Barbara Wheeler, president of Auburn Seminary for 30 years, dies at age 79

Throughout all her accomplishments, Wheeler never obtained a graduate degree

Barbara Wheeler (Photo courtesy of Angela Jimenez, www.angelajimenezphotography.com)

Barbara G. Wheeler, of New York City and Granville, New York, died on October 24 at Calvary Hospital in New York City, with her husband Sam and her son Isaac at her side. She was 79.

Wheeler was a formidable leader and incisive interpreter of American theological education for nearly a half-century. She served as president of Auburn Seminary in New York City from 1979-2009, and in those years also established and directed Auburn’s Center for the Study of Theological Education, producing research that grounded and enlarged the understanding of theological leaders, faculty, students and staff.

She helped found and lead the field of congregational studies in the 1980s and co-authored the award-winning “Being There,” an ethnographic study of life at two seminaries, one evangelical and one mainline. She served as a leader in the national Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), building relationships and modeling mutual respect across differences in the midst of fraught church battles over the most divisive issues of the late 20th century.

In a period of tumultuous change in American religion, Wheeler worked to help the leaders and institutions of mainline Protestantism be their best selves. Her intellectual tenacity and unsentimental bearing mingled with deep love for the church, evoking both great respect and a little fear in her colleagues.  And yet her outward fierceness was matched by an inward gentleness that made her a cherished colleague, mentor, family member, and friend.

Remarkably, she accomplished all this without the standard credential of a graduate degree.

She was born Barbara Helen Grumbach on October 10, 1945, in Oakland, California, the eldest of four daughters of Doris and Leonard Grumbach. Not long after Barbara’s birth, the family moved to Iowa, and from there to the Albany area of New York, where Barbara and her sisters Jane, Elizabeth, and Kathryn grew up together. Leonard taught physiology at the Albany School of Medicine, and Doris taught English, first at the Albany Girls Academy and later at the College of Saint Rose.

Barbara began her own education in public schools, and she attended Albany Girls Academy from fourth grade forward. Later in life, she attributed much of her success to the excellent education she had received at that all-girls school.

After high school she attended Barnard College. She graduated in 1967, cum laude, earning distinction in English and membership in the Barnard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. In this period, she also met Sam Wheeler, whom she married in 1969. Their son, Isaac, was born in 1971.

During those same years, Barbara began working at the intersection of education, religion, institutional planning and research. Her professional trajectory was intuitive, organic, and rapid. Yet it was also (in retrospect) directed toward enduring interests. From 1969-1971, she served first as special assistant to the director of the Earl Hall Center, Columbia University’s campus ministry unit. From 1971-1976, she took on a series of overlapping roles at Union Theological Seminary, as research assistant to the seminary’s long-range planning group, assistant to the seminary’s president, staff associate for the presidential search committee, and consultant to the new president.  During this time, she also met a key colleague, Robert Lynn, who was then a Union professor and Dean of Auburn Seminary, a program within Union with a special commitment to Presbyterian students. In 1974 Bob Lynn put together the Auburn Study of the History of Reform in Theological Education, and Barbara became the project’s Administrative Coordinator and Research Associate.

In 1976 the Wheelers moved to Boston, where Barbara would serve for several years as Director of the Women’s Theological Coalition and evaluate Harvard Divinity School’s new program in women’s studies. Also in 1976, Bob Lynn joined Lilly Endowment Inc. as Vice President of Religion, and Barbara became an essential conversation partner in that work as well, consulting on research in theological education and helping develop a plan of evaluation for the foundation’s grantmaking in religion. It is worth noting that neither foundation evaluation nor women’s theological studies were standard fare in the late 1970s. Barbara was breaking new ground for institutions, and doing it in joyful collaboration with others, wherever she turned.

In 1979, she became president of Auburn Seminary, and she served in that position for the next 30 years. As its leader, Barbara deftly steered Auburn through the choppy waters of change in mainline Protestantism and its institutions. But her passion and purpose for Auburn were most fully realized in its Center for the Study of Theological Education, which she established in 1991 and led until 2012. Through the Center, she organized research teams to study and report on nearly every dimension of theological education. She was also deeply engaged in national theological conversations about the aims and purposes of theological study and ministerial education in serving the churches and the world. And, in the 1980s, she was among a small group of scholars and consultants who helped found the field of Congregational Studies, encouraging research on the local communities at the heart of American religious life.

Barbara was a faithful churchgoer and ordained elder in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). She was a member of the session of her congregation in upstate New York and served on that presbytery’s personnel committee and its committee on theology and leadership development. She served on the boards of the journal Presbyterian Outlook and the Presbyterian Publishing Corporation. And she helped develop the new Presbyterian hymnal, a particular source of pride and joy.

Barbara also moved toward the tensions shaking the Presbyterian world of the late 20^th and early 21^st century, stepping into issues that others sought to avoid. She was a founding member of the Covenant Network, organized to advocate for the full inclusion of gays and lesbians. At the same time, she sought out and built lasting relationships with people whose commitments on this issue differed from her own. Memorably, she and Richard Mouw, then president of Fuller Seminary, went on the road together, publicly modeling how to disagree with civility and love.

Alongside her many professional and church commitments, she kept anchor in more personal places of joy and creativity. One of these was the country house that she and Sam bought in Granville, New York, in 1990. They attended church in that community, and she joined what is today the United Church of Granville. Another great source of happiness was cooking. Barbara became a beta tester for the New York Times Cooking app in its early stages, and one can still enjoy her definitive judgments sprinkled throughout.  A third source of joy was music. Sam and Barbara loved going to the Met and to Carnegie Hall, and they also delighted in the musical and theatrical performances of their grandchildren. In Granville, they bought a pump organ, where Barbara would play the hymns she so enjoyed singing with her congregation. She had a beautiful voice.

All along the way, Barbara’s deepest source of joy was her family, including her sisters Jane (deceased), Elizabeth, and Katie, and especially her husband Sam, son Isaac and daughter-in-law Lynn, and grandchildren Zachary and Emily. It was their love that made the work possible, and it was their companionship, to the end, that made the life in Granville and New York City, the cooking and the gardening, the organ, and the opera, worth every car trip, every subway ride, every recipe, and every song.