THE REVEREND RAPHAEL GAMALIEL WARNOCK, Keynote Speaker
2010 MEMORIAL SERVICE
Monday, January 18, 2010 at 11:45AM at Greater Warner AME Church
The Reverend Raphael Gamaliel Warnock, Ph.D., is currently the Senior Pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, spiritual home of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A native of Savannah, Georgia, and the son of two Pentecostal-Holiness ministers, The Rev. Dr. Warnock preached his first sermon at age eleven. Having been licensed and ordained at the historic Sixth Avenue Baptist Church of Birmingham, Alabama, he then served for six years as the Youth Pastor and four years as the Assistant Pastor of the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church of New York City. Before coming to Ebenezer, Pastor Warnock served for 4 ½ years as the Senior Pastor of Baltimore’s Douglas Memorial Community Church.
The Rev. Dr. Warnock graduated from Morehouse College and holds both a Master of Divinity degree and a Master of Philosophy degree from Union Theological Seminary, New York City. He received his Ph.D. degree from Union Seminary and his research interests and writing have included on-going research on the activist ministries of two twentieth century martyrs: The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. His primary research, however, is focused in the area of investigating black religion and spirituality and interpreting the theological meaning and historical mission of the black church.
As a student at Morehouse College, he organized and served as the keynote speaker at a Peace Vigil protesting George Bush’s initiation of a War against Iraq. During the 1992 Democratic Convention in New York City, he coordinated an alternative People’s Convention and in 1995, was part of a 15-member delegation to Haiti.
The Rev. Dr. Warnock is a graduate of the Leadership Program sponsored by the Greater Baltimore Committee and a graduate of the Summer Leadership Institute of Harvard University. The November 1999 issue of Ebony Magazine listed him as one of Thirty Leaders of the Future.
In 1989, The Rev. Dr. Warnock authored Educating Teens For Positive Peer Intervention, which today still serves as Georgia’s official curriculum guide for teen peer programs aimed at reducing the State’s teenage pregnancy rate. The Honorable Joseph Frank Harris, former Governor of Georgia, made Dr. Warnock the youngest person ever to be appointed to the Southern Regional Task Force on Infant Mortality.
He is a 1993 recipient of Union Theological Seminary’s William H. Hudnut Preaching Award and a member of the American Academy of Religion, Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. and various other civic and social organizations. He has received the Benjamin Elijah Mays Fellowship For Ministry from the Fund for Theological Education, the Thomas and Jeanetta Kilgore Theological Scholarship Award, Associated Black Charity’s “Good Shepherd Award” and other fellowships, honors and citations.