Rev Dr David Steers is married to Sue, they have four grown up children. Born in Liverpool he is a graduate of the Universities of Oxford (Christ Church, BA, MA in Modern History), Manchester (BD, MPhil with distinction), and Glasgow (PhD) and trained for the ministry at the Unitarian College and Luther King House in Manchester. After serving as assistant minister at Cross Street Chapel, Manchester from 1987 to 1988, he was minister of All Souls’ Church, Belfast from 1989 to 2000 and was Dr Williams’s Research Scholar, and tutor and examiner in the School of Divinity/Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Glasgow from 2000 to 2003. He was awarded the John Hope Prize in Ecclesiastical History by the University of Glasgow in 2004. From 2003 to 2021 he was minister of the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Churches of Downpatrick, Ballee and Clough.
He served on the International Council and Executive of the International Association for Religious Freedom for ten years and helped to organize international conferences in Europe and Taiwan. He represented his church on the Irish National Committee of Christian Aid for some years as well as served on the Irish Council of Churches and the Department of Theological Questions of the Irish Inter-Church Meeting. He was editor of the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian magazine from 1993 to 2015 and is currently editor of Faith and Freedom and the Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society.
He is a member of the Council of the Presbyterian Historical Society of Ireland, a former Chaplain at Queen’s University, Belfast, and is currently Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Chaplain at Stranmillis and at St Mary’s University Colleges. He is the author of various books and articles and is a contributor to The Dissenting Academies Project which investigates the history of dissenting academies in England and Ireland. He has contributed to many biographical dictionaries including the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, The Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Philosophers, the Thoemmes Dictionary of Irish Philosophers, the Thoemmes Dictionary of British Classicists, and the Dictionary of Unitarian Universalist Biography. These and other interests can be seen on his blog.