THE LUXCAST - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Director of Marketing and Communications
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- Treasurer / Grand Rapids, MI
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- Associate Director of Development
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- Professor of Pastoral Care and Christian Spirituality / Interim Director of the Doctor of Ministry Program / Executive Director of the Master of Arts in Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program
Chuck is committed to spiritual and emotional formation for the sake of mission. His experience is represented in a fluid combination of pastoral ministry and seminary training for 25 years. He has served several church plants as a teaching pastor and has started two church-based clinical counseling centers. Most recently, he was a teaching pastor at City Church San Francisco, where he co-founded Newbigin House of Studies, an urban and missional training center with offerings through Western Theological Seminary.
His academic specialization is in the intersection of psychology and the Bible, represented best in his book Leaving Egypt: Finding God in the Wilderness Places (Square Inch) - a narrative biblical paradigm for understanding counseling, care, mission, and formation. His next book, The Toughest People to Love (Eerdmans), focuses on caring for the most difficult people leaders encounter. Wholeheartedness (Eerdmans) was released in February 2016, and When Narcissism Comes to Church (IVP) came out in 2020. He is an ordained minister in the Reformed Church in America, a member of City Classis (the RCA's urban, missional classis), and he holds a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology.
Chuck has been married to Sara for 26 years and has two daughters - Emma and Maggie. If you don't see him around campus meeting with students, he is more than likely spending time with his family throwing a frisbee, or traveling to new places, or finding a new extraordinary place to eat.
"I am committed to a relationally-oriented, trauma-informed practice of care and counseling rooted in the Christian soul care tradition. I long to see students become humble, hopeful, wise, and curious as they are formed for the ministries they're called to."
Job Titles:
- Professor of Practical Theology / Director of the Graduate Certificate in Disability and Ministry
Dr. Benjamin T. Conner had been involved in youth ministry in some capacity for over twenty years before coming to Western. He has served the Church in congregations and through Young Life staff. He currently serves on Young Life's National Capernaum Mission Wide Committee.
Ben has earned his Master of Divinity from Union Presbyterian Seminary (Virginia) and his PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary in Mission, Ecumenics and History of Religions. His teaching and research interests include practical theology, youth ministry, discipleship and Christian practices, mission studies, evangelism, disability studies and Christian history. His wife, Melissa, works in therapeutic horsemanship and together they have four children. When he is not on campus Ben can be found playing with his family, in the weight room, on the basketball court or mucking horse stalls.
"I believe that in baptism every member of the Body of Christ is ordained to ministry-spiritually gifted and strategically placed to edify one another, to bear God's love to a hurting world and to bear witness to the redemptive presence of the Triune God. Theological education is about forming people to participate in this calling and to inspire, encourage and equip them to do the same with others. "
Job Titles:
- Associate Academic Dean / Professor of New Testament / Director of the Master of Divinity and Master of Arts Programs
- Professor of Old Testament
Dr. John Brogan was Dean of Students and Student Life at Northwestern College in Iowa for eight years before coming to Western the summer of 2013. He was a Northwestern religion faculty member from 1997 to 2005, department chair from 2002 to 2004, and held the Marvin and Jerene DeWitt Professor of Religion endowed chair. In 2000, he received Northwestern College's Teaching Excellence Award. At Northwestern, he served in numerous administrative roles and on a variety of campus-wide committees. Before serving at Northwestern, Brogan taught at Calvin College, Palm Beach Atlantic University, Reformed Theological Seminary - Charlotte, NC, and Meredith College. He also served as a visiting scholar at Regent College in Vancouver, BC in 2005.
Brogan has a doctorate in New Testament and Christian Origins from Duke University, a Master of Divinity degree from Bethel Theological Seminary (St. Paul, Minnesota), and a Master of Arts in Modern Middle Eastern and North African Studies from the University of Michigan. He is a published author and has made numerous scholarly presentations in the field of New Testament textual criticism.
Brogan loves the church and is excited to help form the next generation of Christian leaders through theological education and ministry experiences. The New Testament vision of the diversity and justice of God's kingdom has led him to an abiding interest in racial reconciliation, social justice, and cross-cultural appreciation.
Before joining Western's faculty in 1994, Carol Bechtel taught at the Presbyterian School of Christian Education in Richmond, Virginia. She has also served as a teaching fellow at Yale Divinity School and as interim pastor of Turn of River Presbyterian Church in Stamford, Connecticut. Dr. Bechtel preaches and teaches widely and is a General Synod Professor of Theology in the Reformed Church in America. She served as President of the RCA's General Synod from 2009-2010. She also serves as the Executive Director of the American Waldensian Society.
Dr. Bechtel grew up on a farm in Fulton, Illinois. She attended Hope College, Western Theological Seminary and received her Ph.D. in Old Testament from Yale University in 1992. She now lives in Holland, Michigan with her husband, Tom Mullens. They have four children and seven grandchildren. Her hobbies include singing, cooking, gardening, and the Celtic harp.
Job Titles:
- Ordained Minister
- Professor Emeritus of Missiology
George Hunsberger came to Western in 1989. He was the coordinator of the Gospel and Our Culture Network in North America from its beginning in 1987 through 2010, and has served as both secretary-treasurer and president of the American Society of Missiology.
Dr. Hunsberger is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), he has been a campus minister; a pastor; a missionary team leader in Nairobi, Kenya; and a teacher at Belhaven College. He has also contributed many articles and reviews to missiological, Reformed, and Presbyterian journals.
