By Bob Allen
A Mercer University professor’s one-year assignment as interim president of a Baptist seminary in Liberia has been extended through 2016.
Richard Wilson, chair of the Christianity department at Mercer’s main campus in Macon, Ga., arrived Jan. 4 in Liberia to lead efforts to rebuild the Liberia Baptist Theological Seminary after decades of civil war and recent factional infighting among Liberian Baptists.
He returned to the United States unexpectedly in August, when the West African outbreak of Ebola made it too dangerous for him to stay. While stateside, he underwent hip-replacement surgery he planned to put off until the first of next year.
Wilson said in a memo Oct. 19 that after conversations with Mercer’s president and his dean it was decided that his work in Liberia is unfinished. In the end they decided he should stay on as president, traveling overseas for two or three weeks at a time while maintaining a reduced teaching load at Mercer.
Wilson hasn’t been entirely sidelined during the last three months. He said in another e-mail that churches and individuals have donated a total of $35,000 for Care for One Hundred, a project launched on short notice before he left Liberia to care for about 100 people living on campus in light of the country’s Ebola scare.
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Liberian seminary responds to humanitarian crisis