At 3:30 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy, the Rev. Gary V. Simpson will deliver the Week Four installment of the Chautauqua Speaker Series for the African American Heritage House.
Simpson has served as the senior pastor of Concord Baptist Church of Christ since 1990, and is associate professor of homiletics at Drew Theological Seminary. He has served as Visiting Professor of Preaching, Worship and the Arts at Union Theological Seminary, and has taught at New Brunswick Theological Seminary, Harvard Divinity School, Yale Divinity School, Princeton Theological Seminary and Candler School of Theology.
At Concord Church, Simpson created a formal Pastoral Residency Program in 2002 with the support of the Lilly Endowment; this program has aided a generation of seminary graduates as they transition to congregational ministry. In 2011, again with Lilly Endowment support, that program expanded to three more African American Baptist congregations.
In January 2023, it was announced that the Pro- gressive National Baptist Convention would use a $1 million grant from the Lilly Endowment to fund a five-year training program for ministers of the historically Black denomination as they adapt their preaching in an age changed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Simpson will lead planning.
“Now that we are at this stage in the pandemic’s life with us,” Simpson in a PNBC statement, “we are all facing challenges of hybridity, and so the program will also examine questions like, ‘What shape and form will our preaching take? How do we employ available technology? Are there emerg- ing models of proclama- tion worth studying more diligently?’ ”
Simpson graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Denison University with a Bachelor of Arts in Religion and Black Studies; earned the Master of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary in New York City, and the Doctor of Ministry Degree from United Theological Seminary.
