NCC End Poverty

Staff

The Reverend Michael E. Livingston, Director

Michael Livingston is the Director of the Poverty Initiative of the National Council of Churches. He is the former Executive Director of the International Council of Community Churches. Rev. Livingston is a graduate of the University of California at Los Angeles and received his Master of Divinity and Master of Theology degrees from Princeton Theological Seminary. Following more than a decade in pastoral work, Rev. Livingston served first as Director of Admissions then as Campus Pastor and Director of the Chapel at Princeton Seminary. Rev. Livingston is a former President of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. He led an NCC peace delegation to Paris, France prior to the Iraq war and to Beirut, Lebanon in October of 2006. In May of this year he traveled to Vietnam in an interfaith delegation to highlight the continuing devastating effects of Agent Orange. On November 1, 2010 Rev. Livingston met with President Obama as a member of a delegation of heads of member denominations of the NCC upon the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the ecumenical movement and to discuss a variety of mutually important concerns.

Ordained in the Presbyterian Church, USA, he recently chaired the General Assembly Committee on Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations. A committed ecumenist, he served on the Presbyterian General Assembly’s Special Committee on the Consultation on Church Union (now Churches Uniting in Christ, CUIC) from 1973-1999 and as chair of the committee and a member of the Executive Board of the COCU (CUIC) from 1993-1999. He has been a member of the Executive Board of the National Council of Churches since 1999 and a member of the Board of Church World Service since 2001.

From 1987 to 2001 Rev. Livingston served as the editor of Liberation and Unity: A Guide for Meditation and Action and has published sermons in the Princeton Seminary Bulletin, The Inclusive Pulpit and the African American Pulpit. He contributed a chapter entitled “An End to Silence” in the 1997 publication Called Out With: Stories of Solidarity (Edited by Thorson-Smith, van Wijk-Bos, Pott, and Thompson, Westminster John Knox, 1997). He is also the author of Done in Love: Edler G. Hawkins, (Church & Society, 1987).

Alongside his professional engagements, Rev. Livingston has been a community activist providing leadership to interfaith and interracial community organizations and membership on a variety of community efforts from local development corporations to broad based community service organizations. He is currently the founding board member and chairperson of The New Jersey Teen Parent Initiative, an effort to provide comprehensive support for unwed teenage mothers and their children.

Throughout his career as a pastor, ecumenist, denominational leader, and author, Rev. Livingston has maintained a passion for ministry to the “least of these” among us. Michael is married to Nancy Rucker Livingston and has two children, Aaron and Megan, and two grandchildren, Zahahia and Senai.

Contact Michael: mlivingston@ncccusa.org; (202)544-2375