Trinity Evangelical Divinity School Will Move to Canada in Acquisition Deal

The Banner has a subscription to republish articles from Religion News Service. This story by Bob Smietana, was published April 8, 2025 on religionnews.com. It has been edited for length and Banner style.

Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, a seminary of the Evangelical Free Church with a campus in Bannockburn, Ill., north of Chicago, has agreed to be acquired by Trinity Western University in Langley, B.C., with its campus moving there in 2026.

Trinity will continue to hold classes in Bannockburn during the 2025-2026 academic year, the school’s leadership said in an April 8 announcement.

The move comes after years of financial struggle and declining attendance at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, known as TEDS.

The school said current students will be able to complete their program through in-person and online options. Students who are U.S. citizens will still be eligible for federal financial aid, though the school said details about scholarships for students have yet to be determined. Current faculty will get a contract for the coming year but it’s unclear how many will move to Canada in the future.

Along with moving, TEDS will part ways with Trinity International University, its parent nonprofit, which will continue to run online classes and operate a law school in Santa Ana, Calif. Trinity International President Kevin Kompelien said that given the challenges in higher education, the divinity school needed to ally itself with a larger institution.

“I believe a school like TEDS will thrive best and accomplish our mission most effectively as part of a larger theologically and missionally aligned evangelical Christian university,” Kompelien said in a statement.

Founded by Scandinavian immigrants, Trinity was born from a merger in the 1940s of the Chicago-based Swedish Bible Institute and the Minnesota-based Norwegian-Danish Bible Institute. Though affiliated with the Evangelical Free Church, a Minneapolis-based denomination with 1,600 churches, the school has long sought to influence the wider evangelical world. Longtime former dean Kenneth Kantzer, who led the school from 1960 to 1978, helped it grow to national prominence.

Among the school’s alumni are historian Randall Balmer, Sojourners founder Jim Wallis, New Testament scholars Scot McKnight and Craig Blomberg, disgraced evangelist Ravi Zacharias, Christian television host John Ankerberg, and Collin Hansen, editor-in-chief of The Gospel Coalition. Longtime professor Don Carson also was one of the founders of The Gospel Coalition and helped to launch the movement dubbed Young, Restless and Reformed that led to a Calvinist revival among evangelicals. Kantzer went on to be editor of Christianity Today. The school is also home to a number of centers, including the Carl F.H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding.

Over the last decade there has been change. In 2015, the divinity school had 1,182 students—the equivalent of 753 full-timers—making it one of the United States’ larger seminaries. By the fall of 2024, that had dropped to 813 students and 403 full-time equivalents.

In 2023, the university shut down some of its on-campus programs, leaving it with too much property and not enough students. The university ran a $17.3 million deficit in 2023, according to its latest financial disclosure to the IRS, after shutting down its in-person undergraduate program. Trinity’s 2024 audit shows a $7.6 million deficit, with a similar deficit expected this year. A $19 million long-term loan is also coming due in 2026.

The entire Trinity campus is currently under contract, and the school hopes to close on that sale in October. After the sale is complete, Trinity will lease back part of the campus for the rest of the academic year and use the proceeds to pay off the $19 million loan. About 100 students currently live on campus and their leases will become month to month for the upcoming academic year.

A university spokesman said many details of TWU’s acquisition of TEDS remain to be sorted out, such as what happens to the Henry Center and other centers at the school and how many professors will move to Canada. The two schools are doing due diligence in hopes of finalizing the acquisition by the end of 2025.

Trinity Western will not take on any of TED’s financial obligations as part of the merger. The Canadian school’s president said the merger will lead to a “stronger combined future.”

“We are privileged to continue a longstanding legacy of evangelical scholarship and expand the impact of a global Christian education,” TWU President Todd F. Martin said in a statement. “We are driven by the same heartbeat for the gospel, and together, we can do even more to serve the Church and societies worldwide.”

c. 2025 Religion News Service