Job Titles:
- Research Chair of Reformed Theology
- Research Professor of Reformed Theology
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- Timothy Brown Professor of Preaching and President Emeritus
Timothy Brown brought twenty years of preaching and pastoral experience to the task of teaching homiletics when he arrived at Western Theological Seminary in 1995. After 13 years of inspiring and teaching the next generation of pastors to preach the Word, he accepted the call to lead the seminary as president, starting in July of 2008. In July of 2019 president Brown stepped down from that role in order to return to the classroom.
Prior to coming here Tim was the senior pastor of Christ Memorial Church in Holland, Michigan, from 1983-1995. During that time the church became one of the fastest growing congregations in the United States, as well as one of the largest in the Reformed Church in America. In recent years Dr. Brown held a joint position with Hope College as the Hinga-Boersma Dean of the Chapel. While at Hope College Tim participated in a highly charged student spiritual renewal movement that gained national acclaim.
Dr. Brown is a frequent speaker at pastors conferences, college campuses, and church renewal events. He has served on the Reformed Church in America's Board of Theological Education; the Hope College Board of Trustees; and the executive committee of Words of Hope, a worldwide radio ministry; and is currently a General Synod Professor.
Job Titles:
- James and Jean Cook Professor of New Testament
What is the gospel, and how does it address and transform our lives? This is the question that has shaped Jim Brownson's academic and theological work. Jim's teaching and thinking tends to move between close and careful readings of the biblical text and wide-ranging exercises in theological imagination that bring the biblical text into conversation with life in the modern and postmodern world.
His passion has been to equip students to understand the gospel both in its stunning simplicity and in its incredibly diverse applications to our lives. His scholarly and teaching interests include the Gospel of John, the Synoptic Gospels, biblical hermeneutics, contextual theology, and theology in service to the church. Dr. Brownson served Western eight years as Academic Dean and contributed significantly to revisions in Western's M.Div. curriculum, as well as the launch of the distance learning program in 2003. After 32 years at Western, Dr. Brownson retired in August of 2021.
He is deeply involved in service to the Reformed Church in America, both in theological scholarship and in theological education. He is a long-standing member of the Gospel and Our Culture Network and a contributor to its ongoing research and publication. He often contributes to a variety of journals and magazines as well.
"I try to teach the New Testament in a way that helps students understand the gospel more deeply. That means understanding both the central message of Christian faith and the different ways in which that faith was lived out in the New Testament church. Understanding the unity and diversity of the New Testament is critical to understanding how Christians are to minister today."
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- Vice - Chairperson / Bronx, NY
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- Associate Director of Development
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- Development Associate & Capital Campaign Administrator
Timothy Brown brought twenty years of preaching and pastoral experience to the task of teaching homiletics when he arrived at Western Theological Seminary in 1995. After 13 years of inspiring and teaching the next generation of pastors to preach the Word, he accepted the call to lead the seminary as president, starting in July of 2008. In July of 2019 president Brown stepped down from that role in order to return to the classroom.
Prior to coming here Tim was the senior pastor of Christ Memorial Church in Holland, Michigan, from 1983-1995. During that time the church became one of the fastest growing congregations in the United States, as well as one of the largest in the Reformed Church in America. In recent years Dr. Brown held a joint position with Hope College as the Hinga-Boersma Dean of the Chapel. While at Hope College Tim participated in a highly charged student spiritual renewal movement that gained national acclaim.
Dr. Brown is a frequent speaker at pastors conferences, college campuses, and church renewal events. He has served on the Reformed Church in America's Board of Theological Education; the Hope College Board of Trustees; and the executive committee of Words of Hope, a worldwide radio ministry; and is currently a General Synod Professor.
Job Titles:
- Director of the Eugene Peterson Center, Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology and Christian Imagination
Winn loves the church and beauty and all the things that make up being human in God's verdant, sacred world. A pastor for over 25 years, Winn was the founding pastor of All Souls in Charlottesville, Virginia, and also serves as the founding director of The Genesis Project, a community providing circles of friendship and contemplation for pastors and writers. The thread through all of his work is delight in the God who exists as the blazing center of everything that is good, beautiful and true.
His teaching centers in pastoral theology, connecting the ancient streams of Christian wisdom to the grit and wonders of the parish, where our stories and hopes and sorrows are enveloped in God's mercy. He's also drawn to the intersections of sacramental theology, incarnation, theology of place and the writing craft. Winn holds a PhD. from the University of Virginia in Religion & Literature, where he explored the sacramental vision of Wendell Berry's fiction. He's authored five books (theology, creative non-fiction, fiction and biography): Restless Faith: Hanging on to a God Just Out of Reach; Let God: Spiritual Conversations with François Fénelon; Holy Curiosity: Encountering Jesus' Provocative Questions; Love Big, Be Well: Letters to a Small Town Church and A Burning in My Bones: The Authorized Biography of Eugene H. Peterson. He has also written for Christian Century, Christianity Today, Washington Post and numerous other outlets.
Winn and his wife Miska, a spiritual director and yoga teacher, have two sons (Wyatt and Seth) and live in Holland, Michigan. When they aren't chasing down their dog Gus (a nod to St. Augustine) or planning their next hike in Colorado or walking tour in Scotland, you'll likely find them with a good book, exploring a new restaurant or watching Chef's Table.