Gordon College, the United College of Gordon and Barrington, is today the only nondenominational Christian liberal arts college in New England. It offers 29 majors and confers three separate degrees: the bachelor of arts, bachelor of science and bachelor of music.

In the fall of 1994 the College's enrollment of approximately 1,200 was drawn from 37 states and 29 foreign countries. Eleven percent of its students were minorities.

Gordon was founded in Boston in 1889 by a small group of Christians who recognized the need for the church and society to have educated leadership. They organized what was first called the Boston Missionary Training Institute. Chief among the founders and the first president was the Rev. Dr. Adoniram Judson Gordon, a prominent Boston pastor, whose name the school adopted after his death in 1895.

Gordon developed into a liberal arts college with a graduate seminary and moved to its present 730-acre North Shore campus in 1955. In 1970 the divinity school was merged with the Conwell School of Theology from Philadelphia to from the new and separate Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

Barrington College was founded in 1900 as the Bethel Bible Training School in Spencer, Massachusetts, and was later located in Dudley, Massachusetts, and Providence, Rhode Island. It took the name Barrington after the campus was moved to that Rhode Island community in 1959.

Gordon and Barrington merged to form the United College on the Wenham campus in 1985.

Over the years Gordon has been a leader in three clusters of colleges and universities to a wide range of added study options both at home and abroad. The groups are the Christian College Consortium (13 institutions), the Christian College Coalition (85 institutions) and the Northeast Consortium of Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts (11 institutions).

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