Katharine Henderson[/caption] Katharine Rhodes Henderson, who’s been selected as the new president of Henderson started at Auburn 15 years ago as its first director of development and “built the fundraising program from the ground up. There had not been a director of development or a fundraising program. There was really no annual fund.”
Now, Auburn raises several million dollars a year and just completed a $5 million capital campaign for its Center for the Study of Theological Education.
Later, Henderson became the seminary’s executive vice-president, overseeing educational programs for clergy and lay leaders, including the Center for Church Life; the Center for Multifaith Education, focusing on religious pluralism; and entrepreneurial programs focusing on integrity in corporate life and on media in the 21st century, “helping religious leaders cultivate a public voice, not just a voice in their own religious communities,” Henderson said.
As Auburn’s new president, a role she will take over on July 1, she also wants to focus on “frontier” issues – including religious pluralism and “how to communicate in an age when media and the internet make the usual organizational structures different and relationships different.”
She also wants to focus on technology, “building a virtual campus, building a technology platform so that all of Auburn’s work can be as accessible in Idaho or Iowa or across the globe as it is here. We have a responsibility to meet people where they live.”
Her own family history is deeply rooted in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
Her father, A. B. Rhodes, was a professor of Old Testament at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Her mother, Lela Nelson Rhodes, ran the bookstore at Louisville seminary and was the first woman ordained in Bardstown Road Church, the family’s home church – ordained “in an age where (women’s) ordination was controversial in our Presbyterian church. I also grew up with parents who were very concerned about civil rights, having grown up in the segregated South. I very early on was introduced to the power of religious people working together . . . and the need for people of faith not just to pray but to march, to do public work.”
Her mother, now 88, “lives right next door. She became a New Yorker at 83,” Henderson said.
Her husband, Charles Henderson, also is a Presbyterian minister. They have three children, two step-grandchildren, and a new puppy, named Mazy – short for Amazing Grace.
