wfn.org | Episcopalians: Presler named dean and president of Seminary of the Southwest

[dmack@episcopalchurch.org]

March 15, 2002

2002-066

Episcopalians: Presler named dean and president of Seminary 
of the Southwest

by Bob Kinney

(ENS) The Rev. 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, Presler will begin work at the 
seminary this summer.  He will succeed the Very Rev. Durstan 
McDonald, dean since 1984, who will retire at the end of May.

"Titus Presler brings stellar gifts of ministry and 
scholarship mixed with a unique worldview to the Seminary of the 
Southwest," said Bishop 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.

Our church needs leaders eager to discern and join in what 
God is up to in the world, 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 Gods mission. Im honored by the 
communitys invitation that I journey with them. 

Presler comes to the seminary from Cambridge, Massachusetts, 
where he has been rector of St. Peter's Church since 1991, 
turning the declining inner-city parish into a diverse and 
substantial congregation dynamically engaged in mission in its 
urban community and the wider world. He has taught mission 
studies and preaching at Harvard Divinity School, the 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 Presler will also have an 
academic appointment in mission and world Christianity at the 
Seminary of the Southwest.

His 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. The Preslers, with their four children, traveled 
to Zimbabwe as missionaries during that country's first years of 
majority rule. Presler was rector of the Bonda Church District 
from 1983 to 1986, opening new congregations in the rural 
district of the Anglican Diocese of Manicaland. The Rev. Jane 
Crosby Butterfield, whom Presler married in 1974, is mission 
personnel officer at the Episcopal Church Center.

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--Bob Kinney is director of communication for the Episcopal 
Theological Seminary of the Southwest.