First attempts at establishing theological colleges

As was the case in England,Footnote ⁵ candidates for the ministry in the Church of the Province of Southern Africa were not all trained in theological institutions, at least until the first decades of the twentieth century. Robert Gray himself, while a graduate, did not attend a theological college. The first batch of Anglican missionaries studied the Bible and learned Greek on board the ship that brought them to South Africa in 1848.Footnote ⁶ In later years it gradually became the practice to board prospective ordination candidates with senior and scholarly priests.Footnote ⁷ This is the way in which the first black clergy were trained. Paul Masiza, ordained deacon for the diocese of St John's in 1871, and his brother Peter, ordained priest in 1877, did not receive any formal theological education.Footnote ⁸ Mpengula Mbanda and William Ngcwensa also ‘read’ with Henry Callaway, the future bishop of St John's, at the Springvale mission in Natal, prior to their ordination to the diaconate in 1871. One was Callaway's translator and the other a young man entrusted to the care of the missionary after a stint in jail for a spate of murders committed under the influence of dagga.Footnote ⁹ Ministerial training would take place in the local congregations where teachers, catechists and evangelists would receive supervision before being accepted for ordination, after a period of probation which could take several years.

In 1883, according to a report prepared for the provincial synod held in that year, 104 out of total of 218 clergy, that is, nearly one half, had been ‘ordained without apparently any specified and certified literary or theological qualification’. Of the remainder, sixty-one were graduates, thirty-four were theological students, mainly at St Augustine's College, Canterbury, and nineteen had been under theological tutors for at least a year. These statistics essentially concerned English-born clergy. Only twenty-nine clergy were born in South Africa, of whom fifteen were said to be black.Footnote ¹⁰ By the time that this report was compiled, nearly half of the white priests and deacons and probably just as many black clergy were exercising the ministry without any formal theological training.

Yet, from an early date, the Anglican bishops understood the need to have theological schools. In 1872, the year of his death, Robert Gray, the metropolitan bishop, told his sister that what the Church of the Province needed most was a theological college.Footnote ¹¹ By then several attempts had been made at opening a theological school, but none had succeeded. Soon after his arrival in Cape Town in 1848, Bishop Gray set up a theological school in a wing of his residence, ‘for the handful of ordinands which the bishop had collected together’.Footnote ¹² His companion Hopkins Badnall became the theological tutor. It seems that this practice had started on board ship on the way to South Africa.Footnote ¹³ How long it lasted is not known.

In 1853, within a few weeks of his arrival in Grahamstown, John Armstrong, the new bishop, issued an appeal for funds to found a college for boys. One of his goals was ‘to furnish the means of training men for Holy Orders’.Footnote ¹⁴ The school opened in 1855 under the name of St Andrew's College and in 1860 a ‘Kafir Institute’ – also called Mullins Institution after Robert Mullins, the priest who ran it from 1864 to 1907 – for black children opened in a wing of the college at the initiative of Henry Cotterill, the second bishop of Grahamstown.Footnote ¹⁵ The theological school never developed, but several pupils from the Mullins Institution became priests.Footnote ¹⁶

In 1856 John William Colenso, bishop of Natal, shared with Sir George Grey, the Cape governor, his intention to open a theological college together with a black school, a central college for Europeans, a hospital and an orphanage.Footnote ¹⁷ His trial for heresy, however, forced him to shelve this project.Footnote ¹⁸ The bishop's first theological student was William Ngidi, a young Zulu who had become his interpreter and confidant and was employed as a teacher in his mission school. There is evidence that Ngidi made some attempts at preaching in the Msinga area after having left Colenso in 1869.Footnote ¹⁹

In 1866 Bishop Gray sent four young blacks, three from Zonnebloem College, a school established in 1858 by Sir George Grey for the education of the sons of African chiefs, and one from the ‘Kafir Institute’ in Grahamstown, to St Augustine's College, Canterbury, to further their education. Suffering from the European climate, all came back before the end of their studies. Two of them, Stephen Mnyakama and Josias Ntsiko, were later admitted to the diaconate.Footnote ²⁰

Subsequently, at a synod held in 1869, the Anglican bishops resolved that ‘a more complete English and Theological Education than is provided in the Mission Institutes of several Dioceses’ should be given in Zonnebloem ‘to candidates for Holy Orders and others’.Footnote ²¹ They wanted to maintain as high a standard of education as was possible for orders in the Province.Footnote ²² But no funds could be found and the plan did not materialise.Footnote ²³

