I love back-to-school season. I love the sense of new possibilities, the reconnections after summer break, and the joy of learning. But this year, as students unpack their boxes in their new dorm rooms, meet their roommates, and navigate campus to find their new classes at Biola University, other campuses will sit empty.
In New York, The King’s College and Nyack College (most recently called Alliance University) have folded, along with Nebraska Christian College, Lincoln Christian University, Judson College, Trinity International University, and Iowa Wesleyan University in the Midwest; Concordia University in Portland, Oregon; and frankly too many more to list. All these were once bustling with activity. Now they are closed.
Alumni grieve the end of something that held great memories. Students whose education was cut short figure out new pathways. And faculty and staff look for work. For half a dozen years now, an undercurrent of grief and anxiety have plagued academic conferences as colleagues meet and tentatively ask, “Do you still have a job? How’s enrollment?”
A couple weeks ago, my husband and I drove through the campus that used to be the home of Multnomah Bible College in Portland (it became Multnomah University in 2008). It’s now for sale. As one of its beloved presidents said repeatedly, “If it’s Bible you want, then you want Multnomah.” And for almost a hundred years, students came to Multnomah because Bible is exactly what they wanted.
When we arrived as students in 1994 and ’95, my plan was to become a Bible translator. Multnomah offered Greek and Hebrew, plus a major in missions, so it seemed like an ideal place for me. My husband had no intention of graduating. He just thought a year of Bible would do him good. But one semester led to another, and he eventually gained a bachelor’s degree and lost his bachelor status when he married me.
We graduated in 1999 and 2000, at the height of Multnomah’s glory years. Our student body was small by some standards, but between 500 and 600 students called our campus home, and we became a tight-knit community. Classes were full, the dorms were bursting with life, and we moved from one theological conversation to the next all day long. We spent quality time with professors not only in the classroom but also across the lunch table in the cafeteria, in their offices, and in their homes. Two professors traveled all the way to Colorado for our wedding.
Our classmates graduated and went on to become pastors and missionaries, parents and teachers. Some of them became police officers or counselors. Others started businesses. All of us had been transformed. Together we had attended chapel three times a week, invested in 52 credit hours of Bible and theology, planned worship nights, participated in student ministries, and prayed together in the dorms. We’d sip lattes or eat bagels with cream cheese together and talk about how we could change the world.
I think I expected the campus to look more rundown than it is. As we turned off Interstate 205 onto Glisan Street, a woman with a clean cardboard sign asked for help buying cat food. Across the bridge, two unhoused neighbors helped each other put up a tent on the side of the road. Two blocks further, Central Bible Church, where Multnomah used to hold chapels, is boarded up, fenced off, and decked with graffiti. Houses in the neighborhood look tired, with peeling paint, sagging porches, and knee-high weeds. But the campus itself is well-maintained.
What’s missing is the students.
In 2024, the school became “the Multnomah campus” of Jessup University in Sacramento, but that iteration, too, was unsuccessful, and the undergraduates took their last semester of classes in spring 2025. After professors vacated their offices, a fellow alum found the dumpsters full of old yearbooks and award plaques and posted the photos online. The school simply could not make ends meet. Christian families stopped insisting that their kids get a Christian education. Christian young people stopped imagining themselves serving in ministry. Christian donors found other causes to support.
Some would say that Multnomah lost its way theologically or that it lost its vision for theological education, trying to become something it was not. But many of the professors who turned in their keys this year are the same professors who trained me in the late ’90s. They are still faithfully following Jesus.
Certainly, some ideas changed over time. When I was a student in 1996, the academic dean told me that a woman would never teach Bible at Multnomah. But before I finished seminary in 2011, a woman was doing just that. To me that change was a harbinger of hope—a sign that maybe I too could fulfill my dream of giving back to the campus that had given me so much.
After all, it was at Multnomah that I discovered a love for teaching to pair with my lifelong love of the Bible. It was Multnomah professors who nurtured me as a scholar, training me to read carefully and communicate well. It was Multnomah professors who offered me opportunities to work as a teaching assistant and to teach under their supervision. During their office hours I wrestled with a calling to teach and with how to square that with Scripture. In those glorious years I discovered what I was born to do, and I’ve spent the past three decades trying to steward that calling faithfully.
I returned to Multnomah briefly in 2015 as an adjunct professor while I finished my PhD. By then the campus had an entirely different vibe, but I relished the opportunity to design courses (Bible courses!) that could reach a new generation of students. On average, these students knew less about the Bible when they started than we had. More of them commuted. More of them came to play sports. John Mitchell’s tagline, “If it’s Bible you want…,” resonated with some of them, but not all.
