Welcome to SCUPE, the Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education. For over 30 years SCUPE has provided contextual, experiential, holistic and community oriented urban theological education to students, pastors and theological educators.
The stories that make us who we are, the communities in which we live, and the social, economic and political constructs within which we live, influence how we think about and do theology. Indeed, the questions we ask of our scripture and tradition arise out of that context. Theologians, including the ones who we admire the most, have also been the products of their contexts. The questions they brought to scripture and the tradition before them arose out of their situation in life.
Today’s context, particularly in the complex, diverse, and dynamic urban environments is very different from anything we have known in years past. Consequently, those who live in today’s cities ask very different questions from the ones Christians have traditionally asked.
The task of the urban theologian is to incarnate herself or himself among the people of the city, make those questions a part of his or her own inquiry, and from that vantage point begin to examine scripture and tradition. We invite you to this exciting journey. You will be amazed at the way such a process expands your theological horizon.
The Congress of Urban Ministry provides an excellent opportunity to reflect on these questions, while listening to well-known theologians and church leaders, participating in a variety of workshops and meeting other practitioners of urban ministry. I encourage you to make use of this valuable opportunity.
This is an exciting time to provide leadership to SCUPE. I am grateful to God for having called me to this task. I welcome your thoughts, suggestions, questions and comments.
Rev. Dr. Shanta Premawardhana
President.Bio of Rev. Dr. Shanta Premawardhana
Rev. Dr. Shanta Premawardhana was recently appointed President of the Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education in Chicago.
A Baptist pastor from Sri Lanka, he was most recently the director for the Program Interreligious Dialogue and Cooperation at the World Council of Churches (WCC), a worldwide fellowship of 349 Protestant and Orthodox churches based in Geneva, Switzerland.
His work there included helping global church bodies articulate a comprehensive theological basis for interreligious dialogue and cooperation relevant for contemporary contexts. He spearheaded a joint initiative -- expected to be finalized in 2011-- between the Vatican, World Evangelical Alliance and the WCC, seeking agreement on a code of conduct for Christian witness. In addition, he worked on the project Accompanying Churches in Situations of Conflict, which encourages churches to stand in solidarity with other churches facing religious persecution. His primary task was to bring religious leaders from such contexts to dialogue tables to seek together ways of resolving conflicts and finding means of reconciliation.
Prior to moving to Geneva, Premawardhana served as the Associate General Secretary for Interfaith Relations at the National Council of Churches of Christ, based in New York. Acknowledging the need for Christian theology as a discipline to take interreligious dialogue seriously, he organized Special Topics Forums at the American Academy of Religion to address this question with professors of theology and academic deans of US seminaries.
Following seminary education in Sri Lanka and India, Premawardhana arrived in the United States in 1981 for graduate study at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where he earned his M.A. and Ph.D, in Religion. Continuing to live in the Chicago area, he founded the Chicago Ashram of Jesus Christ, a Christian community with an outreach to South Asian immigrants from many cultural backgrounds and religious traditions.
He served for fourteen years as senior pastor of Ellis Avenue Church located in the south side of Chicago where members were encouraged to take seriously their own calling to be ministers, and pastors to take seriously their calling to “equip the saints for the work of ministry” (Ephesians 4:11). Understanding his own role as a pastor to the neighborhood, Premawardhana helped found a local congregation-based community organization, served as Vice President of the Chicago-wide Metropolitan Alliance of Congregations, and later, as a leader in the National Leadership Assembly of the Gamaliel Foundation. His leadership in the clergy caucuses of these grassroots organizations enabled him to articulate the biblical and theological basis to the questions of economic justice and immigrant rights in which these organizations primarily engaged. Convinced of the critical need for ministry to young people in low-income neighborhoods of Chicago, he organized and helped coach a youth basketball team in Englewood (one of the poorest communities in Chicago), taking it all the way to its league championship!
Premawardhana also served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Alliance of Baptists for six years and as its Vice President from 2002-03. He chaired its standing committee on Interfaith Relations and was instrumental in helping them adopt an historic "Statement on Jewish-Christian Relations." In recognition of his ministry, the Academy of Parish Clergy named him 1998 Parish Pastor of the Year, and the Islamic Society of North America awarded him the Interfaith Unity Award in 2007.
He has published numerous articles on religion, interreligious dialogue and Christian mission. His most recent, “Jamestown and the Future of Mission: Mending Creation and Claiming Full Humanity in Interreligious Partnership,” was published in Remembering Jamestown: Hard Questions about Christian Mission (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2010) edited by Amos Yong and Barbara Brown Zikmund.
He is married to Dhilanthi Fernando, a well-known music teacher in Chicago and Geneva, and has three adult children, Charith, Devaka and Amali.
