The six Southern Baptist denominational seminaries trained 18.8 percent of all U.S. theology students during the past academic year, according to the latest annual report from the Association of Theological Schools.

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., is the largest of the six official Southern Baptist seminaries, with 3,281 students. The smallest of the six Southern Baptist seminaries, New Orleans Seminary, had 1,476 students.

The six Southern Baptist seminaries combined had 13,471 students during the past academic year out of more than 70,000 seminary students nationwide.

Only 16 seminaries in the nation reported enrollment of more than 1,000 during the 2023-2024 school year. Another 11 seminaries reported enrollment between 500 and 1,000, based on new data from the Association of Theological Schools, which has 237 U.S. affiliated schools.

Liberty Theological Seminary at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., was the largest American seminary this past school year, with an enrollment of 5,507.

Liberty Seminary was founded in 1973 by Thomas Road Baptist Church Pastor Jerry Falwell, which at the time was independent Baptist but now is a member of the Southern Baptist Convention. Liberty Seminary is not an official SBC agency.

Non-denominational seminaries totaled 8,278 students.

By major denominations, Roman Catholics had 5,436 students; United Methodists had 2,527; Seventh-day Adventists had 1,694; the Presbyterian Church in America had 1,483; the Presbyterian Church (USA) had 1,208; the Assemblies of God had 1,180; the Episcopal Church had 1,002; and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America had 988.

There were 132 Protestant, 55 non-denominational or inter-denominational; 42 Roman Catholic, 5 Orthodox seminaries, 1 Jewish, 1 Eastern Rite Catholic and 1 other seminary that reported statistics.

Alabama had four theological schools listed as members of the Association of Theological Schools.

Beeson Divinity School at Samford University is an interfaith theological program training students from 15 denominations at a Baptist university. Its students include Southern Baptists, and the school recently aligned with the Global Methodist Church to train future pastors for that denomination, which broke off from the United Methodist Church.

Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham had 125 theology students during the past school year, according to the report.

Heritage Christian University in Florence, affiliated with the Church of Christ, had 88 students.

The Kearley Graduate School at Faulkner University in Montgomery, also Church of Christ, listed 34 students.

Oakwood University School of Theology in Huntsville, which is Seventh-day Adventist, had 16 students.

The dominance in theological training continues despite the Southern Baptist Convention reporting that membership fell for the 17th consecutive year, falling below 13 million for the first time since the 1970s.

At its height in 2006, the SBC had 16.3 million members. It is now down to 12,982,090, but remains the largest Protestant denomination in America.

It’s also the largest denomination in Alabama, where it once claimed more than one million members. That’s now down to 753,653 members in 3,164 Southern Baptist-affiliated churches in Alabama.

Since Alabama was founded in 1819, Baptists and Methodists have been the two largest denominations, exerting influence across culture.

Both started their first Alabama churches in 1808, then became fixtures in every town of any size in the state.