To the ones who come after, 

We are within reach of each other. That is the whole problem and the whole hope.  

I am writing to you from the other side of a week I am still learning how to hold. One hundred and thirty-five people came from all over this country, carrying twelve different first languages. Among us were young children and elders, the connecting generations in between, and we gathered on the ancestral lands of the Washoe people at Zephyr Point for Auburn’s annual Heal the World Summit.  

Calling on our ancestors, few of whom would have ever crossed paths as we did this last week, we imagined how we might heal together. I want you to know that we tried, that we made an attempt to heal wounds we may not even know how to name.  

I keep returning to lateral healing. So much of what wounds us travels sideways, neighbor to neighbor. We pass the hurt on to the people closest to us because they are within reach. I came to this summit asking: how do we care for those who are not our own? Not our kin, not our tribe, not our language, not our theology--whose ancestors are different, who perhaps might have harmed or healed others, those who created or dismantled systems that damage all of us. How do we turn toward strangers and refuse to look away?  

The answer I am betting my life on is love, through lateral healing. The same sideways closeness that lets us harm one another is the closeness that lets us mend.  

I will not write you a tidy letter. On one day, we had three labs running, each of them offered by Indigenous relatives, gifts laid down with such care. We hosted healing circles. We passed the mic to everyone, writing letters to the future like this one. And that love was both given and received imperfectly. For some, healing took place. For others, the distance between the pain of our ancestors and our longing for our descendants was too far for a week.  

I am not telling you this as a failure. I am telling you because listening is harder than we admit, and being present is a discipline and practice that is much harder today than ever before. Generational violence and technology drive us apart. Division is the devil’s business plan. To stay in the room, to let a stranger’s grief land in your own chest, to receive a gift offered in a language that is not yours, requires care, patience, and a love so few of us have ever received in our lifetime.  

We need more opportunities to practice. And practice means people will fall short, including me. We hope that you are the beneficiaries of the practice of love we seeded here this year. Healing cannot happen in a week. I knew that walking in and I know it more surely walking out. A week is not enough to undo what generations built, but I do not think a week is nothing either.  

I hope the soil was turned over a little. I hope the ground in each heart was loosened just enough that something could take root later, after the return home, in the ordinary days when the work happens. I hope we prepared the soil for something still possible, something with room in it for our many ancestors and for a shared future none of us can build alone. 

Nobody gets there alone— not to a healed future. Not one where we care for each other’s children and elders. If you are reading this, then some seed we could barely see took hold. Tend it. Turn toward the ones who are not your own and say they belong to you, and that you love them.  

Finally, if you are a descendant of or took part in our Heal the World Summit, thank you. I am filled with gratitude for the shared hope and love. As our grounding leader, Dr. Lisa Asedillo, led with her parents, Doug and Rebecca, she reminded us of James Baldwin’s words: “Love has never been a popular movement and no one has ever really wanted to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and passion of very few people.” You are holding the world together with your love, whether you know it or not.  

A Prayer for Love 

Creator, keeper of every language and every land, 

Teach us to care for those who are not our own. When a stranger's grief turns toward us, do not let us look away. When a gift is offered in a tongue we do not speak, open our ears anyway. When the circle is held out, give us courage not to step back. 

We confess how hard it is to listen, how often we cannot speak, how easily we stay outside the room. Be patient with us. 

We know healing does not come quickly. So soften the soil. Loosen the ground in every heart just enough that something might take root later, in the ordinary days where the real work waits. 

Make of us a people who heal sideways, the same closeness that once carried our wounds now carrying our mending. 

Hold our ancestors and our shared future in the same wide hand, and remind us that no one becomes a constellation alone. 

Amen. 

With the good seeds of love planted in hard ground, 

Rev. Patrick B. Reyes, Ph.D.
Executive Vice President and Dean

Friends, 

This year our country turns 250 years old. Auburn has been present for ten generations of that story, founded in 1818. 

It is hard to stand at these milestones and celebrate. When this country was founded, entire generations of people were not considered fully human. Neither the nation marking 250 years, nor the institution called Auburn, would have counted them among those the founders imagined as free, as citizen, as whole. 

We hold two things at once. We grieve the historic violence woven into these foundations, and the violence that continues against the land, against the vulnerable, against communities pushed to the margins. And we give thanks for the ten generations who labored anyway, who tended the acequia so that we might drink today, who planted what they would not harvest so that others might one day stand whole and free. 

