other institutions, or shut their doors. In particular, United Church of Christ (UCC) and Episcopal seminaries have been in free fall. After the recent developments at Chicago Theological Seminary, the UCC is down to one functioning school. Four Episcopal seminaries have sold their properties and become administrative institutes. The Episcopal Divinity School went from selling its property in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to becoming a study program at Union Theological Seminary in New York, to now existing as an unaccredited institute. Many mainline seminaries are in survival mode.

At the same time, since 2016 the Association of Theological Schools (ATS), the major accrediting body for theological schools in the U.S. and Canada, has reported consistent growth resulting in a new high in student head count among all ATS schools. For 2025, the total ATS student head count was 81,364 with a full-time equivalency (FTE) of 50,245. The previous high was in 2005 with a head count of 81,302 and an FTE of somewhere around 51,500 (there is a discrepancy in ATS numbers). This growth produced a 17.5 percent increase in the total number of Protestant seminaries in the U.S. between 2005 and 2025.

What explains these countervailing forces?

Appealing to the demise of the mainline is too simple. While mainline decline is one cause, it does not explain the slow but steady loss of students among the “big three” of establishment evangelicalism: Fuller Theological Seminary, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS), and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. 

How does one explain, for example, the decline of TEDS from 1,338 head count in 2005 to 746 in 2025 compared to Talbot School of Theology at Biola going from 984 to 1,534 during the same period? Talbot’s success has led to the acquisition of Phoenix Seminary in Arizona, from which Wayne Grudem recently retired. Talbot entered the top ten largest ATS seminaries over the same period that TEDS, Fuller, and Gordon-Conwell dropped from the top ten. 

These events do not fit neatly into existing narratives. Ryan Burge’s recent assessment of ATS data led him to conclude that “enrollments are actually pretty flat over the last eighteen years.” What Burge leaves out is a decline between 2005 and 2016 followed by almost a decade of growth. 

These trends are the result of responses to three broad shifts that occurred over the past two decades: a generational shift, an ecclesial shift, and an educational shift. Most of the scholars who defined the late twentieth century have either retired or passed away, resulting in a generational shift. Closely related is an ecclesial shift away from mainline dominance and toward non-conformist approaches. Finally, the blending of digital and physical spaces coupled with the rise of Learning Management Systems (LMS) has resulted in an educational shift. This educational shift hit older, freestanding seminaries with a large physical campus the hardest. None of these trends in isolation explain the current moment, but together they offer a narrative as to why some seminaries have declined while others are growing. 

Generational Shift

When I was in seminary in the 1990s, the Protestant theological world was humming. Wolfhart Pannenberg was in the middle of writing his three-volume work on systematic theology, Jürgen Moltmann had issued his capstone volume on doctrine The Coming of God, Radical Orthodoxy had just burst onto the scene, and the narrative theology of the so-called Yale school with its post-liberal offspring showed no signs of slowing down. One could study at Union with James Cone or study Barth at Princeton Theological Seminary with Daniel Migliore, Bruce McCormack, or George Hunsinger. Hunsinger arrived in 1997 as the founding director of the Center for Barth Studies. The theological research triangle of Germany, Britain, and America seemed as strong as it had been at the beginning of the twentieth century. 

The evangelical world had positioned itself between the American mainline and its British and German counterparts. Within these tensions, one could find Methodists like Tom Oden or Baptists like Stan Grenz (who studied with Pannenberg) and Clark Pinnock. Oden finished his three-volume systematic in 1992, in which he called for a return to the Church Fathers, an approach he termed paleo-orthodoxy. Grenz wrestled with the beginnings of postmodernism, publishing his systematic work two years after Oden completed his. Pinnock went from being Reformed to one of the architects of open theism, which nearly got him expelled from the Evangelical Theological Society in 2003. 

