The Revd Dr Titus Presler has been named dean and president of the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest.
Parish priest, seminary lecturer and long-time advocate for world mission, Dean-elect Presler will begin work at the seminary this summer. He will succeed the Very Revd Durstan McDonald, dean of the Seminary of the Southwest since 1984, who will retire at the end of May.
"Titus Presler brings stellar gifts of ministry and scholarship mixed with a unique world-view to the Seminary of the Southwest," said the Rt Revd Claude Payne, chair of the seminary board of trustees and bishop of the Diocese of Texas. "Dr Presler complements the seminary's vigorous focus on mission to those within as well as outside the church," he said.
Dean-elect Presler comes to the seminary from Cambridge, Mass, where he has been rector of St Peter's Church since 1991. Dr Presler, 51, turned the declining inner-city parish into a diverse and substantial congregation dynamically engaged in mission in its urban community and the wider world. Local work includes a large after-school ministry, English for Speakers of Other Languages, community meals, and a social justice outreach. The congregation currently has four lay mission workers serving in Africa, where Dr Presler was a missionary in the mid-1980s.
"Our church needs leaders eager to discern and join in what God is up to in the world," Dr Presler said upon his appointment. "The Seminary of the Southwest has an activist approach to multi-cultural ministry and is exploring urgently how the Episcopal Church can advance God’s mission. I’m honored by the community’s invitation that I journey with them."
Dr Presler has taught mission studies and preaching at Harvard Divinity School, General Theological Seminary and the Episcopal Divinity School (EDS) during the past 12 years. He helped to shape and launch the Anglican, Global and Ecumenical Studies program at EDS in the early 1990s. It is expected that Dean-elect Presler will also have an academic appointment in mission and world Christianity at the Seminary of the Southwest.
His lengthy service to the Episcopal Church on both the church-wide and diocesan levels includes serving as a deputy to five General Conventions and presently chairing the Standing Commission on World Mission and co-leading the Massachusetts Volunteers for Mission Committee. The Rev Jane Crosby Butterfield, whom Dr. Presler married in 1974, is mission personnel officer at the Episcopal Church Center.
Born to American Methodist missionary parents, Dean-elect Presler spent his first 18 years in India, coming to this country in 1968 to attend Harvard College. After graduation with honors in philosophy in 1972, he worked as a journalist before entering seminary. He graduated from General Theological Seminary and was ordained deacon in 1979. He served Christ Church in Hamilton, Mass, for four years and was ordained a priest in 1980. The Preslers – with their four children – then traveled to Zimbabwe as missionaries of the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society during that country's first years of majority rule. Dr Presler was rector of the Bonda Church District from 1983 to 1986, enhancing the life of the church, rebuilding church structures and opening new congregations in the rural district of the Anglican Diocese of Manicaland.
The Preslers returned to the United States in 1986 where the dean-elect had interim ministries in the Boston area during his doctoral studies at Boston University until he and Jane were called to St. Peter's in Cambridge as co-rectors in 1991. He held fellowships at Harvard Divinity School and EDS and was a doctoral fellow of the Episcopal Church Foundation. He was awarded the doctor of theology degree in mission and New Testament from Boston University in 1995. In addition to numerous articles, the dean-elect is author of two books, Transfigured Night: Mission and Culture in Zimbabwe's Vigil Movement (University of South Africa Press, 1999) and Horizons of Mission (Cowley, 2001), the latter in The New Church's Teaching Series.
Dr Presler comes to the Seminary of the Southwest (ETSS) as it completes its fiftieth anniversary year – over one-third of those years under the leadership of Dean McDonald. The McDonald legacy at the seminary has been distinguished by an institutional focus on mission, significant enrollment gains as ETSS bolstered its church-wide presence, innovative curriculum initiatives for both lay and ordination-track students, and a six-fold increase in endowment. The seminary is two-thirds toward its $8.1 million goal in its fund-raising campaign, "Making All Things New."
"Special thanks goes to the search committee whose several months of diligent work brought Dean-elect Presler to the seminary," Bishop Payne said. The Rt Revd D Bruce MacPherson, suffragan bishop of the Diocese of Dallas, headed the nine-person committee. Trustee members included Bishop MacPherson, the Revd Richard Aguilar, Seguin, Texas; Gene Kirksey, Austin, Texas; and three Houston residents, Jack Mayfield, the Very Revd David Puckett, and Robert Schorr. The Revd Drs Cynthia Kittredge and Michael Floyd were faculty members of the search committee. Kathy Monson Lutes, a senior seminarian from Minnesota and student representative on the board rounded out the committee. David Harvin and Bishop Payne, both of Houston, were ex-officio members of the group.
Article from: Seminary of the Southwest