Toronto Baptist Seminary and Bible College - History

History

The school was founded in 1927 and is currently located adjacent to Jarvis Street Baptist Church with which the school has had a longstanding relationship. The school was proposed in 1925 by Dr. Thomas Todhunter Shields, editor of The Gospel Witness and pastor of the Jarvis Street Baptist Church who was dismayed by the modernism that had taken hold in contemporary theological institutions. McMaster University's McMaster Divinity College, which provided training for Ontario and Quebec's Baptist ministers, drew Shields' evangelical fundamentalist ire when it appointed a liberal professor Laurance Henry Marshall (from England) to the faculty of theology. Shields, who was on the university's board of governors, railed against the appointment with such ferocity he was expelled from both the university and the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec. Therefore Shields formed his own Baptist convention, the Baptist Bible Union, and founded Toronto Baptist Seminary.

On December 23, 1926, The Gospel Witness announced that "Toronto Baptist Seminary, the new Baptist College rendered necessary by the inroads of Modernism, will open its classes on January 4, 1927, in the Seminary Building, 337 Jarvis Street, Toronto."

In 1948, the seminary suffered a split when over 50 students opposed to Shields' control left to form the Canadian Baptist Seminary under the leadership of W. Gordon Brown. Later the name was changed to Central Baptist Seminary which in 1993 merged with London Baptist Seminary to form Heritage Theological Seminary (see Heritage Baptist College and Heritage Theological Seminary). The Bible Baptist Union supported the students and Shields and the Jarvis Street Baptist Church left the union and formed the Association of Regular Baptist Churches. As of 2011, Jarvis Street Baptist Church has joined the Sovereign Grace Fellowship of Canada.