In 1950, Lester E. Pipkin and Robert S. Guelich founded Appalachian Bible Institute as a Bible training school for the young people of the Appalachian Mountains - a region whose churches at the time often lacked formally educated pastors and whose families often lacked the means to send children far from home for theological study. The school was independent and nondenominational by design, serving the fundamental Bible and Baptist congregations that dotted the ridges of West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia, and east Tennessee. Pipkin served as president until 1983, when Daniel L. Anderson - still the college's president - succeeded him. The institute became a college and added accredited bachelor's, associate, and master's programs over the decades that followed.

In 2014, ABC opened a campus inside the walls of the Mount Olive Correctional Complex, West Virginia's maximum-security prison about an hour northwest in Fayette County. The program - branded Mount Olive Bible College - enrolls inmates in a pastoral ministry major leading to an accredited Bachelor of Arts degree. The first cohort graduated in December 2018, holding the same parchment as their counterparts on the Bradley campus. The argument for prison higher education tends to be utilitarian: educated inmates reoffend less and find work more easily on release. ABC's argument is theological as well as utilitarian, but the diploma is the same.

ABC's undergraduate model requires every student in the dual-major Bachelor of Arts program to take a major in Bible and Theology alongside a second ministry-oriented major - pastoral ministry, music ministry, counseling, youth and family ministry, or similar. Shorter programs include a Bible Certificate and an Associate of Arts. Online courses run through ABC Connect, and modular on-campus residencies serve the Master of Arts in Ministry. The school holds accreditation from both the Higher Learning Commission - the major regional accreditor for the central United States - and the Association for Biblical Higher Education. The college also fields intercollegiate teams in men's and women's basketball, men's soccer, and women's volleyball through the National Christian College Athletic Association.

ABC will never appear on a list of West Virginia's biggest schools - it draws students by the hundreds, not the thousands. But the college occupies an unusual niche in the regional education map. The Beckley area now hosts four secular institutions of higher learning - WVU Tech, University of Charleston-Beckley, a Concord University satellite, and New River Community and Technical College - and ABC's nondenominational Bible curriculum sits beside them, drawing students who want both an accredited degree and a specifically Christian theological grounding. The campus is small enough that students know the president by name, and the chapel program meets several times a week. Three quarters of a century after Pipkin and Guelich opened the doors, the school still answers a particular question that particular families in these mountains continue to ask.

The main campus sits at 37.85 N, 81.20 W in Bradley, an unincorporated community just outside the Beckley city limits in Raleigh County, West Virginia, at an elevation around 2,400 feet on the Appalachian Plateau. Raleigh County Memorial Airport (KBKW) is about 5 nautical miles south. From altitude the campus reads as a small cluster of buildings in a clearing surrounded by hardwood forest - hard to spot individually, but U.S. 19 makes a useful north-south guide and the larger Beckley urban grid sits just to the south.