Warren Akin Candler

Warren Akin Candler (1857 – September 25, 1941) was an American Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, elected in 1898. He was the tenth president of Emory University.

He was born in Villa Rica, Georgia, the tenth of eleven children born to Samuel and Martha Bernetta Beall Candler. Samuel was a prosperous merchant and planter. Their children were raised in a devout atmosphere.

Candler attended Emory College in Oxford, Georgia, from 1874 to 1877. There he discovered his religious vocation and quite a talent for preaching. As a result, he made the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, the center of his life.

After college, Warren married Sarah Antoinette "Nettie" Curtright. The couple had five children, three of whom lived to adulthood.

As a young pastor, Candler served several churches in northwest Georgia. In 1882, along with Bishop George Foster Pierce of the M.E. Church, South, and Bishop Lucius Holsey of the Colored (now Christian) M.E. Church, and others, Candler helped found Paine Institute (now Paine College) in Augusta, Georgia. Paine's mission was the higher education of African Americans. As a longtime member of Paine's Board of Trustees, Candler supported the hiring of African Americans to teach, thus helping to create a racially-integrated faculty, unusual in the post-Civil War South.

From 1886 until 1888 Rev. Candler served in Nashville, Tennessee, as the Assistant Editor of the Nashville Christian Advocate, the primary periodical of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. In this capacity he supported at least some of the goals of the evangelical Holiness Association, though also fearing it might become divisive.

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