Episcopal Press and News
Presler Named Dean and President of Seminary of the Southwest
Episcopal News Service. March 15, 2002 [2002-066]
Bob Kinney, Director of communication for the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest.
(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 God's mission. I'm honored by the community's 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.