When the provincial synod met for the first time in 1870, not one of the clergy present was locally born. Only a few priests ordained in South Africa, all of European origin, were at work in parishes. In 1876 the provincial synod recommended the establishment of a theological college in each diocese and the formation of a faculty in the Province to examine candidates in theology.Footnote ²⁴ The same year the bishop of Bloemfontein, Allan Becher Webb, established a theological school, the first of its kind in South Africa, in the seat of this diocese. Before his arrival in South Africa, Webb had been vice-principal of Cuddesdon College, the diocesan seminary founded by Samuel Wilberforce in Oxford.Footnote ²⁵ Cecil Lewis and G. E. Edwards hint at the fact that the new institution was destined for the entire South African Province.Footnote ²⁶ This does not seem to have happened even though the idea of a central theological college might have been attractive to under-resourced dioceses. In effect, the new theological school, St Cyprian's, trained candidates only from the Bloemfontein diocese. What is perhaps more significant is that it was open to white and black candidates. There was no lack of funds this time thanks to a grant from the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK). In August 1876 William Thomas Gaul, the principal, reported the arrival of five students ‘all earnest, loyal, soldierly. We hope to get some of the best and bravest of our colonial boys in time. How glorious it would be if we could make another “Iona” adapted to modern requirements to evangelize the tribes of the north’.Footnote ²⁷

In a pastoral letter published shortly after the provincial synod, the Anglican bishops called on the wealthier members of the community to support financially the candidates for the ministry:

By the end of 1879 nine clergy trained at St Cyprian's were at work in the diocese of Bloemfontein. All were white. But the experiment was short-lived. The college was closed in 1883 when Bishop Webb left the diocese. One of the reasons given was that it was too isolated to serve the whole Province.Footnote ²⁹

By then the idea of a central theological college was gaining support. The authors of a report on the supply and training of candidates for holy orders that was presented to the provincial synod in 1883 came out clearly in support of it:

An important shift had, however, taken place. In the minds of its proponents, the central college was to be for white ordinands only. The multi-racial approach, which had been widely accepted so far, gave way to a racially-based approach to priestly training. In 1891 Grahamstown, where Allan Becher Webb, the bishop of Bloemfontein, had been elected in the meantime, was chosen as the site of the future central college.Footnote ³¹ When St Paul's College was finally established in 1902, all its students were white, a situation which lasted until the mid-1970s.Footnote ³² Some candidates for the ministry continued to be trained in England, as in the early days of the colony. Others went to Grahamstown.

In 1898, in an effort to raise academic standards in theological education, the provincial synod instituted the South African Faculty of Divinity, an examining body awarding diplomas in theology and providing a form of graduation ceremony. A similar board had been established in England the year before. The South African Faculty of Divinity consisted of the archbishop, the bishops and all other doctors and bachelors in the Province. Candidates for holy orders, as well as deacons and priests, were eligible for an examination for the diploma of ‘Student in Divinity’, which entitled them to wear a special hood. The theological colleges established in South Africa in the following years used the South African Faculty of Divinity as a qualifying authority.Footnote ³³

When St Paul's College opened in 1902, John Espin, the warden, had in charge one student, W. Farre, who became rector of Khomga. In 1906 there were six students and the college was full. After an extension of the building the number of ordinands continued to increase. By the time the college celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 1932, 108 students had been admitted and 82 of them had proceeded to ordination. In the early years the rules of St Paul's were based on those in use in English colleges. Six services were said every day and times of silence were observed.Footnote ³⁴

St Paul's was only for Anglicans. In 1947 the Anglican Church had not joined the Congregational, Methodist and Presbyterian Churches in the establishment of Livingstone House, an inter-denominational residence for ministerial students in Grahamstown. However, the four Churches had jointly entered into an agreement with Rhodes University, in 1946, to establish a chair of divinity. This theological education scheme was reserved for white students.Footnote ³⁵

St Paul's College's white-only character caused uneasiness in some sectors of the clergy. At a diocesan synod held in Johannesburg in 1941 Bernard Sigamoney, an Indian priest, moved that all restrictions on the admission of non-European students to St Paul's be removed, but his motion was defeated.Footnote ³⁶ Whilst bishop of Grahamstown in the early 1960s, Robert Selby Taylor took steps to desegregate theological education in his diocese,Footnote ³⁷ but it was not until 1976 that the first black student was admitted to St Paul's. From then on the number of Coloured and African students gradually increased.Footnote ³⁸

The training of black clergy in the Church of the Province

For black and coloured ordinands the only option at the time was the diocesan college. One of them was St Peter's College, Rosettenville, which relocated to Alice in 1963 to become a constituent college of Fedsem. In 1927 South Africa counted seven theological colleges for blacks.Footnote ³⁹ This number was subsequently reduced to two: one for the north and one for the south.

