Henderson will succeed Barbara G. Wheeler, who has led Auburn for nearly 30 years and who informed Auburn’s board of trustees several months ago that she intended to step down as of June 30. Wheeler, 63, plans to become full-time director of the seminary’s Center for the Study of Theological Education, which she helped found 18 years ago and has been leading on a part-time basis ever since.
In an interview, Wheeler said she’s stepping down as president because “I don’t think presidency for life is good for either small countries or small seminaries. It really is time for new leadership for Auburn and for an undivided focus on theological education.”
And Mark Hotstetter, chair of the seminary’s Board of Directors, said in an interview that “we are awesomely excited” about the change. With Wheeler moving over to lead the center, “we have in a lot of ways two extremely strong leaders, dynamic leaders, to take Auburn into the future and continue our impact on religious leaders.”
People at the seminary are “filled with smiles today,” he said. “It’s great.”
Henderson, 52, a parish associate at The First Presbyterian Church in New York, earned a master’s in divinity from Union Theological Seminary in New York and a doctorate in higher education and leadership from Teachers College at Columbia University. She is the author of God’s Troublemakers: How Women of Faith are Changing the World.
In an interview, Henderson said “I am delighted and honored to be invited by the board to be president of Auburn. I think Auburn is a very creative and entrepreneurial place,” rooted in the Presbyterian Church and the Reformed tradition, but with work that focuses on equipping leaders to “heal and repair the world.”
Auburn is an unusual place, for a number of reasons.
In the 1930s, smacked by the Great Depression, the seminary made the decision to leave upstate New York, move onto the campus of Union Theological Seminary in New York City, and “to let other seminaries do the work of training the ministers,” Henderson said. Auburn would focus on “the new frontiers,” of training religious leaders and others involved in public life.
“It doesn’t grant degrees the way most seminaries do,” Hostetter said. “So we have a clean slate to figure out what’s needed to educate and help religious leaders across a multi-faith landscape. We can be more nimble in some ways to respond.”
Auburn also is not a Presbyterian seminary in the traditional sense. It relates to the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) through a covenant agreement and through shared commitments. Presbyterians serve on the seminary’s Board of Directors, and Wheeler and other staff members play leadership roles in the denomination at both the national and regional level.
And Auburn serves as a resource to strengthen other seminaries. Its Center for the Study of Theological Education provides research on theological education – research that’s in scant supply from other sources. While studies of higher education are commonplace, much less attention is paid to theological education, Wheeler said – despite the role that congregations and their leaders continue to play in American religious life.
To fill the void, Auburn’s center has “done research on practically every facet of theological education – on students, faculty, trustees,” she said, and, with a study due out next fall, on seminary presidents and administrators. Those studies have examined everything from the debt that seminarians pile up while in school to how the public perceives religious leaders.
“We’ve become convinced that amid the diversity of religious groups and forms and practices of the future, that theological education and the institutions in which it’s housed are going to become more important then ever as resources and fixed points,” Wheeler said. “Our job is to help keep them strong.”
Along with research, the center also does consulting work. With the economic downturn hammering many institutions, seminaries facing financial stress have turned to the center for advice on what works and what doesn’t, Wheeler said. “So we’re very busy. And I had always planned at some point to devote myself full-time to the center so it will be in good shape when the time comes to hand it on” to new leadership.
When she was named Auburn’s president, Wheeler was 33 years old. She was both excited and daunted – recognizing that “anyone who takes on the job of heading an institution, being responsible for keeping its mission in good repair and also for the vocation and livelihoods of other people, ought to be scared, or at least daunted.”
In the intervening decades, she has emerged as a leader in the church – serving, for example, as a member of the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity and Purity of the PC(USA); on the board of directors of the Presbyterian Publishing Corp.; and, currently, as a member of the committee preparing the new Presbyterian hymnal.
She also has served on the board of the Covenant Network of Presbyterians, which advocates for opening the doors to ordaining gays and lesbians in the PC(USA).
Now, looking back after nearly three decades, Wheeler sees many changes in the seminary she has served. Auburn is six or seven times larger than it was when she arrived. “In those days, it offered continuing education programs jointly with Union for Union’s Presbyterian students. In the last 30 years it’s expanded its programs for Christian churches, and it’s added a whole new dimension in multi-faith education programs that reach across the lines of religious traditions.
“Probably the best-known of these programs (called Face to Face/Faith to Faith) brings 60 teenagers every summer to a Presbyterian camp. They come from zones of conflict around the world – from the Middle East, Northern Ireland, South Africa. They and American teenagers meet for two weeks,” to discuss how world conflicts are often rooted in religious belief “and how faith addresses the things that cause people to do violence to each other.”
Despite all the changes at Auburn, however, Wheeler also sees the seminary as sticking close to the traditions on which it was founded.
Auburn was started by Presbyterian elders who borrowed money personally to get it going, she said.
“It was intended to be a Spartan institution that was inexpensive to attend and that toughened people up for frontier service. The other Presbyterian seminary in existence at the time was relatively affluent, had good food and heated rooms. Its graduates would go out to the frontier territories and get really sick and sometimes die and were unaccustomed as well to the kind of preaching and leadership that was required to minister to people who weren’t highly literate or very cultured.
“What I’m proudest of about Auburn is two things. One, that we’ve remained relatively small and I think you could say Spartan. We’ve had very conservative fiscal policies. We’ve grown our endowment and kept it in good repair.”
In other words, Auburn has remained frugal and financially responsible.
And secondly, “without being too trendy or faddish, we have been searching for where the next frontier is.”
Among those “frontier” endeavors: working with youth leaders; working in multi-faith settings; stressing the significance of theological education and research on its successes and challenges; and finding ways to connect Auburn creatively to the PC(USA).
When she’s not at work, Wheeler divides her time between New York City and a farm that she and her husband Sam own near Granville, N.Y., where she brings the same zeal she shows in her work to her avocations of cooking and gardening.
She is an elder at Bethel Peniel Church in Granville, which was formed by the recent merger of her longtime congregation, Peniel, with the nearby Middle Granville Church, three miles away. The merged church is now sharing its pastor with a Methodist congregation – an arrangement that so far is working wonderfully.
As an example of three small congregations finding new life through change – their own sorts of new frontiers – “it’s a great story,” Wheeler said.
Or at least another chapter – as she goes on to hers.
