Project 2025 and Its Impact on the Church

Join us for our fall series of the Pathways For Tomorrow Initiative of the Lilly Endowment, Inc., for a free 1.5 hour offering open to the public via the Zoom portal.

Monday, October 21, 2024, 6:00 – 7:30 p.m., EST

To Register on Eventbrite, Click Here

For questions, please contact Dr. Karen L. Owens, at kowens@hoodseminary.edu

FACILITATORS:

Dr. Cassandra Gould, Managing Director Power Building Faith In Action National Network, Washington, D.C.

Dr. Obery Hendricks, Visiting Scholar, Departments of Religion & African and African Diaspora Studies Columbia University, New York, New York

About the Facilitators:

Rev. Dr. Cassandra Gould
The Reverend Dr. Cassandra Gould aka “Pastor in the Public Square” is a native of Demopolis, Alabama, 47 miles west of Selma where her mother fought for voter rights. She currently lives in Washington, DC and serves as the Director of Power Building at the Faith in Action National Network, where she coordinates the work of the Faith Leadership, Federation Engagement and Immigration Departments. Her work allows her to develop and facilitate training for faith leaders for justice formation at the intersection of faith and politics in the US and Ghana.

She is an ordained Elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church where she serves as an
Associate at Metropolitan A.M.E. Church in DC. Her pastoral experience includes serving as a Senior Pastor in Missouri for 10 years. Dr. Gould is a capacity builder; under her leadership as pastor of Quinn Chapel A.M.E. in Jefferson City, MO the church built a state-of-the-art edifice, with zero debt, grew spiritually and numerically in exponential ways. While in Missouri she also served six and a half years as the Executive Director of Missouri Faith Voices, a statewide Faith in Action federation. She raised and managed the largest budget in the organization’s history and ran a robust civic engagement plan that resulted in policy wins including raising the minimum wage and passing Medicaid Expansion. Dr. Gould has been a part of a national movement to regulate predatory lending. She is a founding member of Faith for Justice Lending including championing the CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) and has testified in Congress regarding debt collection and financial predation.

While living in St. Louis, she answered the call to the front line in Ferguson as she coordinated the engagement of clergy from across the nation. She continues to answer the call to communities in crisis including Buffalo, New York where she sojourned with faith leaders and the surviving families after a mass shooting in 2022. Her leadership and witness have taken her around the globe from Palestine to Ghana. She has been a national voice on protecting voting rights and the fight against predatory lending. Her activism in this area was captured in the movie Rigged: The Voter Suppression Playbook, where she shares a glimpse of her mother’s story and how it shaped her. She is a sought
after preacher, guest lecturer, trainer, adjunct professor and guest columnist. She contributed to Preaching as Resistance and Rethinking Church. Dr. Gould uses a womanist framework to do ministry in the church and the public square. Her work over the last two years has included equipping Christian faith leaders with the tools to deconstruct the theology of White Christian Nationalism and to disrupt the implementation of Project 2025.

She is a proud alumna of Eden Theological Seminary and was a Samuel DeWitt Proctor Fellow at United Theological Seminary, where she earned a D.Min. Her thesis, “Beyond with Walls” is her mantra for ministry and during the pandemic evolved as a digital ministry. She is also a proud member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. She states, “Working toward justice and liberation at the intersection of faith and politics, in the words of the late Womanist theologian, Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon, “is the work my soul requires.”

Obery M. Hendricks, Jr., Ph.D.

Visiting Scholar, Departments of Religion

& African and African Diaspora Studies

Columbia University

80 Claremont Avenue

New York, NY 10027

Professor Emeritus

New York Theological Seminary

New York, NY

Former President

Payne Theological Seminary

Wilberforce, OH

Former Distinguished Senior Fellow

The Democracy Collaborative

Washington, DC

website: oberyhendricksphd.com