Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School
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Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School is a theological college of Baptist origins. The present day school, which sits on the top of a hill in the beautiful setting of Highland Park in Rochester, New York is a product of several mergers.
The Rochester Theological Seminary was formed in 1850 at the founding of the University of Rochester by a group from Colgate Theological Seminary in Hamilton, New York who wished to move to an urban setting. By 1928, the remainder of the Hamilton school removed to Rochester. In 1961, the school was joined by the Baptist Missionary Training School, a woman's school from Chicago.
Again in 1970 the school merged, this time with Crozer Theological Seminary, the Baptist school from Upland, Pennsylvania where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once studied.
The school is liberal and ecumenical in theology, with Baptists, United Methodists, Presbyterians and members of other denominations on its faculty and in its student body. Degrees can be obtained in cooperaration with Bexley Hall, an Episcopal Church seminary, which shared its facilities from 1968 to 1998, and St. Bernard's School of Theology and Ministry, a Roman Catholic theological school which shared its facilities from 1981 until 2003 and since has moved to a nearby site.
It is a small school with 7 full time faculty and 14 part time faculty and slightly over 100 full time students. The current director is Eugene C. Bay who was previously the head pastor at Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church
[edit] Notable alumni
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
- Dr. Howard Thurman
- Leonard Sweet, author, preacher, scholar
- Dr. Johnny Douglas Turner, author of Rebuilding the Walls: A Call to Teaching in the African-American Church and The Sacred Art.
