The Northern Future of Evangelicalism

Looking across the border

This past Monday night in my education seminar, we were talking about economic, demographic, and other challenges facing evangelical colleges. As a case study, our guest speaker for the night mentioned Trinity International University. With enrollment dropping and the budget constricting, TIU decided in 2023 to move its undergraduate program online and limit in-person education at its suburban Chicago campus to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

Now TEDS itself is not just moving, but leaving the country. Religion journalist Bob Smietana reported on Tuesday that it has been acquired by Trinity Western University, a Christian institution in the Canadian province of British Columbia. After one final year in Illinois, TEDS classes will move to the TWU campus near Vancouver in 2026.

Even knowing that TEDS enrollment had reportedly dropped to the equivalent of just over 400 full-time students by last fall, the sale is still shocking. While TEDS, like Trinity Western, is an Evangelical Free institution¹, it always exerted more influence than other evangelical seminaries run by small denominations. Under long-time dean Kenneth Kantzer, said TIU’s own announcement, TEDS “became a hub of evangelical thought, drawing faculty and students from across evangelical theological traditions.” As Smietana put it, TEDS alumni “have played an outsized role in shaping American evangelicalism.”

Aerial view of the Trinity Western campus in Langley, BC - CC BY-SA 4.0 (Charlesdclee)

While the case of TEDS has already sparked new discussions about the future of theological education, what actually caught my attention about the school’s move from Chicagoland to Canada was this paragraph in Smietana’s article:

Historian Joey Cochran, a TEDS alum, said news of the move to Canada is another sign that evangelism in the Midwest is on the decline. Institutions like TEDS, he said, once helped shaped the movement, but now most of the power has shifted to the South, he said, pointing out that Baptist seminaries in the South dominate theological education, with nearly 20,000 students enrolled in the six seminaries run by the Southern Baptist Convention or at Liberty University. That’s more than a quarter of the 74,000 seminary students in the U.S., according to data from the Association of Theological Schools, which includes Protestant, Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Jewish graduate schools of theology.

I don’t know if evangelism is in decline in my part of the United States, but what’s happened to TEDS does fit with a noticeable decline in evangelicalism in the Midwest. “We are seeing, in real time, the Southern-ification of evangelicalism,” Cochran told Smietana.

Numbers seem to bear this out. In its 2024 Religious Landscape Study, Pew Research Center found that just 21% of American evangelicals live in the Midwest, as compared to 52% in the South. (Those figures are barely changed from the 2014 and 2007 studies.) While evangelicals accounted for the plurality of the populations in Arkansas (50%), Mississippi (46%), Tennessee (45%), and Alabama (43%), other groups surpassed them in Midwestern states like Illinois (29% unaffiliated, 23% Catholic, 16% evangelical) and Minnesota (29% unaffiliated, 22% mainline, 20% evangelical), the home of one of TEDS’ precursors. In the Northeast, evangelicals are even sparser on the ground: e.g., in Massachusetts, Pew found more than four times as many unaffiliated (37%) as evangelicals (8%).

American evangelicalism, in other words, is shrinking in the very places where it first took root and grew into an influential movement in the mid-20th century.