With an undergraduate, masters, doctorate, and even a medical degree from secular universities, Southern Seminary is the only institution Jeff and Peggy Parr support financially, even though, for most of their adult lives, they only knew about it peripherally.
Before 2015, Jeff Parr spent 28 years operating his own private family medical practice in Lexington, Kentucky, just an hour from Louisville.
From the beginning of his medical career, which began with his father for eight years after he finished his medical residency, Parr hoped to own and operate the family practice in light of his Christian faith. “We had a Christian practice and were so blessed in that people knew when they came in that this was a Christian business,” Parr said in a recent interview. “As we’ve walked with the Lord, he has been our priority, serving him. And we’ve had an opportunity to do that through a medical practice.”
Parr’s faith intersected with his work on a daily basis as he prayed with patients and his staff, operated his business with integrity, and cared for people’s bodies and souls. As the Parrs ran their family practice, they began to hear about Southern through Parr’s mother, who became an avid listener to seminary president R. Albert Mohler Jr.’s then radio show, The Briefing. Peggy Parr said her mother-in-law always shared a new piece of information, news, or insight from the radio show. “She was always quoting it or listening to it,” she said.
Yet between the snippets of The Briefing, invitations to Heritage Week each year, and even Parr’s brother graduating from Southern Seminary in 1982 with a master’s degree, the Parrs still remained fairly oblivious to the seminary’s influence in Louisville and beyond until a few years ago.
When their son, Christopher, was still in high school, they visited campus and were impressed from the beginning at the facilities and campus environment. As they began to research colleges, Boyce College continued to enter the conversation as an institution that provided students with a Christian worldview even if they were not going into ministry.
Boyce felt like “a precious gem in our backyard that no one here seemed to know about,” Parr said. “We were excited to be among some of the first parents of a high school kid in Lexington to know about Boyce and see that it had so many different opportunities for students who weren’t going into ministry but still wanted an education from a biblical worldview.”
Christopher’s involvement with Boyce, including participating in the Augustine Honors Collegium, gave the Parrs a new door to Southern that, while it existed before, they never experienced. In addition to attending campus events like chapel, they attended the Reformation Tour with the Mohlers in 2018, which sparked a new appreciation for the school’s leadership and vision for theological education.
As their involvement grew, Peggy Parr, whose background is in clinical psychology, began researching and thinking through how to use counseling as a ministry in her retirement after not having a practice since 1993. The opportunities at Southern helped guide her decision to pursue a biblical counseling certification, and she served as a grader for Seminary Wives Institute. In addition to working with SWI, Parr now serves on the Woman’s Auxiliary as project director, facilitating events and helping the auxiliary continue to grow and serve women from the surrounding Louisville area.
Both of the Parrs believe their retirement — and discovery of Southern Seminary — is providential in this season of their live as they pursue new ministry opportunities.
“When you retire, you ‘refire,’ so in our early retirement years the Lord has shown us purpose,” she said. “Through my pursuit of biblical counseling and our Christian worldview, the Lord has providentially brought us into connection with ministers Southern has produced who are changing the culture here in Lexington for good. It’s thrilling to be a part of that through doing ministry to women.”
As their son works toward earning a humanities degree with a classical education minor, the opportunities he experiences at Boyce continue to encourage the Parrs that their decision to support both schools was the right one.