Richard Spalding elected alumni board president

Richard Spalding ’81 M.Div. is the new president of the Alumni Association Board of Yale Divinity School.

Elected at the association’s fall meeting, Spalding will lead a board of 21 members who serve as ambassadors for the school, oversee the alumni awards program, participate in Convocation and Reunions planning, and support annual giving, among other activities on behalf of the School.

Spalding, who is Chaplain to the College at Williams College in Massachusetts, succeeds Kristin Foster ’77 M.Div., who completed her two-year term as board president this fall. He has served on the board for five years and contributed to creation of its strategic plan in 2014.

“During these next few years,” Spalding said, “I hope the Alumni Board can tap its remarkable reservoir of skills across its generations of wisdom to help realize the important dreams that YDS is dreaming: the reduction of student debt to the vanishing point, the widening of diversity and the deepening of interfaith engagement, and the renewal of residential life on the quad with the construction of the regenerative village.

“These things matter enormously to me. I think they matter enormously to the church, and to the world. These are the commitments that are going to shape these next several years of my work. I hope lots of alumni, from lots of YDS generations, will join me!”

Foster hailed Spalding as a leader who excels at listening and formulating questions. “Rick will bring these capacities to his service as president, along with a profound love for the Divinity School, appreciation for the gifts of other alums, and a commitment to the school’s exciting initiatives,” said Foster, pastor of Messiah Lutheran Church in Mountain Iron, Minn. 

Spalding described his acceptance of the board president role as his way of giving back to a school that has been tremendously influential in his life.

“YDS, quite simply, helped shape and refine the energies that have defined my life’s work,” Spalding said. “If I look closely at pretty much every piece of the work I’ve been doing—pastoral care, preaching, advocacy, interfaith work, writing, prayer—it all bears the prints of [faculty members] Letty Russell, Henri Nouwen, Rowan Greer, Bill Muehl, Bonnie Kittel, my field-education supervisors, and, maybe most of all, my classmates.

“A few years ago I had a kind of stirring awakening to the fact of how much I owe—and, more to the point, how much joy I trace—to my time at YDS. So I felt it was time to do whatever I could to help it be that kind of place for a generation that’s inheriting a vocation more complex and urgent than anything I could have imagined.”

November 22, 2016