NOBTS offers doctoral, master, bachelor, and associate degrees. The seminary has 13 graduate centers in 5 states, 11 undergraduate centers in 5 states, and 13 on-campus research centers.[2] The main campus is situated on over 70 acres with more than 70 buildings.[3]
History
The
Southern Baptist Convention founded the institution as the Baptist Bible Institute during the 1917 convention meeting in New Orleans.[4] New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, or NOBTS for short, was the first institution created as a direct act of the Southern Baptist Convention. The institutes's purpose was centered on missionary work, and initially established as gateway to Central America. The Seminary started as the Baptist Bible Institute in the Garden District and later relocated to the current location in the heart of Gentilly.
On May 17, 1946, the SBC revised the institutes' charter to enable it to become a seminary, and the name was changed to New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.[5] Missions and evangelism have remained the core focus of the seminary.
In 1953, it relocated from Washington Avenue in the
Garden District to a more spacious campus in the
Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans.[6] The school purchased a 75-acre (300,000 m2) pecan orchard and transformed it into what is now a bustling campus over 100 buildings, including academic buildings, faculty and staff housing, and student housing. The new campus was designed by noted Louisiana architect
A. Hays Town.
In 1995, a campus was established at the
Louisiana State Penitentiary following an invitation from the prison warden, Burl Cain.[7] The school has contributed to a significant reduction in the rate of violence in the prison.[8]
By 2022, it had opened 6 campuses in prisons in different states.[9]
For the year 2021-2022, it had 2,004 students.[10]
In 2010 a team from NOBTS launched an effort to clear a
Canaanite Water Shaft at Tel
Gezer in Israel in cooperation with the Israeli Nature and Parks Authority and the Israeli Antiquities Authority.[16] Gezer was first explored by
R.A. Stewart Macalister over a hundred years earlier, but he did not complete a study of the water system because a freak storm refilled the system with debris and Macalister abandoned the effort.[17]
The NOBTS excavation has been chronicled in multiple sources including the
Biblical Archaeology Review[18] and the
Baptist Press.[19] In 2011 Dennis Cole, Dan Warner and Jim Parker from NOBTS led another team in an attempt to finish the effort.[17]
^Michael Hallett, Joshua Hays, Byron R. Johnson, Sung Joon Jang, Grant Duwe, The Angola Prison Seminary: Effects of Faith-Based Ministry on Identity Transformation, Desistance, and Rehabilitation, Routledge, Abingdon-on-Thames, 2016, p. 234
^Prison Seminaries Foundation,
Find a Prison Ministry, prisonseminaries.org, USA, retrieved February 20, 2023