The pioneer in theological education for black clergy was Henry Callaway, who paved the way for the foundation of St Bede's College in Umtata. Introduced to Bishop Colenso's first African agents on his arrival from England in 1854, he trained several young men for ordination to the diaconate while stationed in Springdale after his ordination. In 1876 he was consecrated bishop of St John's, Kaffraria, a new diocese between the Kei River and Natal formed from the division of the diocese of Grahamstown. One of Callaway's first moves was to take students to board with him and by October 1878 the number of black boys had grown to fourteen. The following year he established St John's Theological College in Umtata, ‘for the purpose of training young natives and colonists and lay teachers’. The new school was primarily a teachers' training college but there was a separate department for young men who were prepared for ordination.Footnote ⁴⁰ In his charge to the diocesan synod of 1879, Callaway intimated that he wanted to use his remaining power

In 1898 Bransby Key, Callaway's successor as bishop of the St John's diocese, decided to establish a theological college distinct from the teacher training college. The theological students moved into the vacated Augusta School in 1899 and the centre became known as St Bede's. The rationale for the opening of St Bede's was the need to prepare black people for an eventual takeover of the ecclesiastical machinery. ‘The Native Church’, Key was reported as saying, ‘[should] stand entirely alone’ and all white clergy should withdraw entirely.Footnote ⁴²

In 1911 nine African priests and fourteen deacons, most of them trained at St Bede's, were serving in the diocese of St John's.Footnote ⁴³ Another student was James Matta Dwane, a former Methodist minister who had negotiated the admission of his breakaway Ethiopian movement as a separate order in the Anglican Church. He was ordained to the priesthood by the bishop of St John's on 29 January 1911.Footnote ⁴⁴

Another major initiative in theological education for black people was the opening of St Peter's Theological College in Doornfontein, Johannesburg, in 1903. The history of St Peter's is tied up with that of the Community of the Resurrection (CR), an Anglican religious community for men founded in England in 1892. In the years preceding the South African War, Edwin Farmer, the director of ‘native’ missions in the diocese of Pretoria, had opened a theological school, St Cuthbert's College, where about a dozen men were trained ‘in habits of prayer, and study, and work’.Footnote ⁴⁵ On his arrival in Pretoria in 1894, he had found ‘60 Native men working hard for the Church’.Footnote ⁴⁶ With proper training, he reported, the young men he was preparing for the ministry would shine in the mission field:

In response to Farmer's appeal, the bishop of Pretoria, Henry Bousfield, invited the CR to run a theological college at St Cuthbert's. But war broke out and the project was postponed. It was revived in April 1903 with the establishment of St Peter's College in Doornfontein under the direction of three CR Fathers, who had arrived from England that January. The first student was Matthew Mntande. Later in the year he was joined by Titus Malape, Stephen Masupye, Michael Mpumlwana and Apollos Monare, all of whom had begun their training as catechists at St Cuthbert's College, Pretoria.Footnote ⁴⁸

The first African priest to be trained by the CR was ordained in 1910. The following year St Peter's moved to larger premises in Rosettenville, south of Johannesburg. By 1920 there were thirty-two black clergy in the diocese of Pretoria, of whom fifteen were priests. The CR had also trained 150 catechists and in 1920 half the students were also trained for that ministry. They continued to be trained at St Peter's until 1937 when separate provision was made for them, as educational standards in the college had been raised. By then 188 catechists and 75 ordinands at been trained at St Peter's.Footnote ⁴⁹

