The long-running partnership of board chair W. Clark Randall and president Lovett H. Weems, Jr., will soon be part of the history of Saint Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, Missouri, but the fruit of their labors will be pastoring churches for many years to come. The mutually supportive nature of their relationship offers a pattern worth repeating in any school.

Filling a vacancy in a seminary’s top administrative slot is a task most boards approach with fear and trembling—and rightly so. This is a decision that, for good or ill, can be expected to have long-term and far-reaching implications, and, in this uncertain world, the need to make that decision can occur unexpectedly. Rebekah Burch Basinger offers some experiences and suggestions that can help board members be ready in the event of need.

Rigid, top-down power structures—long the model for leadership in almost all endeavors—are no longer as acceptable or productive as they once were. The dynamics of leadership have been affected profoundly by the information age, and the implications for religious institutions suggest some very positive opportunities for remodeling organizational structures. This excerpt from Building Effective Boards for Religious Organizations, edited by Thomas P. Holland and David C. Hester, looks at how and why new leadership structures are becoming a reality.

Here's a picture of theological schools' governing boards limned out by data the schools supplied in a survey conducted by In Trust late last year. The editors are grateful to the schools—more than three-quarters—who took the time to reply to a complex questionnaire at a particularly busy time of year.