photograph courtesy mts
A landmark on East Parkway for decades.
The ornate, limestone mansion has stood like a rock on the corner of East Parkway and Union since 1912. It was built for a cotton magnate named Joseph Newberger, a Jewish man who was president of his synagogue but also a member of the local Catholic Club.
Half a century later, it was sold to a small, mostly rural Christian denomination that transformed the big house into a small seminary.
Since 1964, the expansive front porch and marble fountain outside, and the waltzing marble staircase and angelic plaster moldings inside, have welcomed dozens of professors and thousands of students.
Now, after more than six decades of worship, study, and service, Memphis Theological Seminary is closing.
photograph courtesy mts
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Thirty-six members of the 62nd and final graduating class received their master’s or doctoral degrees last month. The Cumberland Presbyterian Church’s one-and-only seminary will cease operations July 31st. Its spirit will live on.
Its pastors have shared the Good News and cared for all God’s children in hundreds of pulpits, pews, and other sacred spaces inside and outside the church.
Its chaplains have comforted the sick, visited the imprisoned, and counseled wounded hearts, bodies, and souls in hospitals, prisons, and every branch of the Armed Forces.
Its ministers have formed dozens of nonprofits that fed the hungry, housed the homeless, welcomed strangers, and cared for children and adults, and especially “the least of these.”
Those ministries include Manna House and Room in the Inn, Jacob’s Well and Grace Place, HER Faith Ministries and the Urban Bicycle Food Ministry, the Memphis School of Servant Leadership, Knowledge Quest, and Crosstown Arts.
Its faculty members have taught generations of families to seek and find and follow their own paths to God — and their individual and collective callings from God.
Families like the Foresters. Byron Forester first enrolled at MTS in 1977. He didn’t stay long. “The old founders were still teaching then,” Forester recalls. “It was kind of dull. It felt very disconnected from the real world.”
Forester re-enrolled in 2001. He stayed and graduated with a master’s degree in 2007. “There was a much livelier vibe when I came back,” he says. “The faculty really stretched us to get out from behind the walls of the seminary and into the streets where real theology was taking place.”
Rev. Forester’s daughter, Eleanor, graduated from MTS in 2024. She plans to become a chaplain. Her father and both of her grandfathers became Cumberland Presbyterian ministers. Forester’s ancestors include Thomas H. Campbell, one of the seven MTS founders.
“MTS served its purpose,” says Forester, now a member of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). “God called it into being, but callings can change.”
“We are grieving. We also are grateful for how we have been able to serve a richly diverse community of God’s children here in the Mid-South and beyond. This mission has always been larger than any one institution, and it will continue to live on through the transformative leadership of generations of MTS alums serving around the globe.”
— Rev. Dr. Jody Hill, an MTS graduate and the seminary’s ninth and final president
Seven white, male professors moved their tiny seminary from Bethel College in McKenzie, Tennessee, to Memphis in 1964 with “hopes of becoming an interracial, interdenominational, and international” seminary.
photograph courtesy mts
The seminary began life as the private home of cotton broker Joseph Newberger.
Theirs was a bold vision from a small, mostly white, mostly small-town denomination founded on the nineteenth-century frontier, in part to ordain men without educational backgrounds.
Theirs was an extraordinary vision in a Delta city where white men were blocking Black worshippers from church sanctuaries, and in a deeply patriarchal time when most denominations were blocking women from church pulpits.
And theirs was a biblical vision of “unity in diversity,” held by men who had read Jesus’ prayer for the unity of all believers and the Apostle Paul’s lesson that all believers are “many parts of the same Body of Christ” and that “each has his own special gift from God.”
And it worked.
Among the 57 students who registered for the 1964-1965 school year, 32 were Cumberland Presbyterians, six were Black, and all were male.
Among the 171 students who registered for the 2025-2026 school year, 23 are Cumberland Presbyterians, 126 are Black, and 89 are female.
The seminary’s founding faculty taught courses in Old and New Testament, church doctrine, history and missions, preaching and pastoral counseling.
By the 2000s, the same courses were being taught by a multidenominational, multicultural, multinational faculty who also were teaching courses in feminist, womanist, African-American, and Hispanic theology, Judaism, Islam and other faiths, C.S. Lewis and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., health and food and the environment.
“That’s what saddens me most about the closure. No other seminary had such diversity, especially in the South but maybe anywhere. That diversity was the actual charism of the place, its spiritual gift to the students and faculty, the community, the broader society.”
— Dr. Peter Gathje, former vice president of academic affairs and dean, and professor of Christian ethics
The word “seminary” comes from the Latin word seminarium, which means “seed plot” or “plant nursery.” A seminary became a place where seeds of religious faith and knowledge are planted, nurtured and cultivated.
Over the past six decades, Memphis Theological Seminary became a place where a wide variety of spiritual seeds were sown in students from all walks of life and ways of understanding God.
