President Stephen E. Waers was named the 16th president of Milligan University on January 9, 2024, and assumed office on August 1, 2024, following the retirement of Bill Greer.
Prior to answering the call to serve as Milligan’s president, Waers worked as chief academic officer and chief information officer at Point University in West Point, Georgia. Waers previously worked as director of institutional effectiveness at Point University and held teaching appointments at both Point University and Manhattan Christian College in Kansas.
Waers is a 2007 graduate of Point University, where he was a dual major in Humanities and Biblical Studies. He earned a Master of Divinity with a concentration in Church History from Emmanuel Christian Seminary in 2010 before earning his doctorate in Religious Studies – Historical Theology from Marquette University in 2016. His dissertation work on early Trinitarian theology culminated in the publication of his monograph, Monarchianism and Origen’s Early Trinitarian Theology (Brill, 2022). He has published other articles focusing on the history and theology of the early church as well as the Stone-Campbell movement.
In his role as chief academic officer, Waers worked to build a strong faculty culture at Point. He worked collaboratively with the faculty to identify and develop the core markers of a healthy faculty culture, and key areas of faculty governance were modified to support the markers they identified. In his academic role, Waers also worked to streamline and align Point’s portfolio of academic programs—ensuring that they were missionally aligned and healthy. This streamlined program portfolio was able to better accommodate the three-fold increase in enrollment that occurred in Point’s online programs during his tenure as CAO.
In addition to his study of historical theology and academic administration, Waers has had an interest in technology and programming that began during his teenage years. His knowledge of technology served him well as he also assumed the role of chief information officer at Point. In that role, he served as the architect of a digital transformation at Point that took a patchwork of systems and integrated them into a more unified digital ecosystem.
Waers is a native of Tallahassee, Florida, and grew up in churches that were part of the Stone-Campbell Movement. He is an ordained minister in the Independent Christian Churches. Waers, his wife, Katie, and his two daughters – Vivian and Ellie – live in Johnson City.