Gateway Seminary is one of the six seminaries operated by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Located in godless, heathen California, this seminary recently made the news again. This fall, the school is relocating one of its regional campuses from Fremont to San Leandro.
This school is important for several reasons, and its relocation is important for one major reason. Today, we’ll uncover the details of this strange relocation—and learn what the very earthly forces of the SBC fear most.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 1/21/2025. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now! From introduction: FTC story about Genshin Impact; what Genshin Impact is and how it bamboozles the unwary; why Genshin Impact players themselves think their game gets criticized, similarly to how Calvinists don’t understand why normies despise Calvinism.)
Situation Report: Gateway Seminary relocates
A few days ago, Baptist Press announced that Gateway Seminary plans to relocate a regional campus from Fremont, California to San Leandro. Its current site in Fremont is “under contract,” which means that the sale is not completely finalized yet, but it’s close enough to merit removing the site from real estate listings. Fremont’s operations will move to a new San Leandro site in time for the fall semester this year.
The SBC’s motivations in moving the regional campus are driven purely by money. In the writeup on Baptist Press, the seminary’s leaders express incredible—and strikingly uncharacteristic—concerns about students’ costs and convenience:
Student surveys have shown the two largest barriers preventing students from participating in in-person education are travel time and the cost of tuition. Highway traffic, delays crossing bridges from one region to another, and public transportation options restrict students who prefer to study on campus into online or remote access classes. Financial pressures, including inflation and high cost of living, have caused students to postpone seminary education.
Of course, moving to San Leandro won’t fix a lot of those issues. At most, it’ll make the drive to school shorter for students who already likely stay in the San Leandro area. But it will fix a far more pressing financial issue for both Gateway Seminary and the SBC, and I guarantee you that’s the real motivation in moving the campus.
Everyone, meet Gateway Seminary
The SBC operates six seminary schools. Gateway Seminary is one of them. It’s not a huge school but it’s decent-sized, ranking 9th for enrollment according to a 2024 estimate from Juicy Ecumenism. It enrolls about 1500 students a semester, with some 782 being full-time. Those figures put it last behind all of the other SBC seminaries, but it seems to be doing pretty well for itself. Of note, Gateway Seminary operates about four regional campuses—which includes the Fremont campus, which is the one we’re discussing today.
Fremont stands across the waters from San Francisco and about a half-hour’s drive north from San Jose. San Leandro is simply a longer drive up that coastline up toward Oakland. The two cities are about a 30-minute drive apart.
This school has done a lot of hopping around. Originally founded in 1944 under the name Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, it started life in Mill Valley, California. That’s just north of San Francisco. Then, its leaders renamed the school in 2016 and moved it to Ontario, which is just a short hop east of Los Angeles proper. The move was completed around 2018.
In 2018, the Fremont campus opened as a regional campus for Gateway Seminary. It sounds like the leaders of the seminary were looking forward to getting back to the San Francisco area. The main campus is still in Ontario.
In 2004, Jeff Iorg became the president of Gateway Seminary. Of note, he shepherded the campus through its renaming and site move. This past year, however, Iorg became the president of the SBC’s top-ranked Executive Committee (EC). His last function as Gateway’s president involved presiding over its commencement ceremony this past May.
Gateway Seminary’s new president is Adam Groza. He’s a late Gen X, but he wears impressive Millennial-style black-rimmed glasses. He’s worked for Gateway since 2010. Before that, he worked for Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS), which is also where he earned his master’s degree and Ph.D.
In October, Groza announced the creation of the Jeff P. Iorg School of Christian Leadership at Gateway Seminary. Considering Iorg’s focus on helping seminary students become church and denominational leaders, that makes sense.
Stated reasons vs covert reasons in the Gateway Seminary move
San Francisco is an incredibly expensive place to live. In Fremont, where the regional campus is until it moves, a basic studio shoebox apartment tends to rent for more than USD$2k a month. San Leandro isn’t much better. Apartments are very slightly less expensive there, with studio apartments costing closer to $1800/month. You’d really have to relocate much further from the coast—or way further north along it, like to Arcata Bay, to bring rents down to manageable levels.