Students who were Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, or unaffiliated. Students who were evangelical, mainline, Pentecostal, or undecided.
Students who were baptized as infants, teenagers or adults, with water they were sprinkled with or dunked in.
Students who practiced two ordinances or seven sacraments, who shared communion, the Eucharist, or the Lord’s supper.
Students who held different beliefs about sin and salvation, the divinity of Jesus, the authority of scripture, and the role of the church.
Students who held different views on whether the Bible prohibits abortion, homosexuality, the death penalty, and women in ministry.
By the early 1970s, a majority of MTS students were United Methodist, not Cumberland Presbyterian. Eventually, the student body represented more than 30 denominations.
The more diverse the student body and faculty became, the more the seminary grew.
Annual enrollment exploded from 57 students in 1964 to more than 350 in 2005, with students representing dozens of states and more than a dozen countries.
The full-time faculty expanded from the original seven to 18 with more than 30 adjuncts and visiting faculty from across the country and around the world.
Annual revenue ballooned from $100,000 to nearly $5 million and the endowment to nearly $15 million.
“I don’t think the Cumberland Presbyterian denomination knew what to do with all that diversity. I believe they were committed to the gospel vision of unity in diversity but were sort of stunned when it actually happened. The closing of the seminary is a great loss to theological education and to the community in general. MTS was a hidden treasure, even if Memphis didn’t know it.”
— Dr. Valerie Bridgeman, former associate professor of Hebrew Bible / Homiletics & Liturgics
The seminary outgrew the mansion.
In the 1970s, MTS leaders began holding classes and worship services across the street in roomy Lindenwood Christian Church. By the 1990s, MTS students were filling Lindenwood’s parking lot.
photograph courtesy mts
Original stained-glass windows bring light inside.
The seminary was spreading out. It bought six duplexes and 12 apartments just east of the mansion to provide student housing. The three-car garage behind the house was turned into a student center with more office space. A four-story addition on the back of the house made room for the seminary’s burgeoning library, which grew from 3,600 to 80,000 titles.
In 1986, MTS officials bought the big house next door and turned it into Cumberland Hall. In 2006, they bought the big house next door to that and turned it into Hilliard Hall.
The flourishing seminary attracted the attention of some of the biggest names in theology. Carl F.H. Henry, James Cone, Walter Brueggemann, and Renita Weems were among the celebrated scholars who came to talk and to listen.
In 1997, MTS invited a Presbyterian minister named Fred Rogers to deliver that year’s commencement address. Mr. Rogers — as he was known on his beloved children’s TV show — had kind words for the seminary.
“For many years, this school has been helping people to become advocates for the most essential good news in all of history,” he said. “The news that, in the mind and the heart of the eternal, we human beings have value. That we are partners with God in forgiveness, and the space between any two of us is holy ground.”
MTS faculty and students found and nourished that holy ground. In classroom lectures and discussions. In large worship services and small groups. During shared meals and shared moments in the student center, hallways, and the parking lot.
Faculty set the tone and modeled the mission.
Dr. Colvin Baird was one of the seven founding professors. Rev. Dr. Henry Logan Starks was MTS’s first Black graduate and a legendary professor of church history. In 1968, they both marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on behalf of striking sanitation workers and joined dozens of leaders who demanded justice after King was assassinated.
Dr. Valerie Bridgeman, a black woman, taught womanist and feminist theology and led liturgical dances. Dr. W.E. “Knick” Knickerbocker, a white man, taught church history and came to MTS in 1973 because of its “commitment to Orthodox Christianity.” In 2005, at Knickerbocker’s retirement ceremony, Bridgeman wrote and recited a “A Prayer and Anointing” for the professor and his wife, and washed their feet.
Dr. Paul Brown was a learned, longtime professor of homiletics and worship. Ed Shannon was a learned, longtime campus caretaker and security guard. Their lively, impromptu theological debates were as illuminating as they were entertaining. In 2003, the student center was named Brown-Shannon Hall in their honor.
“You’d have this amazing collection of students — a nondenominational African-American lesbian, a white Episcopal gay man, a white male evangelical, and a black Pentecostal, and so on. You wouldn’t have agreement, but you’d have these tender, open-hearted conversations across the differences with people who knew and loved each other. Where else would that happen in Memphis?”
— Rev. Dr. Lee Ramsey, retired professor of pastoral theology and homiletics
Faculty and students didn’t always find unity in diversity at the seminary.
Over the years, there were concerns and disagreements about the need for inclusive language, the role of women in ministry, the appropriateness of classes in Judaism and Islam, and whether and when education becomes indoctrination.
photograph courtesy mts
The ornamental plasterwork makes the building an architectural marvel, inside and out.
