On Friday evening, October 15, the General Synod of the Reformed Church in America (RCA), meeting in Tucson, Arizona, elected Rev. Micah L. McCreary, Ph.D. to the office of General Synod Professor. He is the first African-American and only the second person of color elected to the office; Dr. Jaeseung Cha, Associate Professor of Foundational and Constructive Theology at New Brunswick Theological Seminary (NBTS), is the other.

Micah McCreary has been president of NBTS since 2017. He was ordained in the National Baptist Convention and had his ordination recognized by the American Baptist Convention. Upon arriving in New Brunswick, he studied RCA theology, history, polity, and liturgy and was received into the membership of the RCA Classis of New Brunswick. Since then, he has been active in his Classis and on the RCA Pastoral Formation Oversight Board, and was recently appointed to the RCA Commission on Theology.

The office of professor of theology was proposed by John Calvin in his Ecclesiastical Ordinances, a foundational document for the Reformed tradition. It stood alongside the offices of deacon, elder, and minister. Professors are meant to prepare people for ministry and to serve as teachers for the whole church. The General Synod Professors of the RCA—one of only a few Reformed bodies to retain the office—continue that work into the present day. This is a select group: currently, there are five such professors in the RCA, and historically there have been only around one hundred. John Henry Livingston, who started NBTS, was the first.