CHICAGO, IL (January 13, 2006) – Dr. Soong-Chan Rah has been named the Milton B. Engebretson Assistant Professor of Church Growth and Evangelism at North Park Theological Seminary, it was announced today.<\/p>\n
Rah is the founding senior pastor of the Cambridge Community Fellowship Church (CCFC), which joined the Evangelical Covenant Church during the 2003 Annual Meeting. Cambridge Community is described as a post-modern, multiethnic, urban ministry focused church located in the Central Square neighborhood of Cambridge, Massachusetts.<\/p>\n
The vision for CCFC was to see young men and women mobilized for a radical, incarnational ministry that would impact the city of Cambridge. The church is committed to living out the values of racial reconciliation and social justice in an urban context, Rah says. The ethnically diverse pastoral staff and leadership team is an integral part of that vision, reflected in numerous outreach programs to neighborhood children and youth as well as partnering with African-American and Latino churches to serve the needs of the inner city.<\/p>\n
Rah previously was part of a church planting team in the Washington D.C. area, working for a number of years with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in Boston – specifically at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) – and has mobilized the Cambridge church to plant two additional churches, one geared towards Vietnamese at-risk youth. He also is an active member of the Boston Ten-Point Coalition, a network of clergy that ministers to at-risk African-American youth in Boston’s inner-city neighborhoods.<\/p>\n
Rah serves on the board of Catalyst Leadership Center, a ministry dedicated to the raising up of Christian leaders and the development of healthy churches that are Asian specific as well as multiethnic. He is also a founding member of the Boston Fellowship of Asian-American Ministers. He has extensive experience in cross-cultural preaching (African-American, Anglo and Latino churches) as well as speaking on numerous college campuses including Harvard, MIT, Wheaton, Yale, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Brown, Trinity, and Gordon. Rah was a plenary speaker at the 2003 Urbana Student Missions Conference, the 2005 Summer Institute for Asian-American Ministry and Theology, and is scheduled to be a plenary speaker at the 2006 Congress on Urban Ministry, sponsored by the Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education.<\/p>\n