THE immediate closure of Spurgeon’s College, the Baptist theological college in south London founded in 1856 by the celebrated preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon, was announced on Friday.
The announcement came amid warnings about the viability of the theological-education sector, as many colleges struggle to attract enough students (News, 2 August 2024).
A statement from the Board of Trustees said that a partnership with a charitable foundation had “provided vital financial support and offered assurances to both the College and the Office for Students of continued funding”. This had been “unexpectedly terminated” without warning on 21 July.
“As a result, the College can no longer sustain its financial operations and has been left with no choice but to enter the insolvency process immediately.” The statement referred to wider challenges in the higher-education sector, “driven by declining student numbers and an increasingly complex and difficult financial landscape”.
A statement from the Office for Students said that up to 200 current students were affected, and that support would be provided to help them to transfer to a course with another educational provider.
The board of the Baptist Union of Great Britain said that it was “deeply saddened” by the closure of the college, which had trained many women and men for Baptist ministry and “shaped leaders and church communities through many generations, the significance of which is immeasurable”.
The college’s annual reports filed with the Charity Commission show large deficits, with expenditure of more than £3.3 million in 2024 against income of £1.1 million. Expenditure had risen by almost 75 per cent since 2020 while income had fallen by 15 per cent.
Trustees had set an optimal reserves level of £1,587,000, but unrestricted free reserves stood at £232,793 in 2024. This was before the sale of the Spurgeon heritage collection — thousands of the founder’s books, manuscripts, letters, and artefacts — to the Spurgeon Library at Midwestern Seminary, Kansas City, Missouri, in the United States, for £1.6 million.
The charitable foundation referred to in the trustees’ statement is understood to be the Graham Dacre Charitable Foundation, established by the Christian philanthropist Graham Dacre to “help young people thrive”. The annual report says that a new partnership with the foundation had resulted in the repayment of £5.4 million of its loans.
In 2022, Spurgeon’s became the first theological college in the UK to be granted full taught-degree awarding powers by the Office for Students, giving it the ability to validate other institutions (News, 21 July 2023).
The college was “actively assisting in securing the provision of theological education in the UK at university level”, the annual report said. The OFS also gave the college a triple gold award, the highest possible, under its Teaching Excellence Framework. Besides preparing candidates for ordination in the Baptist Union of Great Britain, it offered an expanding number of undergraduate and postgraduate courses, and aimed to introduce two new degree programmes each year.
In April 2023, Pastor Rick Warren, the founding pastor of Saddleback Church, an Evangelical megachurch in California, became the Chancellor of Spurgeon’s, recording videos supporting the college’s fund-raising campaign in an effort to reach Christian philanthropists — part of a campaign developed with a Texas-based fund-raising company.
The trustees acknowledged in the annual report that the college was “vulnerable to a decline in student numbers at a time when church attendance is decreasing and congregations find it more difficult to afford to pay a minister, and the economic situation makes it harder for students to afford even the subsidised fees charged”.
In the General Synod last month, a question from the Revd Dr Christopher Landau revealed that the number of C of E ordination candidates entering residential training fell from 218 to 65 in the decade to 2024. Seven of the ten colleges had fewer than ten new students at the beginning of the last academic year.
