Scarritt College for Christian Workers

About Scarritt College for Christian Workers

According to Wikipedia, Scarritt College for Christian Workers was a college associated with the United Methodist Church in Nashville, Tennessee, USA. The campus is now home to Scarritt Bennett Center. History of Scarritt College The Scarritt College for Christian Workers started as the Scarritt Bible and Training School in Kansas City, Missouri in 1892. Belle Harris Bennett, a Southern Methodist woman missionary leader from Richmond, Kentucky, presented the idea to create a training school for missionaries in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. She imagined it to be similar to what Lucy Rider Meyer had created at the Chicago Training School for Home and Foreign Missions. The idea was agreed upon at the Southern Methodist Woman's Board of Foreign Missions annual conference in 1889. Board member Mrs. Nathan Scarritt of Kansas City, Missouri was the first to offer a pledge for the new training school. Her husband, Reverend Nathan Spencer Scarritt later offered a $25,000 challenge and land in Missouri to begin the school. Within one year, Bennett had secured the matching pledges from throughout the Church and other Mission Boards. Despite some dispute within the Woman's Board, the Southern Methodist General Conference approved the plan, and work began in earnest in April 1891. The first building's cornerstone was laid in Kansas City on July 2, 1891.