Associate Professor of Pastoral Ministry and Missions
Director of Spanish Language Church Worker Formation Program

Biography

The Rev. Dr. Don Wiley serves as Assistant Professor of Pastoral Ministry and Missions and Director of Spanish Language Church Worker Formation at Concordia Theological Seminary (CTSFW), Fort Wayne. He joined the faculty in 2018 after serving a year at CTSFW as Mission Specialist and Guest Professor (2017–2018).

He earned his MDiv from CTSFW in 1992 after returning from a two-year vicarage in Panama (where he served in church planting from 1989–1991). He immediately began study in the STM program, serving as the graduate assistant for the Exegetical Department until he was called and ordained to serve as a missionary to Panama to work in leadership development and pastoral formation (1994–1997). When he returned to the United States, he accepted a call to St. John Evangelical Lutheran Church of Colton, California, where he served from January 1998 until August 2013. During his pastoral ministry at St. John, he completed his STM at CTSFW (majoring in New Testament Exegetical Study with a minor in Systematic Theology). In 2009 he defended his thesis entitled “An Exegetical Study of Hebrews 6:4–6: Apostasy and Renewal to Repentance.”

In the winter of 2012–2013, he began his studies in the Ph.D. in Missiology program at CTSFW. When St. John Lutheran Church merged with Christ the King Lutheran Church in Redlands, California, in August 2013, he was called as associate pastor and deployed to CTSFW by the congregation the following year to work with Dr. Arthur Just on the Pastoral Formation for Hispanic-America program while completing his Ph.D. in Missiology.

After successfully defending his dissertation, “The Place of Honor-Shame in the Lutheran Understanding of Justification: A Biblical and Confessional Assessment of the Honor-Shame Dynamic for Lutheran Missiology,” Dr. Wiley earned his PhD in Missiology from CTSFW in May 2017.

He and his wife, Renée, are blessed with two sons and a daughter-in-law.