Abilene Christian University

On the northern edge of Abilene, the campus of Abilene Christian University occupies a stretch of West Texas terrain that looks about as far as you can get from the centers of academic prestige. That distance has never been the point. This institution was built for the people of this specific place, rooted in a particular religious tradition, and it has quietly grown into something larger than its founders imagined.

ACU opened on September eleventh, nineteen oh six, with twenty-five students and the name Childers Classical Institute. The land came from a man named J. W. Childers, who sold five acres and a large house to the founding board at a reduced price to get the school started. The founders were members of the Churches of Christ, a restoration-movement denomination that had emerged from the frontier religious ferment of the early nineteenth century, emphasizing New Testament Christianity without creeds or hierarchy.

The school went through four presidents in its first six years. Stability came with Jesse Parker Sewell, a young preacher who had moved from Tennessee to West Texas for his health, the dry air was then considered therapeutic for tuberculosis. He served from nineteen twelve to nineteen twenty-four and built the institution into something durable. The name became Abilene Christian College in nineteen twenty, and the current university designation was adopted in nineteen seventy-six.

Among the alumni are athletes, politicians, and faith leaders, but the school's deepest mark is probably on the Churches of Christ themselves. For more than a century, ACU has trained ministers, missionaries, and teachers who have carried its influence to congregations across the country and to mission fields around the world.

The university made headlines in recent years for competing successfully in the NCAA tournament's March Madness, winning first-round upsets that introduced the name Abilene Christian to a national audience that may not have known West Texas had a basketball program worth watching.