Tim Green, who has served as chaplain for the past 25 years, will step down from that position at the end of the 2016-2017 academic year.

Trevecca President Dan Boone selected Shawna Songer Gaines as the next chaplain. Gaines, an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene, is a speaker, writer, and pastor.

Boone announced the transition in a letter to Trevecca’s Board of Trustees.

Green initiated the decision after expressing a desire to devote more time to preparing students for ministry through Trevecca’s Millard Reed School of Theology and Christian Ministry. Green will continue  as dean of the school and continue teaching at the university.

“Dr. Tim Green is, in my opinion, one of the finest servants of God that I have known,” Boone wrote in the letter. “Only heaven knows the contribution that he has made to the spiritual formation of thousands through the Trevecca chapel program.”

Green is grateful for the opportunities he has had to minister to students throughout his tenure as Trevecca’s chaplain.

“I am deeply grateful that the Lord would graciously allow me to serve as the chaplain to a university that has been and forever will be a community that I call family and a place that I call home,” Green wrote in the letter. “What a privilege it has been in this role to engage with the most remarkable students the world and church has ever known!”

Gaines will transition into the role of chaplain over the course of the 2016-2017 academic year.

Boone describes Gaines as “one of our outstanding preachers, a person possessed with a pastor’s heart” and a “keen observer of Christianity and culture.” Gaines previously served as a youth pastor in Chicago and a communications consultant for Nazarene Missions International. She is a graduate of Nazarene Theological Seminary and most recently co-pastored Bakersfield Church of the Nazarene in Bakersfield, California.

Her husband, Tim Gaines, serves as a professor of theology in Trevecca’s Millard Reed School of Theology and Christian Religion. The Gaines have co-authored several books, including A Seat at the Table: A Generation Re-Imagining its Place in the Church and Kings and Kingdoms: Political Imagination and the Kingdom of God. Shawna is also the author of the Breathe Bible study series.

--Trevecca Nazarene University