Board Certified Coach
A professional coaching credential held since 2025.
Coach · Scholar · Pastor · Speaker
Seth David Clark
A mortality-aware executive coach and leadership scholar whose work has been shaped in boardrooms, classrooms, congregations, across borders, and at the bedsides of dying patients.
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DMin · MBA · MTS · MATS · BCC
PhD in Leadership Studies in progress
Biography
Working where leadership gets complicated.
Rev. Dr. Seth David Clark has spent more than 20 years in work shaped by leadership, culture, ethics, identity, and loss. He is the lead pastor of First Baptist Church of National City, a multicultural and majority-refugee congregation in Southern California.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Seth also served as a hospice chaplain, sitting with dying patients and their families. That work changed the way he thinks about everything else. Death matters because life matters.
Seth calls his approach mortality-aware leadership: leading with the knowledge that time is finite and using that knowledge to make better decisions, build stronger teams, face loss and change with greater courage and resilience, and leave something worth leaving.
In 2025 he founded Life, Death, and Leadership, an executive coaching and leadership-development practice. His coaching practice has served more than fifty clients across five continents.
Preparation
Credential
In progress
Doctoral
Graduate
Credentials and interdisciplinary study
Seth's work brings leadership science into conversation with organizational practice, business, philosophy, theology, culture, and first-hand experience with grief and mortality.
PhD in Leadership Studies
University of San Diego.
Doctor of Ministry
Columbia Theological Seminary.
MBA · MA · MTS
Western Governors University, Bethel Seminary, and Boston College.
Research
What remains after power?
Seth's doctoral research examines what happens to powerful leaders when they retire: how they rebuild identity, what they do with their influence, and whether relevance survives the title.
His broader scholarly work centers on leadership science and reaches into Aristotle's virtue ethics, Machiavelli's realism, Stoic philosophy, Thomas Merton's true-self mystical theology, religious ethnography, Christianity and Buddhism, vocation, and meaning-making.
Teaching
Research that can enter the room.
Seth has taught in university classrooms, graduate seminars, and seminary courses, including teaching in Spanish. He guest lectures, advises dissertations, and occasionally co-authors.
His aim is not to leave leadership theory abstract. It should help real leaders see and act more truthfully under pressure.
Books and public work
Forthcoming
Judson Press · 2022
Books
Writing about bodies, borders, mortality, and meaning.
Your Immortality Project
A book about mortality, identity, leadership, and the stories inherited about power.
Church at the Wall
Stories of hope along the San Diego-Tijuana border.
Jesus Pooped and God Loves You All the Way
Books exploring embodiment, theology, humor, and unconditional love.
Seth's work has also appeared through podcasts, press, courses, meditations, classrooms, congregations, and organizational settings. Browse verified interviews and selected media.
The person beyond the work
A life is more than a biography.
Seth takes joy in time with his partner of more than 20 years, Mrs. Clark, and their two children. He is a lover of woods, mountain paths, prayer, meditation, laughter, and the ordinary practices that keep a public life human.
Based in
Southern California
Seth is based in Southern California. His coaching practice has served clients on five continents, and his speaking has included national and international settings.
Leadership is finite. Make it faithful.
Explore one-to-one coaching, bring Seth into a room, or start a conversation about research and collaboration.