In the diocese of Natal a theological school ‘for native catechists and clergy’, St Alban's College, opened in Pietermaritzburg in 1898 under the direction of a priest by the name of W. A. Goodwin. Twelve students had already enrolled by the end of the second year. In 1905 it relocated to Riverdale near Escourt. St Alban's had the particularity of also providing practical education in areas such as agriculture, fencing and building. In 1919 the dioceses of Natal and Zululand decided to join forces and three students from Zululand arrived at Estcourt. St Alban's remained active until 1933 when the students moved to Isandlwana near Dundee, where a theological school had, in the meantime, been opened by the bishop of Zululand.Footnote ⁵⁰

In the diocese of Grahamstown, a theological tutor, John Espin, was appointed in 1875 to conduct periodical examinations in theology for catechists and teachers and to ensure that they had an accurate acquaintance with the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. It was on the results of these examinations that candidates were recommended for ordination. In 1881 Espin could report that nine ordinands, six whites and three blacks, were studying under his direction. The bishop, Nathaniel James Merriman, had obtained funding to enable the black ordinands to leave their stations and to live for a time at the Mullins Institution.Footnote ⁵¹ Later on, a school for the training of clergy and catechists opened at St Matthew's College in Keiskammahoek in 1904 as part of a teacher training school founded in 1895. Under the direction of F. D. Binyon, St Matthew's College became the ‘centre of Bantu education for the diocese’.Footnote ⁵² One of the theological students trained at St Matthew's was James Calata, who later became the Cape president and secretary-general of the African National Congress. After several years of teaching, he was made a deacon in the Anglican Church in 1921, was ordained priest in 1926 and, after a brief stint in Port Elizabeth, spent the rest of his life as parish priest in Cradock.Footnote ⁵³ In 1927, when James Dexter Taylor made reference to it his Year-Book of Christian Mission, the theological school still had students, although in smaller numbers.Footnote ⁵⁴ It closed in August 1935 and its two remaining students were transferred to St Bede's.Footnote ⁵⁵

In the diocese of Zululand the first candidates were trained by Charles Johnson at St Augustine's, Nqutu, in the 1880s. Three of them were ordained deacon in 1892.Footnote ⁵⁶ The same year a theological college for the training of catechists and evangelists opened in Isandlwana alongside a teacher training college. It closed in 1918 after having moved to KwaMagwaza near Melmoth.Footnote ⁵⁷ It reopened in Isandlwana in 1923 for a further three years. In 1933 it opened again, this time as a joint theological school, St Vincent's College, for the dioceses of Natal and Zululand, thanks to a bequest left by an Anglican layman. The training of theological students for the diocese of Zululand was transferred to St Peter's, Rosettenville, in 1938.Footnote ⁵⁸

In the diocese of Bloemfontein, the Society of the Sacred Mission (SSM) ran a course for catechists and deacons at Modderpoort from 1915 to 1924. Six deacons were ordained in 1921. ‘We built a village of huts’, a priest from St Augustine's Priory, Modderpoort, reported, ‘and their wives and young children lived therein, so that the students might be saved from the temptations and difficulties of separation.’Footnote ⁵⁹

Lastly in the diocese of Cape Town, St Austin's Clergy School, a college for the training of ‘non-European clergy’, presumably coloured ordinands,Footnote ⁶⁰ and a college for catechists and teachers were established at Zonnebloem College in the 1920s. Both were short-lived.Footnote ⁶¹

A central theological college for black ordinands

The idea of a central theological college for black ordinands – along the line of St Paul's College, Grahamstown – was floated for the first time at the Third Provincial Missionary Conference in 1906. Prior to the conference a questionnaire had been circulated among missionaries about the state of the Anglican mission. They were asked, among other things, whether they wanted the theological colleges for ‘natives’ to be diocesan, combined for two or three dioceses or centralised at the level of the Province. The responses showed that minds were not ready for a central theological college. Only twelve respondents out of a total of thirty-four preferred that option; the others asked for separate colleges.Footnote ⁶² Twelve years later, at a conference on the ‘training for the native ministry’ held in January 1918 in Modderpoort the opinion still was that ‘the time [had] not yet come for the establishment of one central Theological College for the training of native candidates for Holy Orders in [the] Province’. Rather, it was found ‘advantageous that a Theological College should be in proximity to a Normal School or Teachers’ Training College, provided that the Head of the Theological College be supreme in his own department'.Footnote ⁶³

