Executive Director, Center for Christian Apologetics and Civic Engagement
Charleston Southern University seeks a founding executive director for a permanent university-based Center for Christian Apologetics and Civic Engagement. The executive director will be a Baptist scholar and public intellectual who can build a high-impact, academically serious, student-forming, faculty-engaging, and publicly visible apologetics center.
The center will utilize traditional Christian apologetics while also promoting civic discourse and constructive engagement with the major academic fields of the university. Rather than functioning only as a lecture series or public platform, the center will also help faculty and students develop and deploy apologetic arguments for Christianity from the intellectual, moral, cultural, and social goods that emerge when Christians bring the faith to bear faithfully within their disciplines.
The executive director's primary responsibility will be catalytic academic and institutional leadership. The executive director's work will focus on building programs, producing durable intellectual resources, mentoring students, engaging faculty, and establishing a visible evangelical apologetics presence that advances the mission of the university.
Charleston Southern University's mission is to promote academic excellence in a Christian environment. The university aims to be nationally recognized for integrating faith in learning, leading, and serving.
Primary responsibilities include providing strategic, academic, and public leadership for the center, developing and implementing the center's mission, programs, and long-term strategy, building student-facing programs, engaging faculty, creating public programming, producing intellectual resources, representing the university publicly, supporting university advancement efforts, holding a faculty appointment, and working warmly and constructively with evangelicals.
Required qualifications include a strong commitment to Christian higher education, a PhD in a related field, affirmation of the university doctrinal statement, a publication record demonstrating influence, and scholarly credibility, public communication, and evangelical leadership.
Preferred qualifications include demonstrated success in strategic planning and program development, a record of successful external engagement and partnership development, and five or more years serving in a Christian higher education setting.
Desired attributes include a servant leadership philosophy, strong interpersonal skills, a collaborative mindset, strategic thinking balanced with operational effectiveness, and commitment to advancing the mission and growth of the center.