It has been our dream for a number of years for Interfaith Advocate to become a 501(C)(3) organization. We have been working with the Foundation Group out of Nashville Tennessee for several years and in 2019 put together the structure of what would become this nonprofit foundation and developed our charter with my dear friends Holli Emore with whom I have served for number of years on the board of interfaith partners of South Carolina and for the last several years on the board of Cherry Hill seminary, and Reb Tzipi Radonski whom I met through our service together on the board of the Unified Interfaith Community Coalition of Beaufort.
 
For a long time what I perceived as the thrust of our work was the videoing I have been doing of events and interviews with individuals in the interfaith movement. This past year given the Covid crisis has all but halted those efforts. Although I did discover in doing the video interviews for Interfaith Partners of South Carolina's Interfaith Harmony Month that it is possible to produce videos in a virtual environment and I will pursue this. After a lot of thought I now see what I am imagining as a major effort of Interfaith Advocate to be interfaith chaplaincy. Most of the large organizations around here, hospitals, nursing homes, jails and prisons which utilize the services of chaplains generally have only representatives from one or two faith traditions, primarily Christian. It is my hope that I will be able to offer chaplaincy services for the under-served faiths in the area, especially Hinduism, Sikhism and Native American spirituality all of which I have spent some time studying and have worked with faith leaders in those traditions.
 
The purpose of this particular report is to share the news that the Internal Revenue Service has finally granted us our 501(C)(3) status! It has been a long time coming and I am grateful to all of you who have supported our work. And those of you who have the ability and are inclined to support our work financially now have the opportunity to do so with tax credits. Thank you.

As those of you know who have followed our work with Interfaith Partners of South Carolina, we have for a number of years partnered with the governor's office in proclaiming January as South Carolina's Interfaith Harmony Month. This year due to the Covid virus we were unable to have the in person meetings and events which have grown ever more popular and diverse over the years and instead developed a number of wonderful virtual meetings and presentations which were very successful. In some ways it was a great blessing and that many events which were local for some and would require a fair amount of travel for others became equally available to all.
 
As a part of my contribution to the events I was able to conduct a couple of video interviews with real powerhouses in the interfaith movement. Dr. Barbara Fields serves as the Executive Director of the Association of Global New Thought which also engages in a lot of interfaith work. Perhaps the most famous aspect of their work is the annual Gandhi/King Season of Peace which takes place each year beginning January 30th and runs 64 days until April 4th.  She was program director for the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions. For more information please visit WWW.AGNT.ORG We had a lovely time, and to watch this nearly one hour interview click on Dr. Fields image
 
The secondary interview was with Dr. Larry Greenfield, Pres. Emeritus of the Parliament of World Religions. Dr. Greenfield has been involved in many interfaith initiatives over the years as well as an ongoing commitment to the Baptist movement with which she has been affiliated for many many years. Our interview also ran nearly to one hour in length and I believe we covered some exciting topics which I'm anxious to share with you. To watch this interview click on Dr. Greenfield's image

On December 12, 2020 I graduated from the Barbara King school of Ministry in Atlanta Georgia. Dr. Barbara herself had approved my graduation just a few short weeks before she had passed at 90 years of age. What a great gift it was to come to know her better. I had long been following her work and had the opportunity to video the session that she presented at the 2018 Parliament of World Religions in Toronto. Her talk was entitled re-visioning Dr. Martin Luther King's world house vision. The session is available on our Vimeo site click here for the link. During this session she spoke of her initial meeting of Dr. King when he came to meet her and some of her colleagues in the civil rights movement in Chicago in the late 1940s. Dr. King had everyone introduce themselves going around the table and when he came to Dr. Barbara and she introduced herself as Barbara King he said "oh well that will make it easy for me to remember you as we have the same last name". She laughed and then told us that to herself she said "no, you will remember me because I am a 6'6" tall black woman who speaks her mind!". In all seriousness she was a globally recognized not only a new thought but in the interface movement as well and was the first woman to be recognized as a chief in Senegal.

My ministerial skills are fairly well developed in a few areas though I confess that I must still struggle with preaching, in truth I may better teacher than public speaker. I bring this up because the last class that I took from Dr. Barbara was homiletics one and I did learn a great deal from her about how to make points and keep the audiences attention, about the importance of music in church services among other things. My lack of preaching ability may not be such a handicap inasmuch as what I have desired to do for some time as an ordained minister's chaplaincy work and now that I have had my vaccinations I'm in a much better position to seek that kind of work. On December 12th my wife Chris and I traveled down to Atlanta for my graduation and for my ordination ceremony which was magnificently conducted by Bishop Dr. Jack Bomar. I have been working in interface with Bishop Jack for years much of which was with the Unified Interfaith Community Coalition of Beaufort under the direction of Rev. Jeanine Smalls as well as some work with the Parliament of World Religions. I'm very grateful for his generosity and patience with me in our work together.