Some students, faculty, and trustees thought the seminary had become too liberal, too unorthodox, and too far removed from its nineteenth-century Cumberland Presbyterian roots. Others thought it wasn’t moving fast enough into the twenty-first century.
The generous seminary opened its heart, mind, and soul to all.
Dr. Mary Lin Hudson, the seminary’s first female professor, encouraged thousands of women to follow their calling. She taught preaching and worship. “If what we do isn’t worshiping God, then why are we here?” she told students. They worshipped more.
Dr. Mitzi Minor, a Cumberland Presbyterian minister who was raised Southern Baptist, taught the New Testament. “Regular churchgoers are the worst readers of the Bible,” she told students. They read harder.
Dr. Steve Parrish, who always wore sandals, blue jeans and a ponytail, and played blues guitar, taught the Old Testament. “Don’t just read the Psalms as words on a page. Listen to them as poems and hymns,” he told students. They listened harder.
Dr. Stan Wood, who led the doctoral program, and who served for years as general secretary and stated clerk of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in America, a historically black denomination, taught church history and worship. “Sermons are meant to be heard, not read,” he told them in his deep, baritone voice. They heard his conviction.
Dr. Barbara Holmes, who grew up in the Pentecostal church, was ordained in two mainline denominations, and later became president of United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. She taught Christian ethics and African American studies. “You are always seen, deeply known, and eternally loved by God,” she told them. They felt her joy.
“It could get messy sometimes with that beautiful mix of people, but it was a remarkable place to explore together what it means to have a call from God and to answer that call. We worked at having conversations, not arguments. Praying together, reading scripture together, we usually found out we had a lot more in common than we realized.”
— Rev. Dr. Mitzi Minor, professor of New Testament
In 2014, the seminary’s leaders launched a $25 million capital campaign. They wanted to build a new chapel, add more student housing, and fund several endowed faculty positions.
By then, enrollment had been declining for years. Larger forces were at work. U.S. birthrates were falling. So were the number of people attending churches and, consequently, the number of churches and pastor positions.
Mainline churches, in particular, were getting older, grayer — and either bluer or redder as debates over abortion, immigration and LGBTQ issues turned heated, partisan, and divisive.
Entire denominations split up. Younger generations left church or never joined. Nearly half of those born after 1996 do not identify with a religious tradition. Only a quarter of them attend a religious service once a week or more.
Over the past 50 years, the number of active members of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church fell by two-thirds, from about 90,000 to about 30,000. Fewer Cumberland Presbyterian students enrolled in MTS.
Meanwhile, other seminaries were pulling students away with online degree programs, free tuition, or special scholarships for students from their own denominations.
The Memphis seminary tried everything to accommodate changing lifestyles, interests, demographics, and technologies. Traditional on-campus class schedules were adjusted to online and hybrid models. Faculty received training in online pedagogy.
The seminary focused more attention on core populations, launching The Methodist House of Studies, The Cumberland Presbyterian House of Studies, The House of Black Church Studies, and Women in Ministry.
Faculty and staff won millions of dollars in grants to start other innovative new programs: Sustaining Pastoral Excellence, Pastoral Wholeness and Chaplaincy Studies, and Faith and Imagination.
“We chose to maintain a progressive theology because we valued diversity. The denomination wasn’t entirely comfortable with that, and, at times, resisted. But you have to be flexible when you’re trying to help students understand and appreciate other traditions.”
— Dr. Mary Lin Hudson, retired professor of homiletics and liturgics
The founders’ hopes of becoming an ecumenical and interracial seminary came true. As faculty, curricula, and academic leadership became more diverse, so did the student body.
Holmes was the first African-American woman to become vice president of academic affairs and dean at a U.S. seminary. She was followed by Wood and Dr. Carmichael Crutchfield, an MTS grad and general secretary for the CME Church.
photograph courtesy mts
A bust of C.S. Lewis sits on the president’s desk.
The seminary’s doctoral program has been led by Wood, Dr. Christopher Davis, and Dr. Christy W. Woodbury-Moore. Dr. Farris Blount, who taught theology at MTS, has been hired to lead the DMin program at the Perkins School of Theology in Dallas.
Wood, Holmes, and Bridgeman created the MTS Institute for Theology and the Arts. Notable graduates include Rev. Kirk Whalum, a Grammy Award-winning musician who calls himself “a minister who holds a saxophone.” Whalum’s master’s thesis became a series of recordings called “The Gospel According to Jazz.”
Dozens of other high-profile Memphis-area ministers have been drawn to the seminary. The alumni roll includes the Reverend Doctors Lee R. Brown, Earle Fisher, Cozette Garrett, LaSimba Gray, Andre Johnson, James Netters, Roz Nichols, Keith Norman, Gina Stewart, Kenneth Whalum Jr., and Dorothy Sanders Wells.
