Samford graduate new president of Japanese school

FUKUOKA, Japan — A Japanese university founded by Southern Baptist missionaries has named one as its new president.

Trustees of Seinan Gakuin University in Fukuoka, Japan, elected Gary Barkley as the school’s ninth president. Barkley will be the third American-born president at Seinan Gakuin, which was begun by Southern Baptist missionary Charles Kelsey Dozier as a private junior high school in 1916. The university was founded in 1949.

A graduate of Samford University in Birmingham, Barkley received a doctorate degree from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., in 1984 and immediately moved to Japan to begin working as a missionary for the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board, then known as the Foreign Mission Board. Barkley joined the school’s faculty in 1987 and was its dean of religious affairs prior to being named president. He assumed his new position Dec. 15, 2006.

Seinan Gakuin, which is located in a metropolis of 1.3 million people, has 7,600 students. Less than 5 percent of them are Christian. Those figures mirror Japanese society as a whole, where less than 1 percent of the population professes Christianity.