A $30 MILLION CAMPAIGN COMMITMENT
Enduring
Because excellence cannot depend on favorable conditions.
Every generation inherits institutions shaped by the faith, imagination, and generosity of those who came before it.
Garrett is one of them.
For nearly 175 years, the seminary has prepared leaders, advanced scholarship, and served the church through periods of profound social, religious, and institutional change. The world Garrett inhabits today would be nearly unrecognizable to those who founded it. Yet the conviction that theological education matters—that communities need people formed with wisdom, courage, and faith—persists.
What has changed is our environment. Across higher education, institutions confront changing enrollment patterns, rising expectations, financial pressures, and questions about how learning should be delivered. Theological schools face these challenges alongside the changing needs and structures of the churches and communities they serve.
Longstanding assumptions about how seminaries operate can no longer be taken for granted. Some institutions are rethinking their academic models, their partnerships, their physical footprints, and their financial foundations.
Garrett is not exempt from these realities. But we are ready to respond to them.
Endurance is not the ability to remain unaltered. It is the strength to remain faithful to a mission while finding new ways to fulfill it.
An Invitation from our Campaign Co-Chairs
Jerre and Mary Joy Stead have been a dynamic part of the seminary’s work and mission since Jerre joined Garrett’s board in 1991. As the former CEO of several Fortune 500 companies, hear why Jerre believes there’s never been a more consequential campaign for Garrett, nor a more crucial moment to invest in the future of theological education.
Led by Faith, Building from Strength
Garrett should make choices because they advance our mission—not simply because they are the only options our immediate circumstances allow. We can sustain exceptional scholarship and academic leadership while continuing to reimagine how and where theological education takes place. We must be able to pursue promising partnerships that yield new approaches to learning, but innovation requires more than ambition. It requires resources. We will need to rise before unexpected challenges without abandoning our core commitments.
This is the institutional future Garrett seeks.
Even the most promising vision is constrained when every decision must be measured against budgetary demands. Garrett's future calls for a different kind of institutional capacity. A strong and adaptable financial foundation lets Garrett plan beyond immediate pressures. It provides continuity through changing economic conditions and enrollment patterns. It helps the seminary attract and sustain visionary scholarship. It enables choices that do not offer an immediate financial return but are essential to Garrett's mission.
A partnership worth nurturing. An academic initiative worth developing. A student experience worth protecting. A new opportunity to serve the church that requires commitment before it can demonstrate results.
Institutional strength is not an end to itself. It is what allows Garrett to act with purpose when circumstances might otherwise dictate its choices.
God needs Garrett to do more than endure the future. We must help shape it.
Build the strength behind the mission.
The most consequential investments are not always the most visible.
When a scholarship empowers a student to pursue a calling or a faculty appointment attracts an exceptional scholar, these fruits are tethered to a deeper root: financial capacity that allows an institution to make commitments with confidence, sustain excellence over time, and respond when new needs emerge.
This is the work of “Enduring.”
Through Abundant Spirit, Garrett seeks to strengthen the permanent and flexible resources that make long-term institutional excellence possible.
Endowment is one expression of that commitment.
An endowed gift carries a donor's generosity into the future, creating a continuing source of support. Its value provides resources beyond a particular year. It ensures that future academic leaders can sustain important commitments, invest in excellence, and respond to opportunities.
Flexible philanthropic capital is equally important.
Not every consequential need can be anticipated decades in advance. The institution Garrett will need to be in twenty-five or fifty years will be shaped by questions, technologies, partnerships, and forms of ministry that are still emerging.
Flexible resources give future leaders room to excercise judgment when they respond to changing circumstances . They make it possible to act when an opportunity is timely, to address a challenge before it becomes a crisis, and to direct investment toward the areas of greatest institutional consequence.
This flexibility expresses confidence in Garrett's mission and in future leaders’ ability to faithfully steward that mission.
Together, permanent and flexible resources can strengthen the seminary's financial resilience, protect academic excellence, and support strategic investment in the institution's future.
This is the work for which leaders have been trained.
Rev. James Clark III ’07 brings a theological perspective to how churches manage their property. It’s a wisdom he brings to his role on Garrett’s board of trustees as we shape the seminary’s future.
Our World Needs a Spiritual Revival.
The people who helped build Garrett could not have anticipated the technologies through which our students learn, the changing forms of Christian community, or the questions that would shape ministry nearly two centuries after the seminary's founding.
Yet their investments transcended what they could foresee.
They sustained an institution through generations of change. They made possible the scholarship, leadership, and formation that characterize Garrett's contribution to the world.
They gave people they would never meet the means to carry this work forward. We stand in a similar moment.
The coming decades will determine whether humanity will rise and overcome our many challenges. To build the coalitions that meet this moment, we need ethical leaders—people who can bring communities together and repair a tattered social fabric.
Garrett is training the people we need, but this work does not happen in an instant, it is built through sustained commitment.
We do not know every challenge that future generations will face. We can help ensure they have the strength and freedom to meet them.
Help secure a future worthy of Garrett's mission.
Offering a transgenerational blessing.
Dan Van Haften’s parents nurtured a generosity that extended well beyond their lifetimes. Now, Dan is repaying that gift by helping to reduce Garrett’s long-terms debts.