This is why we lead with love. Not love as sentiment, but love as the hard, patient work of repair. Love that names the wound and seeks healing. Love that sits between the ancestors who dreamed of a better society and the descendants who will inherit what we build now. 

The founders could not see us. And yet here we are, tending what they could not imagine. That, too, is a kind of healing. 

A Prayer for Healing 

God of our ancestors and of our descendants, 

we come to these milestones with grief and with gratitude. 

For every generation counted less than human, we ask your mercy. 

Where there has been violence, make us instruments of healing. 

Where there has been fear, teach us to lead with love. 

Root us deep enough to shelter those who come after, 

that they may find shade from what we plant today. 

Amen. 

Last fall, we shared a deliberate, love-rooted plan for Auburn's leadership transition. Today we write with joy, and with news that the road ahead has come into focus. 

With the Board's affirmation in March and its unanimous vote in May, we are overjoyed to share that Rev. Dr. Patrick B. Reyes will become Auburn's 12th President on October 1, 2026, and Rev. Emma Jordan-Simpson will step into a new role as Senior Advisor on that same day. 

This is a celebration years in the making. It is the fruit of shared leadership, deep trust, and a love for this institution and the world it serves. And it unfolds in faithful stages. 

Beginning July 1, 2026, Emma enters a season of sabbatical, rest she has earned and a practice Auburn cherishes. During this time, Patrick will carry the responsibilities of the presidency, continuing the partnership that has shaped Auburn's recent chapter. 

As Senior Advisor, Emma will help ground Patrick in the relationships and rhythms of New York City, continue her public thought leadership with a new book arriving in Spring 2027, and work alongside Patrick to secure Auburn's long-term success and resilience. She is not stepping away. She is stepping into a role only she can hold. 

Why this matters 

When we announced this transition, we named it a faithful act of leadership, built on transparency, foresight, and love. Moving the timeline forward is that same act, continued, and accelerated by confidence. Confidence in Auburn's foundation. Confidence in the model of shared, healing-centered leadership that Emma and Patrick have built together, in full view of the field.  

Auburn does not just practice faithful succession. We studied it. Our own research, Executive Turnover in Theological Education, found that executive leadership is best understood as a relay race, won not by holding on but by handing off well. We are running our own race by the wisdom we have gathered for the field. 

Auburn remains where faith leaders learn to heal the world, together, across every tradition. That mission does not change hands. It deepens. 

A word from our Board 

We asked our Board Chair and trustees to share why this moment, and this timing, matters. 

Succession done well is not a contingency plan. It is a gift. We honor this timeline not out of necessity but out of love. What Emma and Patrick have modeled in shared leadership is something the field can and should learn from. When an institution has discerned together, lead together as they have, we can begin to living into the healed future we have been building towards. We are celebrating the future we were hoping for.  — Kim Anderson, Chair, Board of Directors 

What's ahead 

This upcoming year, Patrick will undertake a listening tour, sitting with the partners and friends who make Auburn's work possible. If you are willing to host Patrick and introduce him (or reintroduce him) to your friends or colleagues, or simply share coffee and conversation one on one, we would love to hear from you. (More on his 100 coffee conversations below.) 

Auburn's future is being built today, with joy. To ensure this leadership season is strong and that Auburn continues to thrive, we invite your partnership. Please consider a generous gift in this moment of promise. Together, we will keep healing-centered leadership alive for a world that needs it. 

With deep gratitude and great joy, 

Rev. Emma Jordan-Simpson, President 

Rev. Dr. Patrick B. Reyes, President-Designate 

Kim Anderson, Chair, Board of Directors 

Auburn Theological Seminary 

Lead with love. 

Dear Ones,

“I don’t understand why democracy is the wrong frame. I don’t understand why knowing the names of the mountains and lakes matters, or understanding why learning the original names matters to a moral imagination.”  

The comment above was shared with me by an organizer who was hosting a gathering to save democracy— a necessary effort these days, unfortunately. Still, I responded by insisting that my people have been here longer, surviving genocide and cultural eradication. Suggesting that God’s vision of history is longer than 250 years old.  

I shared with this organizer that we had committed to years of intentional story circles, centering healing, remaining faithful to God’s time, and operating on what I call ancestor time. Healing, especially from generational trauma, requires a deeper response than a one-time gathering that continues to dismiss the violence my community experienced. We require a healing response that honors a longer history and a clear understanding of the theological assumptions that are driving current divisions.  