Davis, senior pastor of St. Paul Baptist Church in South Memphis since 2000 and an MTS graduate, returned to the seminary to lead its doctoral studies program. He added new intensive tracks in such topics as Womanist Preaching that attracted high-profile visiting professors and dozens of new students.
Under his guidance, annual enrollment in the DMin program grew from about two dozen to more than 100. By 2020, the seminary had more students seeking doctoral degrees than master’s degrees.
Davis left MTS in 2023 to become interim president of LeMoyne-Owen College. He was appointed permanent president in 2024. Gathje and Fisher joined him. Together they are launching a new bachelor’s degree program in religion.
“MTS was a force for social justice and liberation, but it failed the final test by not choosing Chris Davis as president. His DMin program and his connections in the Black community kept that seminary afloat for more than a decade, but he’s not white and he’s not Presbyterian, so he wasn’t chosen. And now the seminary is closing. It is a sad thing.”
— Rev. Dr. Earle Fisher, professor of religious communication and Africana studies and dean of chapel at LeMoyne-Owen College, MTS grad, and former adjunct faculty
The seminary got quiet again in 2020. The pandemic pushed faculty and students off campus and online. Like many institutions, MTS never quite recovered.
In 2022, President Hill told trustees that MTS would need to increase its $15 million endowment to $40 million to remain open in the years ahead. In 2023, Hill told trustees that MTS would need to generate about $1 million annually in new revenue or cost savings to continue its mission.
The board authorized Hill to explore possible mergers, acquisitions, or partnerships that would keep the seminary open and accredited. MTS officials had formal conversations with mainline Protestant seminaries in Atlanta, Dallas, St. Louis, and Tulsa. All hit a snag.
“MTS’s legal status as an entity of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church posed a significant barrier to progress,” Hill told trustees in late 2024.
In the summer of 2025, the denomination’s General Assembly declined to give up its ownership of MTS or control of its endowment.
Last November, the Association of Theological Schools, which accredits graduate theology schools in the U.S., put MTS on probation. “The school does not have sufficient and stable financial resources to achieve its mission with educational quality and financial sustainability,” ATS reported.
In December, MTS trustees recommended that the seminary be closed July 31st. In late January, the denomination’s General Assembly agreed.
MTS students who didn’t graduate in May will be allowed to continue their studies without cost at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
“This whole city has been helped by MTS. The seminary was like this light helping us all understand the true spirit and love of God, keeping at bay all the forces of divisiveness and destruction. You don’t miss the water till the well runs dry.”
— Rev. Dr. Andre Johnson, distinguished professor of Religion and Public Theology and an MTS graduate
A two-story, red brick wall in front of a Chick-fil-A on Union Avenue is all that remains of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church’s former national headquarters.
The neo-Gothic building, which opened when the denomination moved from Nashville to Memphis in 1951, was razed when the denomination moved to Cordova in 2009.
There are no plans to raze Joseph Newburger’s home. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is expected to be preserved in its original architectural design, and in the memories of thousands of people who found a home there.
“We didn’t just build a seminary. We built a community,” says Rev. Dr. Barry Anderson, an MTS graduate and Cumberland Presbyterian minister who became director of student services. “We had meals together, faculty and students. We prayed and worshipped together. We had frank and sometimes hard conversations, but with love and respect. We ministered to the community and to each other.”
The education of ministers was one of the reasons the Cumberland Presbyterian Church was formed in 1810.
A religious revival led by Presbyterians that blazed along the Kentucky-Tennessee frontier in the early 1800s inspired the formation of dozens of churches and created a shortage of ministers.
To meet the demand, a tiny presbytery in Middle Tennessee began ordaining and licensing men who lacked religious education. Many were suspended by the larger denomination. Some of them organized an independent Cumberland Presbytery.
The new group grew into a separate denomination and began training its own ministers at Cumberland College just east of Nashville, then at Bethel College in rural West Tennessee, and since 1964, at Memphis Theological Seminary.
The Joseph Newburger House became Founders Hall. The paneled oak library, pretty sunroom, and parlor became administrative offices; the second-floor bedrooms became classrooms; the dining room became a conference room for faculty and trustees; and the ballroom transformed into a chapel.
MTS’s first graduating class in 1965 included the late Rev. LaRoyce Brown, who became a Cumberland Presbyterian minister. So did his son, Rev. Dr. Jay Earheart-Brown, a 1986 graduate who was named MTS president in 2005. So did his grandson, Rev. Paul Earheart-Brown, who graduated from MTS in 2018.
“It’s deeply sad but not surprising that MTS is closing,” says Earhart-Brown, who retired as president in 2018 and became a truck driver. “It’s a free-standing seminary with declining enrollment rooted in a small and shrinking denomination. But it was a wonderful vision. And it’s amazing that it actually happened.”
For further reading: “The Disappearing Past," by senior editor Jon W. Sparks
