wfn.org | NCC Honors Oakland Religious Leaders as Light in the Community

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11/15/01 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
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NCC Honors Oakland Religious Leaders as Examples of  'Light' in the Community
Announces Grants to Four Doctoral Students Who Excel in Biblical Scholarship

November 15, 2001, OAKLAND, CALIF.-The National Council of Churches (NCC) 
recognized outstanding achievements among the religious community in 
Oakland, Calif.-where the NCC General Assembly is meeting Nov. 13-15-with 
awards to the Rev. Ken Chambers, Sr., a West Oakland community organizer, 
and the Oakland-based Northern California Interreligious Conference (NCIC).

Honored at a November 14 dinner, Chambers and NCIC representatives received 
Waterford crystal candlesticks, symbols that they "are the light in our 
communities," as NCC General Secretary Bob Edgar put it. "They are models 
of reconciliation, understanding, justice and peace," he said.

Ambassador Andrew Young, NCC president for 2000-01, presented the 
President's Award to the Rev. Chambers for his leadership in faith-based 
economic development projects in the highly stressed community of West 
Oakland. Chambers and his 150-member West Side Missionary Baptist Church 
have "become the hub of a community-wide effort at locally controlled 
development," Young said.

Chambers and his wife, Michelle Miles Chambers, founded the West Side 
Economic Development Corporation to bring jobs and economic stability to 
the area. Among the successes of the corporation and its many partners, was 
the opening of the Gateway Foods grocery store in January 2000. The store 
brings fresh, affordable food to consumers in an area that for the past 
decade has been abandoned by large grocery stores. Gateway Foods also 
created 60 jobs that pay living wages.

A predominantly African American community that was once prosperous, West 
Oakland suffered disproportionate job losses and other pressures when the 
post-World War II economic boom faded. It did not participate fully in 
Oakland's recovery and faces a new challenge from gentrification.

"The question now is: Will West Oakland become a bedroom community for 
wealthy commuters or can it maintain the strength of its ethnic minority 
community, its churches and its community organizations?" Young said. "Ken 
Chambers is at work daily to answer that question in a way that favors 
development for the benefit of local residents."

Among other projects, West Side Economic Development Corporation owns the 
shopping plaza now anchored by Gateway Foods and has leveraged $7 million 
in public funds to renovate the entire complex.
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The corporation also founded a community capacity-building organization, 
BEDROC (Building Equity, Discipline and Respect for Our Community), which 
Chambers serves as president and CEO. BEDROC's core program links high-risk 
youth with mentors in congregations and provides them with pre-employment 
training and with job opportunities.

Chambers included members of the General Assembly in his remarks when he 
accepted the award. After September 11, he said, "the work ahead of us all 
is awesome. Let it be said that the religious community put their 
differences aside and worked arm in arm, hand in hand."

"We are all repairers of the breach," he said, referring to the Bible 
passage, Isaiah 58:12.

NCIC Tackles Issues Important to the State and to the World

The Northern California Interreligious Conference received the NCC General 
Secretary's Award for its "leadership role on social justice issues central 
to California's development." NCIC has acted on issues of energy use, 
welfare reform, and racism and other forms of discrimination, and it has 
fostered dialogue on the issue of same-gender marriage.

Jointly presenting the award were Dr. Bob Edgar and the Rev. John 
McCullough, executive director of Church World Service, the humanitarian 
assistance arm of the NCC. McCullough noted that during the '70s and '80s, 
at a time when Northern California received a huge influx of refugees and 
other immigrants, NCIC "worked closely with Church World Service to 
resettle newcomers from Central America, Southeast Asia and other areas of 
the world."

Founded in 1914, NCIC has evolved from a Christian organization into an 
interreligious group. It currently includes Christians, Jews, Muslims and 
Buddhists, and actively seeks relationships with people of other faiths, in 
what is a very religiously diverse area of the country. NCIC's 
interreligious nature "is more important than ever," Edgar said, and the 
organization "has redoubled efforts to involve Muslims in educational 
events for the public" following September 11.

Accepting the award on behalf of NCIC was the Rev. Phil Lawson, the group's 
president, pastor of Easter Hill United Methodist Church in Richmond, 
Calif., and a prominent area religious leader.

Lawson urged members of the General Assembly to go beyond working for 
Christian unity and to "look at all of humanity as one people." Lawson 
said, "Religions are only about 10,000 years old, but spirituality, 
religious feelings, go back three or four hundred thousand years. ... We 
need to include a role for the spiritual movement that is not religiously 
confined-that goes beyond Baptists and Buddhists.

"We have felt that here in Northern California," he said. "We are one 
people-in all the world. We are now bombing our sisters and brothers, our 
aunts and uncles, in Afghanistan," Lawson concluded, urging the General 
Assembly to use this moment to "expand our vision."

BTU Bible Scholars Announced

At the awards dinner, the NCC's incoming president, Elenie Huszagh, Esq., 
announced the NCC's Bible Translation and Utilization (BTU) Committee 
scholars for the 2001-2002 academic year. Each has received a $10,000 
scholarship funded by royalties from the New Revised Standard Version of 
the Bible and its predecessor, the Revised Standard Version, to which the 
NCC holds the copyrights.
-more-

Each year the NCC awards several grants to women and persons of color who 
are pursuing graduate degrees in biblical scholarship-in part to increase 
the diversity of the pool of scholars from which future Bible translators 
may be drawn. The scholarships are administered by the Fund for Theological 
Education in Atlanta, which shares this goal as part of its work toward 
excellence and diversity in Christian ministry and teaching.

Brief sketches of this year's BTU Committee scholars follow:

Mitz J. Smith of the African Methodist Episcopal Church is receiving the 
Bishop Melvin G. Talbert Scholarship, the only BTU scholarship that is 
named. It honors Bishop Talbert, a retired United Methodist bishop and a 
former NCC president. Ms. Smith is a doctoral candidate at Harvard 
University, where she studies New Testament and Early Christianity, with an 
emphasis on the books of Luke and Acts. An African American, she has an 
interest in biblical interpretation from African American perspectives. Her 
article "Roman Slavery in Antiquity" appeared in the African American 
Jubilee Bible.

Eun Suk Cho, an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), is 
pursuing a doctoral degree in Old Testament at the Graduate Theological 
Union in Berkeley, Calif. A student whose mentors expect him to make 
"original and significant contributions" to biblical scholarship, he is at 
work on a dissertation that looks at how the dynamics of national 
separation and hopes for reunification played out in the ancient 
neighboring countries of Israel and Judah. A Korean American, he will 
compare these ancient societies with the Korea of today.

A doctoral student at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif., 
where he received the prestigious Presidential Scholarship, Uriah Yong-Hwan 
Kim has specialized in Hebrew Bible. His recent paper "Uriah the Hittite: A 
(Con) Text of Struggle for Identity" has been accepted for publication in 
Semeia, a journal of the national Society of Biblical Literature. His 
dissertation will continue to explore the construction of Israelite 
religious and ethnic identity. A member of the Presbyterian Church 
(U.S.A.), Mr. Kim plans to work in the church and in his community and to 
teach in a seminary.

Love L. Sechrest, an African American student and a member of the 
Progressive National Baptist Convention, is enrolled in a doctoral program 
at Duke University in Durham, N.C., where she is engaged in New Testament 
studies. She has served as a teaching assistant at Duke, receiving high 
marks both from faculty and students, who project that she will make "an 
excellent teacher and scholar." In future work, she hopes to make a close 
examination of the theme of church unity, particularly as unfolded in the 
New Testament books, Galatians, Romans and Ephesians.

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