The Rev. Canon Dr. Titus Presler

Diocese of Vermont and Bridges to Pakistan

GEMN’s executive director since May 2022, Titus Presler is an Episcopal missiologist with extended mission experience in Africa and Asia.  He grew up in India as the child of missionary theological educators.  He and his wife Jane served as missionaries in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe during the decade after that country’s Liberation War.  More recently he served four years as principal of Edwardes College, a church undergraduate and graduate institution in Peshawar, Pakistan.  He was president of GEMN from 2018 to 2022 and is a member of the Board of Bridges to Pakistan, a GEMN member organization based in Texas.  

Titus served 11 years as rector of St. Peter’s Church in Cambridge, Mass., which became a mission-activist parish, and co-chaired the Wider Mission Commission of the Diocese of Massachusetts.  He co-chaired the Volunteers for Mission Committee, which supported 76 persons in mission abroad from 1991 to 2002.  He was a researcher for the Global Anglicanism Project, in which he focused on the Church of North India, and was a consultant for the Anglican Indaba Project, coordinating the theological consultations held in Delhi, Barbados and Virginia.  

Titus holds a B.A. from Harvard, M.Div. from General Seminary, and Th.D. in missiology from Boston University.  He is a former president of the Seminary of the Southwest and academic dean of General Seminary.  He taught at Episcopal Divinity School, Gaul Theological College in Harare, Harvard Divinity School and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and was a visiting researcher at Boston University School of Theology.  He specializes in mission theology and gospel-culture interactions. 

Titus is a member of the American Society of Missiology and the International Association for Mission Studies.  Vicar of St. Matthew’s Church, Enosburg Falls, Vermont, he is the convener of Green Mountain Witness, the Diocese of Vermont’s evangelism initiative, and chairs the diocese’s Commission on Ministry.

In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, Titus is the author of Transfigured Night: Mission and Culture in Zimbabwe’s Vigil Movement; Horizons of Mission in the New Church’s Teaching Series; and Going Global with God: Reconciling Mission in a World of Difference.  With Grace Burton-Edwards, he is co-author of the 2020 GEMN study book, Questing: The Way of Love in Global Mission. His most recent scholarly article, “The Poverty Captivity of Mission in the Churches – and Strategies to Liberate It,” appeared in the January 2022 issue of the International Bulletin of Mission Research.

Titus is an Episcopal Church Foundation Fellow, holds honorary degrees from General and from Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, and is an honorary canon theologian of the Diocese of Central Pennsylvania.  In 2014 he was named a Distinguished Alumnus of the Boston University School of Theology.    

Titus blogs at TitusOnMission.wordpress.com.  He and his wife Canon Jane Butterfield have four grown children and nine grandchildren.