The seminary was established in 1956 as a sister institution to
Covenant College, founded the previous year in
Pasadena, California. Both were agencies of the
Bible Presbyterian Church (Columbus Synod). The institution's founders believed that their denomination needed a strong
theological school to resist
liberalizing influences in
American Evangelicalism. The college and seminary shared the president and campus in St. Louis until the college outgrew its space and moved to
Lookout Mountain, Georgia, in 1964. They formally became two separate institutions in 1966. Denominational mergers over the ensuing decades made the schools part of the
Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC), then the
Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod (RPCES), and finally, in 1982—through what is known as the "joining and receiving" with the RPCES—the
Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), which elects and oversees the work of the seminary's board of trustees. On March 26, 1990, Covenant Theological Seminary student Elizabeth Mackintosh was murdered on the Seminary's campus. The murder remains unsolved. Over its 65 years, the seminary has continued to grow in size and reputation, and is now home to a student body (both on campus and online) drawn from nearly every U.S. state and many other nations. More than 4,500 Covenant Seminary graduates now serve as pastors, church planters, missionaries, campus ministers, counselors, Bible translators, and educators, and in many other ministry and non-vocational ministry capacities in multiple denominations and in all 50 states and 100 countries. ==Academics==