The Reformed evangelical world wrestled over Dutch neo-Calvinism and Puritanism as two ways to respond to neo-orthodoxy. These tensions led to numerous debates that John Frame characterized in a 2003 essay as the product of “Machen’s warrior children.” Whether Frame’s polemic against his Reformed confreres was valid or not, the debates were real and extensive. Even R. C. Sproul and J. I. Packer temporarily parted ways in the early 1990s over Packer’s role in Evangelicals and Catholics Together. 

These voices (and I have left out many names) within Protestantism produced clear theological trajectories and operated within rigorous schools of thought. All of this started to change in the first decade of the twenty-first century. From the death of Ron Nash in 2006 to Daniel Migliore’s death in March of this year, there has been a changing of the guard. Most of the movers and shakers of Protestant theology in the late twentieth century are gone. Retirees like Wayne Grudem or Stanley Hauerwas are all in their late seventies or eighties. The departure or retirement of these scholars left a vacuum at most Protestant seminaries that has not been filled. 

What is left at many mainline seminaries is a potpourri of liberationist approaches that engage in theological advocacy through a form of deconstruction. These usually coincide with a postcolonial approach, in which the language of empire and imperialism is regularly deployed to critique America. The research triangle has shifted to voices from the Global South on board with this new agenda. Everything has become praxis in which the social sciences drive social ethics.

Many Protestant seminaries attracted students through the schools of thought they represented or the collection of scholars they possessed. While the publication of scholarly works continues at a brisk pace, scholars are spread out across a wider array of institutes and institutions. Moreover, the new social media landscape has produced a younger group of savvy evangelical voices who compete with scholars for audience share. With diluted schools of thought and dispersed scholars, it’s more challenging to attract students. 

Ecclesial Shift

While the demise of the mainline and the rise of non-denominationalism have garnered much attention, it’s more about the triumph of non-conformist ecclesiology. Growing networks of neo-charismatic churches, the different types of Baptists, and denominations like the Assemblies of God all account for an increase among non-conformist forms of Protestantism. More importantly, the “magisterial” forms that trace their lineage back to the Protestant Reformation like Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Anglicans/Episcopalians, are struggling to find traction. 

To take one example, Presbyterianism on the whole is declining in the U.S. The loss of 1.5 million members in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. (PCUSA) since 2000 has meant that its sponsored seminaries are now averaging around 166 student head count. Even though Princeton Theological Seminary’s large endowment shields it from the drastic measures McCormick Theological Seminary had to take in selling its property, Princeton still went from a 766 student head count in 2005 to 300 in 2025. In April, Columbia Theological Seminary approved a restructuring plan that led to cuts of eighteen positions. The Old Testament scholar Walter Bruggemann had been a long-term fixture at Columbia until his retirement in 2003. He passed away last year. 

Conservative Presbyterianism is not growing fast enough to overcome the PCUSA’s decline. The Presbyterian Church in America is the largest of the conservative bodies, but after fifty-three years of existence, it has just reached around 400,000 members. The remaining Reformed and Presbyterian denominations are smaller. Even though Doug Wilson’s Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches gets a lot of attention, it’s not even at 25,000 members.

Reformed and Presbyterian seminaries must adapt or die. Many PCUSA seminaries have gone online and tried to hire Latino and African-American faculty to reach out to those ethnic groups, most of which do not belong to Reformed or Presbyterian churches. Conservative Presbyterians have gone international or reached out to the independent Baptist and non-denominational world. 

Reformed Theological Seminary (RTS) is a good example of this approach. The seminary has combined a multi-campus model with an online approach. With its commitment to a theological tradition rather than an ecclesial one, RTS has achieved a student body that is half Presbyterian and half a mix of other groups, most of which are Baptists. Even with its aggressive posture, RTS still went from 1,249 student head count in 2005 to 1,050 in 2025. Still, RTS remains one of the strongest conservative Reformed seminaries with roots in the Presbyterian tradition, and will no doubt remain so for the foreseeable future. 

Only three of the top ten ATS seminaries are not Baptist: Asbury Theological Seminary, Talbot, and Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS). Asbury has benefitted from the size of Methodism, but the old fundamentalist schools of DTS and Talbot have always relied heavily on independent Bible churches, Baptists, and smaller denominations for survival. They were much better positioned for the shift toward non-conformist forms of Protestantism. They also did not have the reputations of being “establishment evangelical” schools like Fuller, Gordon-Conwell, and TEDS, which had traditionally drawn faculty from conservative Reformed ranks. 