Minimum wage in California starts at $16.50/hr (and fast food jobs start at $20/hr), so a full-time job will pay about $2600 before taxes. I don’t know how well full-time jobs mesh with full-time enrollment at a seminary, but I’m guessing the answer is “not terribly well.”
So we can nix most of the cost-of-living arguments out of hand. San Leandro, for students at least, won’t represent that much of an improvement over Fremont.
We can also discard transportation concerns as being motivators behind the move. Though the school’s leaders cited public transportation options as a motivation for moving, it looks like Fremont has better public transportation options for student-aged people than San Leandro does. Fremont’s closer to Silicon Valley, so that makes sense. (ETA: Someone who lived in the area has let me know that there’s a BART station close to the San Leandro location, so this paragraph may not be accurate.)
As for traffic, it does look like the Fremont site is difficult to get into. Its entrance sure wouldn’t make my Top 10 Drives list.

But bad traffic sure didn’t matter to Gateway’s leaders when selecting that site in the first place. It’s hard to imagine they care overmuch about it now.
I also noticed that San Leandro’s county (10.75%) has slightly higher sales taxes than Fremont’s (10.25%). So lower taxes for students shouldn’t figure into the move.
In summary, I don’t think seminary students will find the new location to be all that much better than the old one. But you know who would almost certainly consider this move to be a huge improvement?
The school’s leaders. And the SBC’s leaders as well.
Money makes the world go around, the world go around, the world go around…
As those great bards once sang, “money makes the world go around.”
That rule applies just as much to religious institutions as to secular businesses. In the end, both must at least justify their expenses somehow.
Interestingly, Gateway Seminary isn’t doing poorly, financially speaking. That’s actually why this story caught my attention. The last stories I’d seen about the school were all positive, and then this one came along! Last school year, Gateway Seminary even got a little bump in its budget! As that story tells it, they also regularly receive large endowments and some lovely gifts—including a huge collection of old Bibles recently donated to them. As well, in May 2023 the school gave out 288 degrees, which is a “record number” for them.
But we can certainly suss out some financial incentives to make this move. For one thing, Baptist Press tells us that after selling the Fremont property, the school’s owners plan to use that money to set up scholarships for students and “support new teaching sites.” One of these sites is planned for Sacramento, which is way more affordable than either Fremont or San Leandro.
Gateway Seminary’s leaders aren’t buying a new facility, either. They’re apparently going to set up shop in an SBC facility run by the Bridges Bay Area Association. That association consists of various SBC churches in the area.
And it has one such facility in San Leandro. Wouldja lookit that!
The days of wine and roses might be coming to a middle for the SBC
Once upon a time, nobody in SBC leadership cared about saving money or being super-careful with resources. They put their relatives and buddies into positions of power, spent money stupidly, shielded abusers to protect their exalted status, and most of all silenced and destroyed anyone who criticized them for doing any of it.
Those days appear to be over at last. Nowadays, people notice when SBC leaders abuse and misuse their power and money.
And those are good things to notice. Another good thing to be noticing is any power-hungry religious institution selling off its real estate. Though it’s a subtle sign of decline, it’s a powerful one.
Real estate still rules the roost as tangible evidence of any institution’s wealth and power. For years now, various SBC entities have been downsizing their real estate portfolios. In 2015, Lifeway (the SBC’s propaganda, publishing, and research arm) sold its huge, sprawling downtown Nashville campus. Then a few years later, they sold off all their brick-and-mortar stores to go to an online-selling model. And just this past year, the SBC’s top leaders sold off their own 7-story headquarters building in downtown Nashville.
That had to smart!
I’m not saying the SBC is going broke. The denomination still rakes in billions of dollars a year. It’s a behemoth with a long way to fall yet before it hits bottom. I’m just saying that its leaders are trimming some fat away from their prize cow.
And I bet they are just seething about having to do it.
NEXT UP: Whatever did happen to those Quiverfull folks? We’ll explore that question next time. See you soon!
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