Doug Cunningham
Doug Cunningham is an ordained pastor, activist, and bestselling author of Beyond the White Church: Disrupting Racism, Rebuilding Faith Community. His forty-year journey began in the Philippines amid the resistance movement that toppled the Marcos dictatorship in the 1980s. Over the following decades, he ministered in white, multiracial, and Black United Methodist churches in Baltimore and New York.
In 2008, he served as lead and founding pastor of New Day Church, a Bronx-based, multiracial, LGBTQ+ affirming congregation shaped by boundary-crossing theology across race, class, sexual orientation, gender, and age, and by an explicit commitment to social justice and leadership development among emerging faith leaders. Originally a church plant of the United Methodist Church, he launched with a team including Sheila Beckford, Jorge Lockward, and Lisa Asedillo. In 2020, he joined a campaign led by the New York chapter of Black Methodists for Church Renewal, which established the James Lawson Anti-Racism Commission (JLARC), of which he is currently a member.
Beyond the White Church: Disrupting Racism, Rebuilding Faith Community is a memoir that weaves personal narrative with antiracist insights and ministry practices developed alongside colleagues working to disrupt racism in the church (2025).
See more athttps://beyondthewhitechurch.com/
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