Central India Theological Seminary
theological institute in Central India
Central India Theological Seminary (CITS), located in Itarsi, Madhya Pradesh, India, is a Christian institution that offers a range of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes designed to equip students for ministry, scholarship, and Christian service. Its programs are accredited by Asia Theological Association.
History
In 1962, Kurien Thomas, a Pentecostal missionary and pastor shared a vision with the local church to start a Bible School in Itarsi. Consequently, in July 1962 the Bharosa Bible School was born with the purpose of training Christian workers for evangelism, church planting, and Christian ministry. According to Kurien Thomas, "There was no Mission Board we could apply to for help. No bank account we could lean on.... We would have to walk from day-to-day trusting Him. The Bible School would have to run by Faith and so it was called "Bharosa Bible School." ("Bharosa" being the Hindi word for "Faith.") The School preliminary offered a three-month course with an enrollment of seven students that included A.J. Samuel who later served as pastor at Indore, K.V. Kurien who became pastor of the United States' then largest Indian Pentecostal Church in New York, Samuel R. Shri Sunder who joined the Norwegian Mission in India, and Sadhu Dewan Chand who became an itinerant preacher across India.
A few years later, it was renamed as Central India Bible College offering undergraduate programs. In 1999, under the Presidentship of Matthew K. Thomas, it was renamed as Central India Theological Seminary and began offering, in addition to the Bachelor of Theology program, the Master of Divinity program.
“Central India Theological Seminary” enters the record as theological institute in Central India. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Central, India and Theological can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5061244. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1962 and 1999.
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This entry incorporates text from “Central India Theological Seminary” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.