Meet Dennis.
Dr. Dennis Wilhite serves as Assistant Professor and Instructional Mentor with Liberty University's Rawlings School of Divinity Online, where he teaches in the Doctor of Ministry program. He also serves at Anchor Christian University across the professional ministry and Bible/theology curriculum, and contributes to academic program design. His career spans more than five decades across pastoral ministry, classroom teaching, wilderness leadership training, and the architecture of Christian academic programs.
Before graduate study and academic appointments, Dennis spent nearly two decades in full-time youth pastoral ministry — first at First Baptist Church in North Tonawanda, New York (1973–1980), then at Calvary Baptist Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan (1981–1991). Those years still shape how he thinks about formation, discipleship, and the way Christian education actually serves the local church.
In 1984 he founded Pilgrimage (later Pilgrimage Educational Resources), a wilderness leadership training organization he led until selling it in 2008 and remained instrumentally involved with through its closure in 2022. He contributed to the Wilderness Institute and to the development of the GROW System — a curriculum model that trained leaders through experiential field-based study. The convictions formed there — that real learning happens in the work, not adjacent to it — continue to shape his teaching today.
From 1991 to 2017 he served as Professor and Chair of the School of Global Ministries at Clarks Summit University, leading the design of degree programs that prepared students for cross-cultural missions, pastoral ministry, and leadership in Christian education.
Anchor students benefit from a faculty member whose career bridges pastoral practice, decades of higher-education teaching, and the architecture of degree programs themselves — someone who returns again and again to the question that defines maverick Christian education: does this actually prepare students for the work they're called to do?
He holds a Doctor of Education in Higher Education Leadership and Curricular Design from Nova Southeastern University, a Master of Religious Education from Cornerstone University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Pastoral Ministry and Bible from Baptist Bible College.