Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary

In the years 2003-2005 Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary celebrates the 150th anniversary of its founding. Our sesquicentennial celebration gives us an opportunity to review our past, to celebrate our present, and to anticipate our future. This brief history was written to give newcomers to the seminary a sense of its historical evolution and is grounded in some of the documentary histories of the seminary’s predecessor institutions.

1853-1855
The Founding of Garrett Biblical Institute

The Methodist Episcopal Church had been founded at the “Christmas Conference” in Baltimore in 1784. The new American church relied on strong lay leadership in local societies and on itinerant elders who traveled wide circuits. At first, elders were trained in a kind of apprenticeship supervised by other elders in annual conferences. This system eventually coalesced into a formal “course of study” for elders, with a specified list of textbooks prescribed in the denomination’s Discipline. Although there is evidence that the course of study maintained high standards of training, there was also a strong prejudice against formal theological education; even the term “seminary” was suspected by many Methodists. Consequently, the first Methodist institutions for training clergy served to supplement the prescribed course of study and took the name “biblical institute” rather than “seminary.” The very first of these was the Newbury Biblical Institute, founded at Newbury, Vermont, in 1839. This institution was the predecessor of Boston University School of Theology, and its first president was a Methodist elder and an advocate of clergy education, John Dempster.

In 1831, 40 years after the death of John Wesley, Methodists founded a society in the village of Chicago. This society, the Clark Street society, eventually became Chicago’s First United Methodist Church. Within its membership were early settlers Eliza Clark Garrett and her husband, Chicago mayor Augustus Garrett. Eliza Garrett had become convinced of the need for better training for Methodist preachers. In her will, made out in early December 1853, she left a considerable inheritance for the founding of a biblical institute. A meeting was held in Chicago on December 26, 1853, at which a group of Methodist leaders invited John Dempster to come to the Chicago area and organize the institute. Eliza Garrett’s will and this organizational meeting are the basis of the date 1853 for the founding of the seminary.

The group of friends that organized this biblical institute was in fact the original nucleus of settlers of Evanston, Illinois. They organized a Methodist society in Evanston (in 1854) that became the First United Methodist Church there. They also planned the building of Northwestern University there. In 1854 a building (Dempster Hall) was constructed for the biblical institute on the shores of Lake Michigan in Evanston, and it was opened on January 1, 1855. The State of Illinois granted a charter to Garrett Biblical Institute on February 15, 1855. These two events are the basis for the year 1855 being given as the founding date of the institution in older seals of Garrett Biblical Institute. In the next year the institution was transferred from the estate of Eliza Garrett to the trustees of the institute. On this occasion Eliza Garrett’s attorney Grant Goodrich gave a charge to the trustees expressing Eliza Garrett’s wishes in founding the institute. The “Semi-Centennial” of the institute in 1906 took this event in 1856 (the transfer of the seminary to its trustees) as its founding date.

Garrett Biblical Institute grew in the ensuing years. Like the Newbury Biblical Institute on which it was patterned, the institution’s three-year curriculum supplemented the denomination’s prescribed course of study with a particular focus on biblical learning, including instruction in Greek and Hebrew. Students could elect either a diploma program or a more extensive Bachelor of Divinity degree program. Bishop Matthew Simpson was serving as the second president of the institute when he preached the eulogy at Abraham Lincoln’s burial in Springfield, Illinois, on May 4, 1865.

In 1867 a large new building, Heck Hall, was dedicated for the Institute. The famous Chicago fire of 1871 destroyed some property in Chicago owned by the institute through the bequest of Eliza Garrett, and the institute suffered for several years due to lack of rental funds from this property. After recovery from this disaster, the institute built a new building, Memorial Hall, dedicated in 1887. This was the institute’s primary building until 1924 when the present Gothic structure was dedicated and Memorial Hall was sold to Northwestern University.

1873
The Founding of Union Biblical Institute

Evangelistic preaching and an adaptation of Methodist polity gave rise to similar institutions among German-speaking people in Pennsylvania and Maryland. The followers of Jacob Albright became organized as a separate denomination, the evangelische Gemeinschaft or “Evangelical Association” in the early 19th century. By the middle of the 19th century leaders of the Evangelical Association were discussing the need for institutions for the education of preachers. They faced much of the same resistance as English-speaking Methodists faced, including resistance to the term “seminary.”

