Rev. John W. Wimberly, Jr., has been a pastor in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area since 1976, at Western since 1983. Rev. Wimberly does not just preach Sunday sermons and counsel his parishioners; he also works hands-on to empower the most vulnerable citizens of the nation's capital and to support those who serve them.
While he was associate pastor of Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church in Bethesda, Maryland, he helped found the Network of Abused Women. Soon after he moved to Western, in 1983, he co-founded Miriam's Kitchen for the Homeless, which has been feeding breakfast to homeless people five days a week for 17 years. To acknowledge the importance of this work, the Potomac Electric Power Company gave Rev. Wimberly its annual award for community service in 1990.
In 1989, Rev. Wimberly and Western's congregation negotiated a creative agreement with the powerful International Monetary Fund, which wanted to acquire the church's property, then at 19th and H Streets, N.W., for office expansion. Rev. Wimberly headed a team that negotiated a contract that resulted in significant plant improvements for the feeding program as well as for the congregation. It also created an endowment that helps fund mission projects, such as Project Create and Western's campus ministry.
He served nine years on the board of directors of Centro Comunal Unidad, a Hispanic center for social services in the Adams Morgan-Columbia Heights area. While serving there, he helped negotiate a contract with the National Capital Presbytery that allowed the center to remain open and serve the Latino community.
Working in the Latino community was a natural for Rev. Wimberly, whose Ph.D. dissertation at Catholic University of America was "Grace and the Human Condition in the Theology of Juan Luis Segundo." Segundo was a Latin American practitioner of liberation theology, a theology that understands the Gospel as requiring us to support the struggles of the poor for freedom and economic justice.
The American Jewish Congress of the National Capital Region presented him and the Western congregation with its Conscience of the Community Award in 1994. In 1995, the National Interfaith/Impact Foundation gave him and the congregation its Protecting and Expanding the Dream Award. In 1996, he helped organize the D.C. Mayor's Day of Dialogue on Racial Polarization. In 2003, Reverend Wimberly earned his MBA from The George Washington University. In 2006, the American Jewish Committee gave him an award for his work on interfaith issues. In the same year, he was inducted into the Washington D.C. Hall of Fame.
In the Presbyterian denomination, he has been moderator of the Presbyterian Synod of the Piedmont for the Mid-Atlantic States and moderator of the National Capital Presbytery for the D.C. metropolitan area.
He is currently on the Board of Trustees for the periodical The Presbyterian Outlook. He is President of the ACLU in the Washington, D.C. area. His recent book on church management The Business of the Church, published by Alban Institute, was named a notable fall book by The Christian Century magazine.
Rev. Wimberly has been interviewed on CBS Evening News, ABC Evening News, CNN, the Derrick McGinty Show on National Public Radio, and local radio and TV stations. Articles about his work on behalf of the abused, the homeless, the poor, and minorities have been published in The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The Christian Century, and The New York Times Sunday Edition. Rev. Wimberly has himself advocated social justice in numerous articles in The Washington Post Sunday Outlook.
Rev. Wimberly, a husband, father, and grandfather, lives in Washington, D.C., but takes many of his vacations in Mexico, where his family has built a house. He makes and teaches pottery on the wheel.