I just came home from one of Auburn’s story circles in Alaska, where we both learned from and took part in a healing circle. After dancing, singing, and sharing stories at the SHI Celebration, we were all reminded that we are still here. I am still here, still singing, still moving, in the old ways and the new. Even though our songs, language, and culture were outlawed, and our children stolen away and sent to boarding schools, people are still singing, recovering language, and celebrating culture. A culture that knew and taught the names of the land and sea. From babies to elders, practices were shared with kin and guests alike.  

Celebration is its own form of testimony. It says that the breath God gave us is still in us, and we are still using it to praise. It reminded me so much of what we do back home in our community; recovering our languages, practices, and traditions.  

Part of the purpose of this trip, and of our storytelling work more broadly, was to seek a deeper narrative than the one many people were celebrating this year as the nation marked 250 years since the colonies declared their independence. We have been listening with Indigenous communities to ask what healing looks like in the aftermath of genocide and epistemicide, especially where that violence was enacted or supported by the church. 

In our story circle, and in the quieter work of telling the truth to one another, we spoke about the church’s violence against our communities. We named the generational harm that follows, the way colonial violence spreads like a disease. One speaker named it lateral violence. 

Lateral violence. 

Lateral violence names what happens when harm done to a people turns inward and sideways, when those carrying the weight of oppression begin to press that same weight onto those beside them. Paulo Freire called this dynamic the sub-oppressor. The oppressed, having known the logic of domination, can begin to host that logic in their own bodies and aim it at peers. The colonized hand reaches for the colonizer’s tools and uses them on kin. I have seen it in movement organizations, congregations, families, and myself. It is one of the cruelest inheritances, because it convinces a wounded people that those whom we should be in solidarity with are somehow a threat. 

I left Alaska carrying a question, and I want to set it down here where the future can hold it. 

What if we practiced lateral healing? 

Extending friendship that crosses the very line drawn to decide who counts as your people. Listening to stories. Making space in our hearts and souls for those we might count as family. 

If violence can move sideways, so can love. I am curious what it would mean to build this on purpose, not as sentiment but as practice. To turn toward one another with the same attention we have been taught to turn outward in vigilance. To see the person beside us, and the stranger across the road, as the neighbor God keeps asking us to recognize. A place where repair begins, rather than the easiest place to pass on our pain. 

For that organizer I mentioned at the beginning, it is in fact a necessity for you to learn the languages, names, and practices that existed on this land before contact in order for us to heal in meaningful ways. It is an act of repair to lay a better foundation for a democracy that is worth saving.  

Healing, in an age of genocide and division, can feel impossible. But I can sense its outline in a story circle where people choose honesty and gentleness at the same time. I can feel it when someone says, I am hurting, and is met with, we are still here. Lateral healing looks like elders and leaders refusing to compete for the same narrow scrap of recognition. It looks like communities under the weight of historic oppression, the dispossessed and the displaced, deciding that scarcity is a story told about us, not a truth we must perform on one another. 

What world do you get to live in because we chose lateral healing? If we practiced healing with the stranger, what did it build? Did the sideways wound begin to close? Did the next generation inherit something other than suspicion or pain? 

I am writing toward a world where the answer is yes. Where the SHI Celebration in Alaska was not an exception to our grief, but a glimpse of our ordinary life. Where we remembered, together, that we were never meant to be each other’s oppressors.

We were meant to be each other’s friend. We were meant to be each other’s medicine. 

With hope and with the songs still in my ears, 

Rev. Patrick B. Reyes, Ph.D.
Executive Vice President and Dean

Our institutions will not save us.  

As Auburn’s Dr. Walter Wink wrote, the Powers have fallen.  

I do not say that with bitterness. I say it in truth, and because you need to hear it from someone who loves institutions, who has given his life to one. I say it as someone who believes in the slow sacred work, of building something that outlasts any one person. The sooner we understand this, the sooner we can get to the real work. 

For ten generations, Auburn has done this work. We prepared faith leaders to go into a world where the courts, the churches, and the legislatures have repeatedly failed to make things whole. When our institution was founded, not one member could vote. Half of our staff's descendants were not even considered fully human by the Powers. And our founders could not have imagined the leadership shaping this institution today.  

Our ancestors lived and worked for a future we now inhabit. We have outlasted every fracture this country has handed us. We are still here. And yet, I find myself returning to this truth: the institutions, even the ones we love and lead, were not designed to heal what ails us. They were designed to manage it. 

Look at what the courts have done.  

