RICHMOND, Va. (ABP) — Two Virginia Baptist benefactors have offered a large matching-gift challenge to Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond.
Seminary officials announced Jan. 19 that Louise and Harwood Cochrane had issued a $3 million challenge to their fellow BTSR supporters. As part of the challenge, the Cochranes will match all gifts, up to $3 million, given between now and July 31, 2007, to the seminary's “Building Our Future…Together” campaign.
The campaign, designed to expand the seminary's facilities and endowment for the future, has an overall goal of raising $19 million. According to seminary spokesman Nathan Taylor, the Cochranes' matching gifts will be earmarked for renovating a dormitory building with an eye to creating more of a residential campus community.
“Under the matching plan, the Cochranes will contribute their gift to the renovation of the former student nurses' dormitory of Richmond Memorial Hospital, adjacent to the seminary's campus,” Taylor said. “Upon completion, the project will significantly increase the availability of affordable housing for single students and help transform BTSR from a commuter school into a residential campus.”
Other gifts given in response to the challenge will be applied to the fundraising campaign's other goals. The seminary's three other buildings are currently undergoing major renovations.
“Thanks to the Cochranes' support, our dreams for progress and growth can be realized as never before,” said BTSR President Tom Graves, according to a seminary news release. “This is good news for our school and for all free and faithful Baptists.”
Harwood Cochrane built his fortune in the shipping and trucking industries, selling the second company he founded in 2003. For decades, the Cochranes have been significant donors to Baptist, educational and cultural institutions in Virginia, including Richmond's Tabernacle Church, where they have been members for more than 50 years. Their gifts have also benefited the University of Richmond, the Virginia Opera, the Virginia Historical Society and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
The Cochranes donated the more than 440 acres of land near Richmond on which the organization then known as the Southern Baptist Convention's Foreign Mission Board established its Missionary Learning Center.
BTSR, founded in 1989, was the first of several divinity schools established as an alternative to the six official SBC seminaries, which had become a political football in the ongoing war between the denomination's theological moderates and ultra-conservatives. In the ensuing years, conservatives took over the leadership of the SBC institutions, and several Baptist colleges and state conventions founded their own moderate schools.
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