Annual Data Tables reveal the universe of theological education

Each fall, member institutions of the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) submit extensive information about enrollment, faculty, and finances to ATS. As a service to its members and the public, the association compiles this information and makes it available in an aggregate form on its website. This year’s data is now online at www.ats.edu/resources/institutional-data/annual-data-tables. 

As of fall 2013, there were 267 ATS member schools, including 241 accredited theological schools, 7 candidate schools, and 19 associate members. 

Of the 267 schools, 40 were in Canada and 227 in the United States. A list of all member schools, with their current status, is at www.ats.edu/member-schools/member-school-list.

Of the 267 schools, 173 were freestanding, independent schools, while 52 were “university-affiliated” and 42 were “college-affiliated.”

Of the 267 schools, 151 were affiliated with a Protestant denomination, 59 were non-, inter-, or multidenominational, 52 were Roman Catholic, 3 were Orthodox, 1 was Catholic of the Eastern Rite, and 1 did not report.Twenty percent of all members had a head-count enrollment of less than 75, while 12 percent had a head-count of more than 500.

One hundred ninety-eight U.S. member schools reported the total compensation package for their chief executives, where “total compensation” included base salary, housing, and pension contributions. Of these, the average total compensation was $174,888. For academic vice presidents/academic deans, 203 schools reported, with an average total compensation of $115,149. One hundred twenty-nine schools reported the total compensation for their chief development officer, with an average total compensation of $122,206.

In Canada, the average total compensation packages were lower: $130,382 for presidents (with 31 schools reporting), $113,560 for academic vice presidents/academic deans (with 33 reporting), and $98,220 for chief development officers (with 13 reporting). 

These figures, along with salary data for other administrators and for faculty, vary widely by size and type of institution. They are broken down in many ways in the full data tables, which run to 169 pages.

Changes at the top

Martin B. Copenhaver

■ The board of trustees of Andover Newton Theological School has named the Rev. Martin B. Copenhaver as the school’s next president. He succeeds the Rev. Nick Carter, president for the last 10 years, who will retire at the end of this academic year.

Copenhaver has been senior pastor of Wellesley Congregational Church (also called “the Village Church”) in Wellesley, Massachusetts, since 1994. He has been a trustee of Andover Newton for 10 years and has served on the board of advisors of Yale Divinity School for eight years. Ordained in the United Church of Christ, Copenhaver is a graduate of Dickinson College and Yale Divinity School. He served parishes in Arizona, Vermont, and Connecticut before moving to the Village Church, which is the largest United Church of Christ congregation in Massachusetts.

Copenhaver and his wife, Karen, an attorney in private practice, are the parents of two adult children.

Dean O. Wenthe

■ The Rev. Dean O. Wenthe has been named president of the Concordia University System, the network of 10 colleges and universities affiliated with the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod. He succeeds the Rev. Alan Borcherding, who led the system on an interim basis from 2010 until 2013. Borcherding will continue as director of university education for the system.

Wenthe was named interim president of the 28,000-student system in October 2013 and was subsequently named to the post on a permanent basis in March 2014. Previously he was president of Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana, from 1996 to 2011, and after being named president emeritus, he remained on the faculty as professor of exegetical theology.

Wenthe attended Concordia University Wisconsin and later graduated from Concordia Senior College (Fort Wayne, Indiana), Concordia Seminary (St. Louis, Missouri), Princeton Theological Seminary, and the University of Notre Dame. He served as pastor of Zion Lutheran Church in Atlantic, Iowa, before joining the faculty of Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, in 1980.

Wenthe and his wife, Linda, have four sons.

Robin J. Steinke

■ The board of directors of Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, has named the Rev. Robin J. Steinke as the school’s next president. Steinke succeeds the Rev. Rick Foss, director of contextual learning at the seminary, who has served as interim president since 2012.

For the past 15 years, Steinke has been a member of the faculty at Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg, where she is now dean of the seminary and professor of theological ethics and public life. Previously, from 1984 to 1992, she was a financial planner and training manager at American Express Financial Advisors in Atlanta.

Steinke co-chairs the Theological Education Advisory Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and chairs the Endowment Fund of the Lutheran World Federation Council. She is completing a six-year term as a commissioner for the Commission on Accrediting of the Association of Theological Schools. She is a graduate of Augustana College (Sioux Falls, South Dakota), Trinity Lutheran Seminary, and the University of Cambridge. 

Luther Seminary, with a head-count enrollment of 695, is the largest of the eight seminaries of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Karen L. Bloomquist

■ The Rev. Karen L. Bloomquist has been named the new head of Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary. She succeeds the Rev. Phyllis Anderson, the first female president of a seminary affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Anderson retired on December 31, 2013, after leading the seminary since 2004. 