In 1837 a group of German settlers in the Naperville, Illinois, area formed a society of the Evangelical Association that would become Community United Methodist Church there. In 1870 a small college of the Evangelical Association moved to Naperville from Plainfield, Illinois, and this school would become North Central College. The 1871 General Conference of the Evangelical Association adopted a resolution calling for the establishment of a biblical institute, and on March 13, 1873, the State of Illinois granted a charter for the Union Biblical Institute in Naperville. The institute was organized as an adjunct to the college in Naperville and held its first classes in 1876. In August 1877, it was formally opened by Bishop J. J. Esher. One of its first faculty members, F. W. Heidner, was an 1863 graduate of Garrett Biblical Institute and is thought to have been the first seminary-trained pastor in the Evangelical Association. Like Garrett Biblical Institute, the Union Biblical Institute sponsored both a diploma program and a Bachelor of Divinity degree program. The name of the Institute was eventually changed to Evangelical Theological Seminary. A separate building for the seminary was dedicated in 1913 and still stands on the campus of North Central College.

1885
The Founding of the Chicago Training School for City, Home and Foreign Missions

Chicago in the late 1800s was a city of hope and despair. European immigrants had arrived by the thousands; the meat-packing industry was flourishing; the first skyscrapers were arising from the ashes of the great fire; Upton Sinclair would soon describe conditions in the city in his novel The Jungle; and evangelist D. L. Moody had become the voice of a new phenomenon in American religious life, namely, urban revivalism. It was in this context that a Methodist laywoman (and associate of Moody), Lucy Rider Meyer, called for a new vision of Christian leadership, a ministry of women who were eventually recognized as deaconesses, ministering to the needs of the city. In 1885 she and her husband convinced a group of Chicago Methodists to endorse the organization of a training school, the Chicago Training School for City, Home and Foreign Missions, and they began raising funds for the new school.

The Chicago Training School opened in October 1885 at 19 W. Park Avenue with four students. In the next year the institution was incorporated and moved into a new building at 114 Dearborn Avenue inside the Chicago Loop. The school grew through the later years of the nineteenth century under Meyer’s leadership. In 1896 it moved into a larger building at the corner of Indiana Avenue and 50th Street in the Hyde Park area. By 1910 the school had 256 students. Lucy Rider Meyer’s failing health (she died in 1922) led to the appointment of a new president, Louis F. Lesemann, in 1917. In the 1920s students from the Chicago Training School took some of their courses at the University of Chicago nearby. The school brought in a faculty member, Murray Leiffer, who had graduated from Garrett Biblical Institute and was pursuing a doctorate in the nascent field of sociology at the University of Chicago.6

1934
The Union of the Chicago Training School and Garrett Biblical Institute

Both the Chicago Training School and Garrett Biblical Institute flourished in the 1920s. It was in this decade that Garrett built the Gothic structure that remains the main seminary building and was then considered “the pride of the North Shore.” It was dedicated in 1924, the same year in which Chicago’s First Methodist Church moved into the Chicago Temple.7 The building had just been dedicated when the school celebrated its 75th anniversary in 1926.8 Although one professor of Old Testament had been forced to resign in the late 19th century due to his espousal of modern biblical criticism, Garrett Biblical Institute developed in the early 20th century a reputation for openness to modern thought both in biblical studies and in theology.

Both the Chicago Training School and Garrett Biblical Institute faced hard times in the 1930s. The Depression sent the value of Garrett’s Chicago properties plummeting, and the rental income from these properties had been, in effect, Garrett’s endowment through previous decades. The seminary had assumed debt for its new buildings, and in 1932 could not pay for them. The buildings and surrounding property were sold at Sheriff’s auction in 1932. Northwestern University purchased the property and graciously leased it back to the seminary for one dollar per year. This arrangement, which was made by contract for one hundred years renewable at the request of the seminary for another hundred years, remains in effect today.

The Chicago Training School faced difficulties in recruiting students and in raising funds for the institution in the 1930s. In March 1934 the trustees of the Chicago Training School and Garrett Biblical Institute voted to bring the Training School into Garrett Biblical Institute, and in the fall of that year three faculty members, one secretary and twenty-one students from the Training School came to the Garrett campus in Evanston.9

The integration of the Chicago Training School meant that the scope of Garrett’s vision for training Christian leaders had expanded to include leaders of church-based institutions for the betterment of social conditions and significant numbers of women. A Ph.D. program had been instituted in conjunction with Northwestern University in 1930, and this program further expanded the seminary’s program into the preparation of seminary and college faculty members. The service of Dr. Georgia Harkness as professor of applied theology (1939-1950) signaled the expansion of Garrett’s vision by including women faculty members.