I don’t think we can blame the demise of Multnomah on a single thing—too many new majors, loss of a vision, too much emphasis on sports, theological drift. Institutions of higher education all across the nation are struggling. The “demographic cliff” forecast by sociologists for many years now is finally here, and it’s affecting state schools as well as private institutions. Fewer children means fewer potential college students, and the competition for those who remain is fierce.
Jessup University in Sacramento tried to rescue Multnomah through a strategic partnership. But that acquisition saddled Jessup with more debt, as well as property in an aging neighborhood in Portland. After closing the undergraduate programs in Oregon, the university moved Multnomah Seminary fully online. Will this iteration work? It’s hard to say. Christian higher education feels like a game of “Who will be the last school standing?”
I’m not an expert on the history of the Bible college movement, but I’ve been a direct participant and beneficiary of it. Before I came to Biola University in 2021, I taught at Prairie College in Three Hills, Alberta, Canada, and I briefly taught at Multnomah.
Biola was founded as the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (BIOLA) back in 1908 in the thick of the Bible college movement, preceded by Nyack in New York (1882), Moody in Chicago (1886), and Tyndale University in Toronto (1894). They all preceded Prairie Bible Institute (1922), Briercrest Bible Institute (1935), and Multnomah (1936). Each of these schools has had to reinvent itself over the years to survive. The needs and opportunities of each generation fluctuate.
In its glory years, Prairie College had over a thousand students. The massive Prairie Tabernacle offered a beacon of light to the prairies, hosting revival meetings, concerts, and conventions. The tabernacle was torn down many years ago, and other aging buildings on campus have been dismantled since then, but this month the school cut the ribbon on a beautiful new dorm. Prairie is over a hundred years old but going strong in its mission to train students to meet the greatest needs of the world.
Much further south, Biola has such a large incoming freshman class in 2025 that many of its dorm rooms had to be converted into triples. Our seminary has its largest enrollment ever. Thanks to a generous gift from Lynsi Snyder-Ellingson, the CEO of In-N-Out Burger, we’re in the midst of a massive building project—a 45,000-square-foot building to house the Snyder School of Cinema and Media Arts. Almost every student who comes to Biola to study film receives a Bible minor as well, taking 30 credits of Bible and theology alongside students from other disciplines.
Today I met with a student who was wrestling with whether he had made the right decision to be a Bible major. Ultimately he doesn’t plan to be a pastor. So why Bible? I shared with him the story of my husband, who double-majored in Bible and worship ministry but has spent most of his career in finance, mission administration, and now information technology.
On paper, it may not look as if majoring in Bible made any sense, but none of that learning has gone to waste. It’s made him a better deacon, a better neighbor, a better husband, and a better dad. His bachelor’s degree has provided the ticket to a variety of jobs, and the formation he experienced has made him the kind of employee folks are eager to hire. As Wendell Berry wrote, “The thing being made in a university is humanity.”
Another of our classmates from Multnomah spent a few years in pastoral ministry and then started a heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning business. The Lord has blessed his business, which now employs a dozen people and brings in over a million dollars a year. He and his wife have generously supported Christian ministry through the years. Their goal has been to give as much of the profits away as possible for God’s kingdom purposes. His integrity, leadership, and good work are the fruit of what Multnomah planted in him.
Each generation has to wrestle anew with what God has revealed to us in the Bible about who he is, who we are, and why we’re here. Ethical questions are not going away. A life of discipleship requires competence in reading Scripture, a sense of the scope of church history, and a clear vision for human vocation. Bible colleges are still the best place I know to get that.
I’ve grieved this year over the loss of my alma mater. I’m disappointed that some of the school’s legacy ended up in the dumpster. But as I drove through campus, I felt strangely encouraged. The ministry of Multnomah continues unabated through all of us who were formed there. My colleague, Ken Berding, whose office is down the hall from mine at Biola, trained at Multnomah too. Ironically, after serving as a missionary, he began his teaching career at Nyack College in New York (now also closed). Together we’re training the next generation of Bible majors here at Biola.
I know graduates who are serving in refugee ministry; who have pioneered Bible translation work; who are pastoring, teaching backyard Bible clubs, and leading worship. Some are teachers or counselors. Multnomah’s legacy lives on in many evangelical churches in the Pacific Northwest, where its graduates are pastors and Sunday school teachers, youth leaders, and office managers. Some are professors and authors. Some are principals. One leads an apologetics ministry. Two of our classmates started the BibleProject, a ministry that is catalyzing Bible engagement for a whole generation.
Multnomah will live on as long as its graduates are carrying out its mission wherever we find ourselves. As I head back to the classroom this fall, I’m convinced that things are not what they seem. Multnomah’s legacy is alive and well.
Carmen Joy Imes is associate professor of Old Testament at Biola University and author of Bearing God’s Name, Being God’s Image, and a forthcoming book, Becoming God’s Family: Why the Church Still Matters.
