By Bob Allen
Baptist Seminary of Kentucky, one of 15 theology schools in partnership with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, postponed its usual spring commencement to Aug. 8 in a special celebration after earning accreditation early this summer.
CBF Executive Coordinator Suzii Paynter challenged six graduates receiving the master of divinity degree to “go, serve and share the gospel.”
“You graduate to be aware and to act,” Paynter said in comments quoted by a seminary news release. “What a joy to know our churches and communities will be led by leaders like you.”
The six graduates received a standing ovation at a special post-commencement celebration both to honor them and celebrate the school’s accreditation by the Association of Theological Schools, first announced in June.
“Stand there and soak it up,” Bob Browning, a seminary trustee and pastor of First Baptist Church in Frankfort, Ky., advised the new graduates. “You won’t get this every Sunday in church.”
Greg Earwood, president of Baptist Seminary of Kentucky since the year before the first classes opened in 2002, celebrated the accreditation announcement “as verification that we are fulfilling our purpose of preparing students for life and ministry in faithful witness to Christ in the church and the world.”
“For 13 years we have been successful at Baptist Seminary of Kentucky in doing what we imagined,” said Earwood, a former pastor with both the M.Div. and Ph.D. degrees from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. “We imagined a place where students and faculty would be learning together to cultivate habits and practices of faithful Christian living, to ask questions, to nurture spiritual gifts, to develop a theological imagination and to pursue God’s calling on their lives.”
A partner of both the national CBF and the statewide Kentucky Baptist Fellowship from the start, Baptist Seminary of Kentucky started on paper in 1996 in response to changes underway in Southern Baptist Convention seminaries including Southern Seminary in Louisville, Ky. After a series of meetings around the Commonwealth, trustees elected Earwood, of Faith Baptist Church in Georgetown, Ky., as the seminary’s first president on July 16, 2001.
Classes began Aug. 14, 2002, at Calvary Baptist Church in Lexington, with 14 students. Dalen Jackson, the first full-time faculty member as associate professor of biblical studies later promoted to academic dean, taught the first class.
After the first commencement in 2005, Baptist Seminary of Kentucky relocated to the campus of Lexington Theological Seminary, a theological school of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).
In the summer of 2010, Baptist Seminary of Kentucky relocated to the campus of Georgetown College, citing the liberal-arts school’s Baptist identity, reputation and historical roots dating to 1787.
The move was one of several leadership initiatives by Georgetown’s former president Bill Crouch that prompted the Kentucky Baptist Convention to terminate its partnership with Georgetown in 2013.
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