Although Garrett Biblical Institute had African American students from as early as the 1880s, the racial and ethnic diversity of the institution increased notably from the 1950s. The seminary invited Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to serve on its faculty in 1958, but King eventually decided that the struggle for civil rights in the South demanded his attention.10 The service of Dr. Grant Shockley (1959-1966) marked the inclusion of African-American faculty members, and the seminary began to work deliberately to attract African-American students and faculty members. This occurred despite the fact that the 1939 union of the Methodist Episcopal Church with the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the Methodist Protestant Church had forced African-American congregations of the Methodist Church into a racially segregated Central Jurisdiction.

1974
The Union of Evangelical Theological Seminary and Garrett Theological Seminary

The 1968 merger of the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren Church to form the United Methodist Church left the denomination with two theological seminaries in close proximity in the Chicago area. By that time, Garrett Biblical Institute had taken the name “Garrett Theological Seminary.”11 The 1972 General Conference of the United Methodist Church mandated the merger of the two Chicago-area seminaries, and negotiations began between Evangelical Theological Seminary and Garrett Theological Seminary by way of a Consultation Task Force that included seminary trustees, faculty members, administrators, and students. The task force agreed on a plan to form a merged seminary using the Evanston campus, and in the fall of 1974 Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary opened as a newly-merged seminary.

After the merger in the 1970s the Center for the Church and the Black Experience became a central facet of the seminary’s life, working to attract black students and faculty members. A very distinctive faculty structure, the parity committee, served to mediate any contested issue involving race facing the faculty by referring the issue to a committee composed of equal numbers of African-American and non-African-American faculty members. At the same time, the rising prominence of women faculty members, especially Dr. Rosemary Radford Ruether (who served from 1976 through 2002), and increasing numbers of women students brought Garrett-Evangelical a reputation as a center for feminist Christian thought. During the 1970s and 1980s the seminary encouraged the development of a women’s center and centers for Asian and Hispanic ministries.

A number of important developments have occurred since the 1980s. In the late 1980s the development of the office of diaconal minister and then the order of deacon (as a permanent order in ministry) in the United Methodist Church led the seminary to develop an extensive program of training for diaconal ministers and deacon candidates. In 1992 the faculty of the seminary adopted a statement of mission and purpose, affirming three core values of evangelical commitment, creative and critical reason, and prophetic participation in society. The trustees of the seminary affirmed this by incorporating the mission and values statement into the seminary’s bylaws. The seminary adopted a strategic plan in 2001, laying out six strategic goals of attracting highly qualified men and women to Christian leadership, develop-ing new scholarship resour-ces, building stronger connec-tions to churches, commun-icating more effectively with churches and other consti-tu-encies, expanding and enhancing educational programs, and restoring physical facilities. In the year 2002 Garrett-Evangelical and Chicago Theological Seminary joined other seminaries of the Association of Chicago Theological Schools in moving to a semester-based academic calendar.

2003-05
Garrett-Evangelical’s Sesquicentennial

In 1998, following discussions with faculty members and administrators, the trustees of Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary adopted a statement of core purpose. According to the new statement, the purpose of the seminary is

To know God in Christ and, through preparing spiritual leaders, to help others know God in Christ.

This statement offers an appropriate coda to the story told here. When Garrett Biblical Institute and Union Biblical Institute were formed in 1853 and 1873, their focus was almost solely on the formation of Euro-American men to serve as elders in the Methodist Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Association. The vision of the seminary has evolved and expanded in the ensuing years with the growing inclusion of women in ministry, with the expansion of the racial and cultural breadth of the seminary’s faculty and student body, and with the expansion of the idea of Christian leadership as embracing a wide variety of gifts for ministry and forms of ministry in the churches. What has remained consistent through the histories of Garrett Biblical Institute, Evangelical Theological Seminary and the Chicago Training School has been an unwavering, core commitment to the formation of Christian leaders. Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary takes great pride in this history as we celebrate 150 years of preparing spiritual leaders.

by Ted A. Campbell, president, 2001-2005