This last week, on April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Callais v. Landry. In a 6-3 ruling along partisan lines, the court held that Louisiana’s congressional map, which had created a second majority-Black district, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, leaving what remains of the Voting Rights Act a hollow shell of what it was before. The 1965 Voting Rights Act, born out of the Civil Rights Movement, paid for in blood and sacrifice, gutted. Not by enemies from outside the system, but by the system itself. 

The court has shown us who it protects before, not just in this moment of what feels like a widening political divide. In May 2025, the Supreme Court refused to hear Apache Stronghold v. United States. At the heart of the case was Oak Flat, Chí’chil Biłdagoteel,  a sacred Apache site in Arizona’s Tonto National Forest, where Western Apache people have practiced religious ceremonies for centuries. The Apache Stronghold argued that transferring the land to a private copper mining company would destroy a site that serves as a direct corridor to the Creator, the only place where certain ceremonies can be performed. The court declined to hear them. The land is set to become a crater two miles wide and a thousand feet deep. Sacred ground, gone. And this court, the same court that has repeatedly expanded religious freedom of protections for others, could not find the same urgency for the Western Apache. The treaties were signed, and the land rights were promised. But when Indigenous nations went to reclaim what was theirs, the land they had purchased back on the open market, land that had been illegally taken from them, the Supreme Court said no again.

In City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whom many of us admired, wrote the 8-1 opinion ruling that the Oneida Nation could not restore sovereignty to lands that had once been theirs, lands taken through transactions that clearly violated the terms of the Federal Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts. The reasoning, at its core, was that too much time had passed. Justice Ginsburg seemed to say: your lands were taken from you illegally, but there is nothing we can do for you now. The court reached back to the Doctrine of Discovery, a legal construct rooted in 15th-century papal edicts that gave European sovereigns the right to take lands occupied by non-Christians, and called it settled law. 

Even the church, my church, the institution I am accountable to and love, has not always been writing a letter to the future that is faithful to a God of love. The church blessed the Doctrine of Discovery and looked the other way when the residential schools took children from their families. The church has too often reflected the world’s imagination rather than challenging it. Healing from these wounds is the long work of leadership.  

The Powers are fallen. But can they be redeemed? Can we achieve a healed future? 

The failure of institutions to heal us does not mean healing is not possible. It means the healing was never going to come from institutions that were not designed for healing, but for power. It was always going to come from the circle. From the community. From the stories we are writing together. Returning to Wink, we remember that the Powers can be redeemed by our better angels.  

Those better angels are you.  

If our story circles have had any impact at all, somewhere right now a community is naming a wound that has never had a name. Somewhere a leader is sitting with the grief of their people and not running from it. Somewhere the historical trauma that was supposed to be passed down silently, invisibly, generation after generation, is being interrupted. Healing is happening and just as in our body, it happens through relationships below the surface, evidenced later by the scars we carry.  

In the last two years, ninety-five emerging leaders have come through our programs. Ninety-five faith leaders rooted in their traditions, committed to justice, and now, I pray, equipped to see their work in a longer lens. They are not just fixing what is broken in front of them. They are healing a world they may not even live to see fully restored. That is the letter we are asking them to carry to the future, to you.  

We were not asking for better institutions, more responsive courts, or a church that finally gets it right. Those things matter, and I do desire them, but they are not enough. What I want,what we are called to build, is a healed society. One that works for all of God’s creation. Citizen or not. Member of my congregation or not. Inside the treaty or outside of it. 

And so, we write. We gather together in a sacred circle. We tell the truth about what has been done, about what has been lost, and about what, by the grace of something older and deeper than any institution, still remains. We train leaders not just for the next election cycle or the next budget year, but for the next generation and the one after that. We send letters into a future we will never fully see. Trusting that love, pressed into the work, carried in the stories, embodied in the leaders we form, will find its way there. 

The institutions will not save us. They have fallen. But they can be redeemed. 

Our better angels, you, rooted and healing and refusing to forget, just might see the healed future so many of us are working towards. 

A Prayer for Courage

God of all generations, 

the time before our treaties and before our courts, 

before our institutions and our arguments about them, 

hold us now in your patience. 

 

Give us the courage to name what has been broken 

without letting the breaking have the last word. 

Give us communities that can hold grief and hope at the same time. 

Give us leaders with eyes long enough 

to see a future, they may not inhabit 

and lead with love. 

 

May the healing we plant today 

take root in soil and in circle. 

May the children inherit a world 

shaped by those who loved it before they arrived. 

 

And may we, in our moment, 

be faithful to the ones who are coming. 

