08438
June 9, 2008
Notes about people
The Rev. Michael Parker, a Presbyterian minister and international educator, has been named coordinator for frontier and international evangelism in the World Mission ministry area of the General Assembly Council.
Parker, a graduate of the University of California at Los Angeles and Fuller Theological Seminary, holds advanced degrees — including a Ph.D. — from the University of Maryland. He was ordained in 1994.
Since 2006, Parker has been interim pastor of the United Parish of Bowie, MD, a union church of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the United Church of Christ. For 11 years prior to that he served as a PC(USA) mission worker in Africa, teaching literature, theology and Christian history at universities in Sudan and Rwanda.
Parker has published two books: The Kingdom of Character: The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, 1886-1926 (1998) and Children of the Sun: Stories of the Christian Journey in Sudan (2000) and numerous articles for scholarly journals.
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Judy Semaria has been named coordinator for operations and administration in the World Mission ministry area of the General Assembly Council. Her new responsibilities will include the ministry area’s budget, finance, human resources and administration, in addition to participating in the ministry area's leadership team.
Semaria has worked as a CFO, corporate treasurer and financial management advisor in the private sector, worked overseas and speaks fluent French and proficient Spanish.
She has been serving as a budget and financial management officer for the GAC’s Compassion, Peace and Justice ministry area. She carried major responsibility for developing the long-term recovery plan for presbyteries affected by the 2005 hurricanes.
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The Rev. Clifford W. Nunn, who was active in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s response to Hurricane Katrina, died May 25 at age 66.
For 14 years, Nunn served as pastor of First Presbyterian Church of New Orleans, which was at the epicenter of Hurricane Katrina.
He is survived by his wife of 43 years, Nieta; a daughter, Rebecca Nunn Johnson and a son, Bruce O. Nunn; three grandchildren and numerous nieces and nephews; and a sister, Carolyn Johnson. Services were held May 29 at First Church, New Orleans.
Clement John, a Pakistani lawyer who worked for the World Council of Churches and the Christian Conference of Asia, died June 2 at his home in Minnesota. He was 67. Less than a week before he died, John has announced he had accepted a post as associate director of the Christian Study Center in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and planned to return to his native country within a couple of months.
John was born in Peshawar, in what is now Pakistan, in 1941. He completed his schooling at Sind, and took his BA and Bachelor of Law degrees from the University of Karachi, where he specialized in labor law.
John was a member of the board of directors of the YMCA of Karachi, and of its Technical Institute. He was also a founding member of a joint Anglican-Roman Catholic committee for justice and peace, formed by the Karachi diocese of the Church of Pakistan and the Catholic Church of Pakistan. He was long active in both student and legal organizations in Pakistan.
In 1983, he took up a post in Hong Kong as executive secretary for international affairs with the Christian Conference of Asia, where he became the first general secretary of both the Asian Human Rights Commission and the Asian Legal Resource Center. In 1993, John joined the staff of the WCC, specializing in human rights and the Asia-Pacific region. By the time of his retirement from the WCC in 2006, he was serving as director of the organization's Commission of the Churches on International Affairs.
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Solange De Santis, a veteran newswoman with experience in the secular and religious press, has been chosen to be the new editor of Episcopal Life Media.
De Santis, a native New Yorker who has reported for Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, and the Anglican Journal of Canada, will begin her new position July 1. Since 2000, De Santis had been a staff writer at the Anglican Journal, the national newspaper of the Anglican Church of Canada.
She succeeds Jerry Hames, who retired in 2007 after 17 years with Episcopal Life Media.
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