The future of Protestantism in the U.S. is non-conformist. This does not mean that older “magisterial” forms will go away. But they won’t have the numbers to sustain most seminaries. Absent a well-known faculty or school of thought, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian/Anglican seminaries will need to look to non-conformist forms to survive. 

Educational Shift

The first decade of the twentieth century witnessed the rise of online education through Learning Management Systems (LMS) like Blackboard (launched in 1997), Moodle, and eventually Canvas (which became the largest in 2018). By 2006, Blackboard was used on more than 65 percent of college campuses, and the percentage of schools using LMSs has only gone up from there. Most seminaries were slow to adjust to the new world these online systems created and did not benefit from the rise of online education until it was too late. 

After analyzing the data, Chris Meinzer and Deborah Gin noted that between 2000 and 2014 about 25 percent of students at ATS schools were classified as “distance.” This classification included online students. During the next ten years, the percentage grew to over 63 percent of students. It’s interesting that the growth in percentages among ATS schools follows the period of decline (2005–2015) and growth (2016–2025) I noted earlier. This suggests a correlation between increased online courses and programs and the decade of sustained growth. 

Some seminaries took longer to make this shift than others. Part of the problem with many mainline seminaries is that they were stuck in the past. In an ironic twist, mainline seminaries had become liberal in theology while being staunchly conservative in modes of education. They simply refused to change until it was too late. Many preferred the older on-campus, in-person model that privileged the Master of Divinity (M.Div.) as the bread-and-butter degree of ATS seminaries. Mainline seminaries were joined in this educational conservatism by evangelical seminaries more beholden to “magisterial” forms of Protestantism.

At over one-hundred credit hours, the traditional M.Div. degree was almost as long as a four-year bachelor’s degree. This length was the result of its precursor, the Bachelor of Divinity. By requiring the M.Div. for ordination, mainline Protestant denominations ensured its place in the seminary curriculum. ATS buttressed the M.Div. by forcing ATS schools to require it or its equivalent before admission to doctoral programs. The M.Div. had been propped up for years when most master’s programs were between thirty-six and sixty hours. This kept in place a mid-twentieth-century approach to theological education when the mainline was ascendent. 

During the economic downturn of 2008, most ATS schools operated under this older model. Those seminaries more dependent on endowments to offset maintenance costs of large campuses took a larger hit. They were also slow to adjust to the new shifts in education. 

The increase in non-conformist Protestantism meant a decline in the traditional M.Div. Almost all denominations and networks in the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement do not require any upper-level degree for ordination. Nor do most Baptists, regardless of whether they are independent or Southern Baptist. As these non-conformist forms became dominant, seminaries that adapted to this reality grew. Because of their reliance on tuition rather than endowments, these same seminaries also weathered the 2008 downturn and the 2020 pandemic better. 

Protestant seminaries that adjusted to the rise of leadership studies also benefited. While leadership studies emerged as a multidisciplinary field in the 1980s, it did not take off until the 1990s. Protestant pastors like John Maxwell became household names in evangelical circles for their books on leadership. By the end of the 1990s, the first leadership studies programs emerged in business and government schools at universities. Master’s degrees in Christian leadership took off, especially in non-conformist circles where the M.Div. was not required. 

Protestant seminaries that adapted to these educational shifts more quickly weathered the changes in the twenty-first century. Seminaries that were more entrepreneurial and flexible in their model and delivery of theological education grew while those wedded to older approaches slowly withered. 

With their combination of theological liberalism and institutional conservatism, mainline seminaries have been hit hard. When you add in the large campus footprint among most mainline seminaries, it made for a perfect storm.

The Future of Protestant Seminaries

What do these three shifts tell us about the future? 

What all of this means for Protestant scholarship and theology must await a future newsletter.