 

Amen. 

With love across time, 

Rev. Patrick B. Reyes, Ph.D.
Executive Vice President and Dean

I write in a time when the world is on fire. From climate change to bombing campaigns, humanity appears grimly determined to destroy our planet for future generations.

But even with everything else going on at home and abroad, the recent journey of Artemis II around the moon captured our collective attention. Perhaps you have even seen their pictures of the bright blue dot we call Earth and of a total solar eclipse seen from behind the Moon.

I am writing to you after the space mission came up during a monthly gathering at my church. Those in attendance expressed the awe of the pictures. Yet, one of them wondered, why are we spending so much money going to space with all the problems right here? I conceded that this argument makes a valid point.

To my way of thinking, however, the mission of Artemis II is for all humankind. We can learn from the astronauts themselves, and I believe these lessons can have a positive bearing on the future.

The astronauts aboard Artemis II were Canadian and American, male and female, Black and white. Each individual was at the top of their field, excelling in bravery, expertise and knowledge. Together, they formed an incredible crew. Astronaut Christina Koch defined a “crew” as those with a “shared purpose, silent sacrifice … giving grace and accountability.”

As they went beyond our planet’s atmosphere, these astronauts challenged humankind to move beyond the “us versus them” mentality that is the source of so many problems and become one community. We share the spaceship Earth; like crew members, we are (in Koch’s words) “inescapably linked.”

Quantum physicists tell us that, whether on Earth or across the galaxy, two objects (such as subatomic particles) that seem separated by vast distances of time and space are, in fact, invisibly and intimately connected. To my way of thinking, this concept was expressed long ago as the idea of a God in whom we live, move and have our being (Acts 17:28).

What I know is that, for all their grandiose accomplishments, the crew members of Artemis II are also personally relatable. They had a clogged toilet, and they joked about it!

The crew also grieved together. One of them, with the fitting last name of Wiseman, had a new crater named after his wife, Carroll, who had died of cancer in 2020. The entire crew wept and held onto each other as they spelled out her name, letter by letter, over the transmission back to Earth. Suddenly, whether it was called the body of believers or quantum entanglement, we knew of a deep, abiding connection. Though literally farther from Earth than any other human, they felt like part of our family.

In addition to clogged toilets and potty humor, grief and sorrow are as much a part of the human experience as pride over accomplishments. Just as we do not all achieve the same things, we do not all suffer the same losses — and yet, all of us will suffer loss at some point. Despite the many differences that will surely exist in your future world, loss remains as inevitable as gravity on Earth; while it weighs on us, sharing our grief can lighten even our dark sides.

I pray that, on this whirling planet, we will remember such lessons, like the connecting power of grief, so that we might care for one another like a crew and thereby make this planet a safer, kinder and more loving place for today and for the future.

In that holy hope,

Andrew Taylor-Troutman

Rev. Dr. Andrew Taylor-Troutman is the author of eight books of short essays and poetry. He serves as the senior pastor and head of staff of Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he shares life with his partner, their three children and a rambunctious dog, who occasionally makes Andrew lose his religion.

You are the dream, the laughter echoing through the long corridors of time. We lived and loved with fierce intention, not because love was an easy thing, but because it was the work of our hands and hearts, a practice sanctified each day.

We placed our hope in this sacred labor, believing your lives could unfold in joy, not in the shadow of fear. We prayed for you under Shabbat candles, through tears and the ache of honest conversation, longing for a time when no child wonders if gathering to pray is safe.

We looked to a future where no one queries if Grandpa will return home. Where family is not divided by borders or suspicion, but bound together by hospitality and justice.

May your communities be circles of wisdom—elders, healers, storytellers—gathering you in, teaching you the songs and languages that keep memory alive and joy communal. Let your feet know land that welcomes you, that the sky above and the ground below are familiar and kind, restored by your relationship with creation.

May you open the news and see stories of joy. Where we shared our love with the world, not our war.

May you know the weight and the lightness of history, its courage and its failure, its liberation and its pain, and hold each with humility, refusing to turn away from any piece of truth. May your generation be the ones who mend wounds, who make healing our true inheritance.

I hope you see in your ancestors, those we call emerging leaders at Auburn. They are the leaders who stayed present, who chose repair over retreat, who kept pouring life into those who would come after, like Joy, Liz, Alma, Josh, Abeera, Zuogwi, Blake, Alex, Davion, Grace, Sylvie, like Ross, Caleb, Charlotte, Jael, Anthony, Brandon, Ali, Devon, and so many others.

