McClelland Heads S.F. Urban Program

Westmont has hired a new director for the San Francisco Urban Program. Scott McClelland is heading the off-campus program he describes as a “maturity accelerator” for students.

The San Francisco program began in 1971 and operates in a 108-year old house near Golden Gate Park. There are 22 students enrolled this semester.

Although San Francisco is less than 47 square miles, McClelland says the city by the bay offers the best kind of experience students can have to enhance their Westmont education.

“It’s a place that has some of the widest diversity of wealth and poverty that you’ll ever see,” he says. “In the midst of all those delights, there’s also tremendous despair.”

As for the homeless, McClelland says it’s not hard to find them.

“They’re right out in front of us at Fell and Lyon Street,” he says.

“Some of the internships are dealing exactly with those folks,” McClelland says. “Some are working in the higher financial market. Wherever they’re interning, students are going to break up encrusted soil, learn, grow, develop and put feet to their faith.”

That’s one of the draws for students who enroll in the urban program, to work in a quality internship and practice their faith.

Before coming to the urban program, McClelland served as executive director of International Neighbors in Seattle, a parachurch organization that reaches out to international students in the Puget Sound area.

He earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from Wheaton College in Illinois as well as a master’s degree in theology from Westminster Theological Seminary. He received his doctorate in New Testament from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He has taught at Kings College in New York and mostly recently at Fuller Theological Seminary in Southern California, Seattle and Menlo Park. He is an ordained minister in the Evangelical Free Church of America and has spent 15 years doing pastoral work.

Scott and his wife, Louise, have been married 29 years and have two grown children.