It was not until the 1930s that a consensus emerged on the suitability of a central theological college for black candidates. As Osmund Victor, a member of the Community of the Resurrection, pointed out, such a college was ‘in the interests alike of efficiency and of economy of money and man power’.Footnote ⁶⁴ In November 1933, following a recommendation of the Provincial Missionary Conference held in Port Elizabeth a few months before,Footnote ⁶⁵ the episcopal synod approved the ‘principle of Regional Theological Colleges for African ordination candidates’. It welcomed the ‘spontaneous fulfilment of this principle by the dioceses of Pretoria, Kimberley and Kuruman, and Johannesburg, and by the dioceses of Natal and Zululand’ – St Peter's College, Rosettenville, for the former and St Vincent's, Isandlwana, for the latter – and expressed ‘the hope that as opportunity offers such Regional Colleges will take the place of local Colleges’.Footnote ⁶⁶

By 1934, according to the minutes of a meeting of the heads of theological institutions, only four theological colleges were left in South Africa – St Bede's, Umtata; St Peter's, Rosettenville; St Matthew's, Keiskammahoek; and St Vincent's, Isandlwana – and one in Zimbabwe – St Augustine's, Penhalonga, a theological college of the Community of the Resurrection. St Augustine's, Modderpoort, had been ‘in suspense for some years’.Footnote ⁶⁷ St Matthew's closed in 1935 and St Vincent's in 1938. The same year the Provincial Missionary Conference recommended to the episcopal synod that St Peter's, Rosettenville, should be recognised as a ‘Provincial College for Native Ordinands’, while noting that ‘this motion should not preclude the development of St Bede's, Umtata as a Theological College for Native Ordinands’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Subsequently the episcopal synod formally recognised St Peter's College as a provincial college, while recognising the right of any diocese – in effect the diocese of St John's with St Bede's – to maintain an existing theological college.Footnote ⁶⁹ In practice, after 1938 two theological colleges in the Province were operating as provincial centres of ministerial training: St Peter's for the north and St Bede's for the south.

St Peter's, the bigger of the two, drew students from the dioceses of Pretoria, Johannesburg, Kimberley, Zululand, Lebombo and Southern Rhodesia with the later addition of Bloemfontein.Footnote ⁷⁰ ‘It was the finest Theological College in the Province’, Alban Winter, of the Community of the Resurrection, wrote in 1962, ‘and students from St Paul's, the corresponding College for Europeans, must, I think, have envied us a little, at least until they received their latest additions. We had accommodation for 36 students living generally two in a room in a two-storey block which occupied the larger length of an extensive quadrangle, laid out in three levels.’Footnote ⁷¹ Alphaeus Zulu, first black Anglican bishop in South Africa (1961), and Desmond Tutu, first black secretary-general of the South African Council of Churches (1978) and first black archbishop of Cape Town (1986), were among the Anglican priests trained at St Peter's.Footnote ⁷²

While maintaining good educational standards, the college had a distinctly monastic atmosphere, as noted by Alan Wilkinson, the historian of the Community of the Resurrection:

Apart from St Peter's, St Bede's was the only theological college for black ordinands in South Africa after 1937. In 1955 it became a ‘diocesan college with some provincial recognition’, as Bishop Schuster put it in an interview.Footnote ⁷⁴

According to Livingstone Ngewu, Bishop Key's vision of a seminary geared towards the creation of an indigenous leadership was lost right from the beginning of the twentieth century. With the episcopate of Joseph Watkin Williams (1901–22) came a ‘significant paradigm shift’ in the training of black clergy in the diocese of St John's. For Williams and his successors, the role of St Bede's was mainly to supply assistants to the white priests. The college was not meant to prepare black priests for leadership positions in the diocese.Footnote ⁷⁵ When Norman Goodall and Eric Nielsen came to survey the state of theological education in South Africa on behalf of the International Missionary Council in 1953, they found that the general academic standard was ‘very low’ at St Bede's and that too much emphasis was placed on ‘devotional training and pastoralia’.Footnote ⁷⁶

The situation started to change in 1955 with the appointment of Michael Carmichael as principal. For the new head of St Bede's the college's mission was to prepare black priests to take over the administration of the CPSA. While most students did not possess a matriculation certificate, a good number ended up doing further studies. Under his leadership the first black tutors, Sydwell Thelejane, Matthew Makhaye and Ephraim Mosothoane, joined the staff of the college.Footnote ⁷⁷ It was only in 1955, however, that the status of St Bede's as a ‘diocesan college with some provincial recognition’, as spelled out by Bishop Schuster, was officially approved by the bishops.Footnote ⁷⁸

