How Did Grace College And Seminary Come To Be?

Shortly after the Beyer brothers opened their Spring Fountain Park amusement and conference center to the public, groups from the Brethren church tradition began meeting annually in Winona Lake for conventions.
The Brethren in America originated from a small group of Christian believers led by a German man named Alexander Mack. As Mack understood the New Testament, baptism — by immersion — was for believers to make their faith public. But the teaching of the state church mandated infant baptism — even to the extent of making it a capital offense not to baptize infants.
Finding freedom to worship in the little village of Schwarzenau, about an hour east of the current city of Cologne, the group eventually emigrated to the U.S. in the early 1700s, finding their freedom to worship in Penn’s Woods, near the city of Philadelphia.
As the Brethren movement grew and developed in America, it spread westward along U.S. 30. One major development came in a meeting at the corner of Ind. 15 and Ind. 6 near Milford. Eventually a headquarters and seminary for training Brethren pastors were established in the mid-Ohio town of Ashland.
In the mid-1930s some dissension arose and the dean of the seminary — Alva J. McClain — and the seminary’s Greek professor —Herman A. Hoyt — were separated from the Ashland school.
During the 1936 annual meeting of the Brethren in Winona Lake, a group wishing to found a new seminary met in the Winona Lake Presbyterian Church, which is today’s Good Shepherd Church on College Avenue. At that meeting they decided to found a new school, naming it Grace Theological Seminary. Alva McClain was named president, and Herman Hoyt was named academic dean.
The seminary met for the first two years in Akron, Ohio, but returned to a permanent home in Winona Lake in 1939. Eventually the need was felt for an undergraduate school to prepare students for seminary-level education, so an undergraduate division was founded in 1948. Grace College became a four-year liberal arts college in 1954.
Initially Grace Theological Seminary met in Mount Memorial Hall. Students found their own housing, including some who chose to live at Westminster Hotel on Ninth Street.
Realizing the need to have their own facility, the seminary made preliminary plans to build on the local baseball field, located on Kings Highway across from the elementary school.
The school’s trustees, however, realized that locale would land-lock the school if it ever chose to expand and so they negotiated the purchase of 30 housing lots to the east from Brethren clergyman Leo Polman.
The first building, begun in 1951 and completed in 1952, was McClain Hall, named for Dr. Alva J. McClain, Grace’s first president. Today, it is the classic building in the center of the Grace campus with the white steeple, and it houses administrative offices including the president’s office.
McClain served the school as its first president until 1962, and was succeeded by Herman A. Hoyt as the school’s second president. Succeeding presidents were Homer A. Kent, Jr., John J. Davis, Ronald Manahan, William Katip and Grace’s current president, Drew Flamm.
Both schools, Grace Theological Seminary and Grace College, co-exist on the Winona Lake campus. They share facilities and operate under a unified board of directors. Grace continues to be the only higher education facility affiliated with the Charis Fellowship, formerly known as the Fellowship of Grace Brethren Churches.
Originally viewed as an insular school, Grace has over the years become much more integrated into the Warsaw/Winona Lake community. The school has now graduated some 80,000 alumni, many of whom have settled in the community and have become the schoolteachers, business owners, clergy, law enforcement personnel, etc.
The most visible symbol of the cooperation between the community and the school was the building of the Manahan Orthopaedic Capital Center in 2007. Ideal for seminars, large banquets, meetings and athletic events, The MOCC is a state-of-the-art facility seating 2,800, completed with funding input from three local orthopedic companies: Biomet, DePuy Synthes, and Zimmer. It is named for Grace’s fifth president and his late wife, Barbara.
Today the Grace campus includes 21 buildings, and the total student body is just under 2,500 students. Further information is available at www.grace.edu.