Dr. David Evans, professor of history and intercultural studies and associate dean of Eastern Mennonite Seminary, delivered a guest sermon on radical solidarity on Sunday, Feb. 8, at First United Methodist Church of Evanston, Illinois.
The Rev. Wendy J. Miller MA ’91 (church leadership) served the seminary from 1991 to 2010 in roles including campus pastor and assistant professor of spiritual formation. She passed away on Oct. 8, 2025, at age 87.
At Hope for the Future 2026 in San Antonio, two dozen BIPOC leaders gathered for deep discernment, rest and strategic visioning asking what faithful leadership looks like in a divided world.
Among them was EMS Doctor of Ministry student Jonny Rashid, pastor of West Philadelphia Mennonite Fellowship, who reflected: “To be united, we need to work toward collective liberation. We need to ally with all minorities because our liberation is linked.” The gathering, led by Sue Park-Hur, Director of Racial/Ethnic Engagement for Mennonite Church USA and friend of EMS, centered listening, renewal, and a vision of interdependent ministry rooted in 1 Corinthians 12.
As the newly appointed vice president of the Harrisonburg-Rockingham NAACP, Dr. David Evans, professor of history and intercultural studies and associate dean of Eastern Mennonite Seminary, presented on the significance of Black History Month during the chapter’s meeting on Tuesday, Feb. 3.
Union Presbyterian Seminary has received a transformative $10 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. to implement Seminary Extended: Strengthening Pastoral Leadership, a groundbreaking collaborative initiative with Eastern Mennonite Seminary and Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary to deliver congregation-embedded leadership development, shared faculty across institutions, and a joint Doctor of Ministry (DMin) in Adaptive Leadership. The initiative will bring the three theological institutions together in a first-of-its-kind collaboration to strengthen pastoral formation for today’s rapidly changing ministry landscape.
The Rev. Dr. Almeda Wright, associate professor of religious education at Yale Divinity School and author of Teaching to Live: Black Religion, Activist-Educators, and Radical Social Change (Oxford University Press, 2024), will present at EMU’s annual Augsburger Lecture Series on Monday, Oct. 27, in the MainStage Theater (University Commons 170). The lecture starts at 7 p.m. and will be followed by a reception. Dr. Wright is a collaborative partner and co-principal investigator in the Conectere project, which is connected with EMU’s graduate counseling program and the Shalom Collaboratory at Eastern Mennonite Seminary.
Join us for three days of learning, storytelling, and conversation with people who hold practical wisdom and whose theology leads them into everyday justice work. Participants will explore organizing as an Anabaptist-Mennonite expression of peacebuilding, wrestle with the theological questions it raises, and begin building ongoing connections among leaders in both movement and broad-based organizing.
When Eastern Mennonite Seminary Professor David Evans set out to write his book about religious white progressives in the fight for Black freedom, he didn’t expect that his main thesis would flip by nearly 180 degrees. But after seven years of research and writing, Damned Whiteness: How White Christian Allies Failed the Black Freedom Movement is just weeks away from publication. The book offers an unflinching history of white allies—namely Clarence Jordan, Dorothy Day, and Ralph Templin—and the fracturing relationships that followed when their strategies and philosophies didn’t align with Black leaders and communities.
As one of the lead organizers for Congregate Charlottesville, Brittany Caine-Conley, MDiv ’14, (aka “Smash”) called for 1,000 clergy and faith leaders of all denominations to counter-protest a gathering of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. Her efforts denied white supremacists key locations that would have made their Unite the Right rally more visible, and later that year, she was honored by the National Council of Churches as a co-recipient of the President’s Award for Excellence in Faithful Leadership.