In 1960 St Bede's was briefly considered as a site for the Federal Theological Seminary. It was not chosen because, presumably on account of St Bede's diocesan status, the new Anglican college would have only been affiliated to and not integrated into the seminary.Footnote ⁷⁹ In 1975 St Bede's accommodated Fedsem after it had been expropriated by the apartheid government from its premises in Alice, but the seminary was compelled to leave Umtata a few months later because of difficulties with the Transkei government.Footnote ⁸⁰ St Bede's itself closed in 1992 as a result of the decision, taken the previous year by the Provincial Standing Committee, to amalgamate it with St Paul's into a new institution called the College of the Transfiguration and based in Grahamstown.Footnote ⁸¹

The impact of apartheid on theological education

Meanwhile, the closure of the teacher training college and of the high school at Modderpoort in 1955 as a result of the application of the Bantu Education policy resulted in a further development in Anglican theological education. In 1957 the SSM, which had been running the Modderpoort mission since 1902, opened a pre-admission centre for black candidates for the ministry, the Test School, at the request of the Anglican bishops, in empty school buildings. The new institution was controversial from the start. The black students found the screening process to which they were submitted discriminatory and as a result there were ‘enormous frictions’ between them and the staff.Footnote ⁸² The author of a report to the general chapter of the SSM in 1962 admitted that the Test School had raised criticism but he stressed its importance for the future of ministry in the Church:

In 1960 the Anglican model of theological education for black candidates for the ministry had to be re-envisioned for reasons entirely external to the Church. After forty years of peaceful existence, St Peter's College had become, because of the skin colour of its students, a problem to the apartheid government. As Aelred Stubbs cr described in an anniversary speech, it was a ‘black spot’ in a white area and therefore had to go:

In June 1960 Stubbs, who by then was the principal of the college, received a letter from the Ministry of Bantu Affairs and Development instructing the municipal authority not to give permits for any new student after 1 January 1961.Footnote ⁸⁵ It was in this context that the CPSA negotiated the inclusion of St Peter's in the Federal Theological Seminary. St Peter's College moved out of Rosettenville at the end of 1962 to reopen at Alice in early 1963.Footnote ⁸⁶

The South African government's segregationist policies were crucial in the Anglican Church's decision to cooperate with the Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregationalist Churches in the field of theological education. Yet factors internal to the Church also contributed. In the early 1950s the International Missionary Council (IMC) – which was later to merge with the World Council of Churches – commissioned a survey of the training of the ministry in Africa. Its authors, Norman Goodall and Eric Nielsen, noted with concern that despite occasional contacts between the heads of theological institutions, among Anglicans in particular, most South Africa theological colleges lived in isolation:

Independently from the political developments in South Africa, the time had come for a new initiative in the field of ecumenical theological education. At the turn of the 1960s Lesslie Newbigin, the IMC secretary, D. G. S. Mtimkulu, the secretary of the All Africa Church Conference, and Milton Martin, the acting secretary of the Christian Council of South Africa, played an active role in the negotiations that led to the creation of Fedsem. Without their mediation a common ground between the four Churches might never have been found.Footnote ⁸⁸

The end of institutional segregation

The foundation, in 1963, of the Federal Theological Seminary of Southern Africa with St Peter's College as one of its constituents signalled the beginning of a new era in Anglican theological education. Victims of the apartheid government which had brutally closed down their institutions of learning, the Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational Churches joined forces and formed an inter-denominational seminary. Five years later, they established the Church Unity Commission (CUC) with a view to uniting the Churches within a common organic structure.Footnote ⁸⁹

That the Anglican Church was part of this remarkable ecumenical venture is very significant. Yet theological education continued to be segregated. Until the end of apartheid, the majority of white ordinands were educated at St Paul's while nearly all black candidates were trained at St Peter's and St Bede's. It was only in 1993, the year of Fedsem's closure,Footnote ⁹⁰ that a truly multi-racial institution opened in Grahamstown under the name of College of the Transfiguration. By then, for a variety of reasons, some of them financial, the CUC churches had decided to revert to the denominational model of theological education. Ministerial training was no longer segregated, but the dream of an ecumenical seminary had been abandoned.