The institution was founded as the Belfast Bible School and Missionary Training Home, a name that captured the evangelical Protestant culture of mid-century Northern Ireland. The 'school' trained students who expected to go overseas as missionaries or work in Christian ministry at home. For decades the name stayed roughly the same - Belfast Bible College - and so did the mission. Then in April 2024 the trustees made a change that signalled how the institution understood itself in a more secular era. Belfast Bible College became the Belfast School of Theology. The new name kept the city and kept the theology but dropped the assumption that students were preparing for missionary work.

In 1983 the college moved into Glenburn House, a Victorian property in the south of the city. For more than four decades it was the school's identity - a house with a wood-panelled library, classrooms in repurposed rooms, students drifting between sessions on lawns that did not look like a typical campus. Generations of ministers and missionaries trained at Glenburn. In August 2025 the school left it. Operations moved to the second floor of nearby Stranmillis University College, trading a freestanding house for a tenant arrangement inside a working teacher-training college. It was the kind of move small institutions make when running an old building gets harder than running a curriculum.

Bible colleges in the UK historically partnered with one university to award degrees. For decades Belfast Bible College's partner was Queen's University Belfast, the city's main research university. That partnership ended in 2019. The transition was eased by an existing arrangement: the University of Cumbria, based in Carlisle and Lancaster, had been validating Belfast Bible College degrees since 2010 and became the sole degree-awarding body after Queen's withdrew. Belfast students now study in Belfast but receive their degrees with a University of Cumbria parchment. The BA in Theology runs three years full-time or six years part-time. There is a postgraduate ladder up through certificate, diploma, and an online MA in Practical Theology designed for people already working in ministry.

Northern Ireland's Christian map is famously crowded. The school deliberately refused to belong to any one denomination. Its students arrive as Presbyterians, Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals, members of independent congregations - in a country where those distinctions have sometimes mattered enough to define neighbourhoods. The school's interdenominational stance was a quiet but pointed choice in a society where 'mixed' had political weight. The principal stays. The faculty stays. The students change. Eight decades on, the institution that began in wartime Belfast keeps doing what it set out to do: teach theology to people who plan to use it.