On January 1, 2014, the seminary became a graduate division of California Lutheran University, and the title of the seminary head was changed from “president” to “dean and chief administrative officer.” Under the new structure, the seminary dean reports to the provost of California Lutheran University except in matters of church relations, where she reports directly to the university president.

Between 1999 and 2010, Bloomquist was director of the Theology and Studies Department of the Lutheran World Federation in Geneva, Switzerland. 

Previously she had served as director for studies in the Division for Church in Society, a unit of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, in which she is an ordained minister.

Bloomquist is a graduate of St. Olaf College, Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, and Union Theological Seminary in New York. She and her husband, Bill Strehlow, have one adult son.

California Lutheran University has about 4,200 undergraduate and graduate students, including those in graduate schools of management, education, and psychology. Its main campus is in Thousand Oaks, a suburb of Los Angeles. Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, located 380 miles north in Berkeley, has a head-count enrollment of 100. It is one of nine members of the Graduate Theological Union.

Deana Porterfield

■ The boards of trustees of Roberts Wesleyan College and Northeastern Seminary have named Dr. Deana Porterfield as the 11th president of the college and the third president of the seminary. She succeeds John Martin, who will retire in June 2014 after 18 years at the college and seminary, including the last 12 as president of both schools.

Porterfield has spent the last 24 years at Azusa Pacific University in Azusa, California, where she has been vice president for enrollment management, chief of staff, senior vice president for people and organizational development, and executive vice president of the university’s online division. Porterfield is a graduate of Azusa Pacific and the University of La Verne. She and her husband, Doug, have two daughters.

Roberts Wesleyan College and Northeastern Seminary are legally distinct institutions that share a campus near Rochester, New York. They are affiliated with the Free Methodist Church.

Edwin Gonsalves

■ Father Edwin Gonsalves has been named president-rector of St. Augustine’s Seminary in Toronto. He succeeds Msgr. A. Robert Nusca, who has led the seminary for 13 years and who will receive an assignment of new duties from Cardinal Thomas C. Collins, archbishop of Toronto. 

Since 2008, Father Gonsalves has been pastor of St. Barnabas Catholic Church in Scarborough, Ontario. Previously he was director of the archdiocesan Office of Catholic Youth and served parishes in Newmarket and Oshawa, Ontario.

Gonsalves began his studies for the priesthood at St. Pius X Seminary in the Indian city of Mumbai before moving with his parents to Toronto in 1994. He later graduated from St. Augustine’s and was ordained a priest in 1999.

Gladstone Stevens

■ Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco has appointed Sulpician Father Gladstone Stevens as president/ rector of St. Patrick’s Seminary and University in Menlo Park, California. He replaces Bishop Thomas Daly, auxiliary bishop of San Jose, California, who has been serving as interim president and rector since September, when Sulpician Father James McKearney was asked to resign.

Father Stevens has been associate professor of theology, vice rector, and academic dean at the seminary since 2008. Previously he taught theology at St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore.

Born in Connecticut and raised in Tennessee, Stevens is a graduate of Quincy College, Marquette University, and St. Mary’s Seminary and University. He was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of Louisville in 2000 and is a member of the Society of St. Sulpice, a community of diocesan priests dedicated to theological education. 

Richard Land

■ In 2013 the board of trustees of Southern Evangelical Seminary named the Rev. Richard Land as the institution’s fourth president. He succeeded Robert C. Westra, a member of the seminary’s board of trustees who had led the school on an interim basis since the resignation of former president Alex McFarland in 2010. McFarland is now on the faculty at North Greenville University.

From 1988 until 2013, Land was head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. While in that position, he served five terms on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. Prior to leading the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Land had been a professor and vice president for academic affairs at Criswell College in Dallas.

Land is a graduate of Princeton University, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, and Oxford University. He and his wife, Rebekah, a psychotherapist in private practice, have three adult children.

Southern Evangelical Seminary is an evangelical, nondenominational school offering undergraduate and graduate programs that focus on Christian apologetics. Founded in 1992, it is located in Matthews, North Carolina.

David Dockery

■ The Rev. David Dockery has been named 15th president of Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois. He will succeed Neil Nyberg, an attorney and a member of the university’s board of regents, who stepped in as interim president last year when the Rev. Craig Williford elected not to renew his five-year contract and began a one-year sabbatical to end his term in office.

Dockery will become interim president on June 1 and will officially assume the university presidency when affirmed at a convention of the Evangelical Free Church of America. President of Union University in Jackson, Tennessee, since 1995, Dockery had previously been chief academic officer at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, where he was also professor of theology and New Testament.

Dockery is a graduate of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Grace Seminary, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Texas Christian University, and the University of Texas. He and his wife, Lanese, have three adult sons.