He calls himself “the new guy,” and he has spent his first weeks on the job meeting with and listening to people in places ranging from the red-brick campus of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary to some of the grittier streets of its surrounding neighborhoods.
And as a veteran of seminary work from Africa to the Pacific, the Rev. David Esterline, 64, already has a few ideas of his own about the direction of the Highland Park seminary.
They include making the school more available to students taking part-time, online and nontraditional routes to a master’s of divinity degree, rather than just the traditional three-year full-time program.
More fundamentally, Rev. Esterline wants to build on the theological diversity of a school that has long had a reputation as having a stronger evangelical bent than the more liberal seminaries of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) but which also has faculty from various denominations with views ranging from progressive to conservative.
“The seminary cannot be successful unless it becomes much more diverse not only racially but also theological,” he said. He envisions “a seminary as broad as the church of Jesus Christ, rooted in the Reformed tradition,” he said, referring to the theological heritage of Presbyterianism.
“That rootedness in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has got to be first and foremost,” he said. But “I’m honestly convinced we can’t do good theological education unless we have many different conversation partners, especially those we disagree with.”
He’s lived out that kind of diversity, growing up in a Pentecostal church and later earning a degree in religious studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, later studying at Oxford University and eventually earning a doctorate at Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. All along, he found diverse people “whose faith is at least as deep and profound, who understood Christianity in very different ways.”
Rev. Esterline will formally launch his first academic year today with seminary convocation. He assumed the presidency in June to succeed the Rev. William Carl, who retired after a decade at the helm.
Rev. Esterline previously served as a professor and dean at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, another Presbyterian school. He earlier worked in Presbyterian missions as a seminary professor in Cameroon and later in Fiji, where he was dean at Pacific Theological College. He was long active in the Pittsburgh-based Association of Theological Schools, which accredits seminaries in the United States and Canada and which gave him a bird’s-eye view of trends in theological education.
Rev. Esterline is the sixth president of the seminary since the 1959 merger of two institutions with roots that go back as far as 1794. It reported an enrollment of 219 full- and part-time students in 2014-15. In addition to the master’s of divinity degree, it also offers other master’s degrees and a doctorate.
Rev. Esterline said the seminary is fortunate to have a strong endowment, but it can’t be complacent.
For one thing, its fate is closely tied with that of the Presbyterian Church and other historic Protestant denominations with ties to the seminary and which have been steadily losing members for years.
As these denominations are seeking to innovate, so must the seminary, he said.
For example, he said, he used to take the model of the three-year full-time program as almost a “fifth Gospel.” He said he was struck by a colleague’s observation that “we invented the three-year M.Div, and we can change it.”
He added: “The time of thinking whether or not online education is an appropriate model, it’s time to stop talking about it and get on with it.”
Peter Smith: petersmith@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1416 or on Twitter @PG_PeterSmith.
First Published: September 8, 2015, 4:07 a.m.