I hope you know the chain of love is unbroken, that what was entrusted to us has been entrusted to you, and you have made it more whole. That you are defining the world by your laughter.

You are the future we served, the story we labored to tell, one where love and courage are your birthright, and laughter is the language of your days.

A Prayer for Healing

To a known God,

Heal what has been broken in us and between us.

Heal the wounds that were passed down through generations before anyone had words for them.

Heal the land that has been taken from and not returned to.

Heal the communities that were told their belonging was conditional.

Heal the fear that lived in the bodies of parents who only wanted to worship, to rest, to raise their children in peace.

Make us instruments of that healing.

Give us the courage to do the work that outlasts us, to love beyond what we can see, to equip those who come after us with more than we had.

Let those five generations from now, the future we now serve, grow up in wholeness.

Let them know, in their bodies and in their communities, that they are beloved.

May it be so. May we make it so. Amen.

With love that refuses to give up on a dream of a healed future,

Rev. Patrick B. Reyes, Ph.D.
Executive Vice President and Dean

As part of the long-term work to strengthen Auburn’s core, clarify its mission, and secure its future, President Jordan-Simpson and the Board have together mapped a leadership transition that builds on the strategic groundwork of recent years. With confidence in the road ahead, we share that President Jordan-Simpson will step down at the conclusion of this strategic cycle in 2027, following a deliberate and collaborative transition process grounded in Auburn’s mission and values.

Effective July 1, 2025, we celebrate the appointment of Rev. Dr. Patrick B. Reyes as Auburn’s Executive Vice President & Dean. A visionary scholar and trusted leader, Dr. Reyes has already played a pivotal leadership role, partnering with the President and Board to reimagine what a 200-year-old seminary can offer a rapidly changing world. He will steward Auburn’s three cornerstone portfolios of faith-leadership formation, field-advancing research, and storytelling and narrative change.

Over the next year, Dr. Reyes will work alongside President Jordan-Simpson and the Board to finalize and implement Auburn’s next business plan. Following Auburn’s Heal the World Summit in June 2026, President Jordan-Simpson will take a sabbatical, during which Dr. Reyes will serve as Acting President. Upon President Jordan-Simpson’s return in September 2026, they will share executive responsibilities.

With the Board’s support, Dr. Reyes will succeed President Jordan-Simpson as Auburn’s 12th President on July 1, 2027. We are excited that they will be documenting this model of shared leadership to serve the wider field.

Why This Matters

President Jordan-Simpson has led Auburn Theological Seminary to embody healing-centered leadership during a time of deep social uncertainty. This succession plan is a faithful act of leadership in itself—built on transparency, foresight, and love for the community. By planning openly and well in advance, we are:

Demonstrating Healing-Centered Leadership

Together, Emma and Patrick have modeled a leadership ethos grounded in relationship, transparency, and shared decision-making—strengthening Auburn’s governance, organizational structure, and financial foundation.

Securing Generational Strength

This thoughtful transition ensures continuity of wisdom, mission, and momentum—preparing future leaders to inherit an institution that is financially sound, justice-rooted, and prepared for tomorrow’s challenges.

Modeling Best Practices for the Field

As seminaries and nonprofits across the country navigate leadership changes, Auburn offers a living example of succession rooted in faithfulness — an approach worth sharing widely.

When leaders plan for tomorrow while tending to the well-being of people today, communities thrive. That is the legacy we are shaping at Auburn — with your partnership —and it will serve rising generations for years to come.

Auburn's future is being built today. To ensure this leadership transition is strong and that Auburn continues to thrive, we invite your partnership. Please consider a generous gift to Auburn in this season of planning and promise. Together, we will keep healing-centered leadership alive for a world that desperately needs it.

With deep gratitude,

Rev. Emma Jordan-Simpson, President

Auburn Theological Seminary

Dr. Prabhjot Singh, Chair

Board of Directors

Today, we are reminded of a repeated message from Levar Burton in Reading Rainbow. In every episode, he would recommend books about different cultures and people, but before he would offer his recommendations he would say: “But, you don’t have to take my word for it...” The episode would immediately cut to young people sharing their favorite books.

With this same spirit, Auburn’s leadership believes in a healed future, but, you don’t have to take our word for it...

• Letter from Liz

• Letter from Grace

• Letter from Afif Rahman

If you feel inspired or called to share your vision for a healed future, send it to our dean and we would love to share it with our community.