A for-profit, Christian university once owned by Arizona Southern Baptists edged out the North American Mission Board (NAMB) in a contest for a 217-acre campus in Massachusetts offered free to a deserving Christian charity by owners of the Oklahoma-based Hobby Lobby craft store chain.
Phoenix-based Grand Canyon University plans to open an extension campus on the site of the former Northfield Mount Hermon School founded in 1879 by legendary evangelist D.L. Moody. The property was donated by the billionaire Green family, which purchased the property three years ago with plans to launch an evangelical college named after author and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis.
After fundraising for C.S. Lewis College came up short the family began accepting alternative proposals for the property, which is worth an estimated $20 million, including $5 million in upgrades by the Greens.
“We hope this campus will provide a home for students to find their purpose in Christ and realize their full potential in life,” Hobby Lobby President Steve Green said in a statement Sept. 21.
NAMB, the other finalist, expressed interest in using the campus as a year-round ministry, retreat and missionary training center.
The Arizona Southern Baptist Convention opened Grand Canyon College in 1948 in Prescott, Ariz., and challenged churches to raise money for its support. Three years later the school moved to Phoenix.
It was renamed Grand Canyon University (GCU) in 1989. GCU trustees severed official ties with the Arizona Southern Baptist Convention in 2000 and, facing $15 million in debt and on the brink of bankruptcy, sold the school four years later to California-based Significant Education LLC, a for-profit subsidiary led by executives formerly associated with the parent company of the University of Phoenix. It made GCU the first for-profit Christian college in the U.S.
In coming months the Green family will transfer the Massachusetts property to Scholarships for GCU Students, a nonprofit that will then lease it to GCU’s holding company, GCU Education, which trades on Nasdaq.
Plans call for initially establishing an extension site and then after three or four years forming an independent university owned by GCU Education.
The campus consists of 43 buildings and includes the gravesite of Moody and his wife.
Moody was born in Northfield, Mass., in 1837 and in the later decades of the 19th century traveled the globe as an evangelist. He started Illinois Street Church, which was renamed the Moody Church after his death, in Chicago. He began a Bible study course that eventually became Moody Bible Institute and later spun off Moody Publishers, Moody Radio and MOODY magazine, which published until 2003.
(ABP)
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