BISHOP WARNER H. BROWN, JR.
Bishop Warner H. Brown, Jr. is a retired bishop of the United Methodist Church.
He is a native of Baltimore, Maryland. Graduating high school in 1964 from Baltimore City College. “City” is the third oldest public high school in the US still in operation. He went on to earn a B.A. in Sociology at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland in 1969. Bishop Brown then earned a Masters of Divinity Degree from Wesley Theological Seminary (Washington DC) in 1974. Planning to serve the church as a layperson, the call to ordained ministry became clear while serving in a local Washington, D.C. church as a Wesley student intern.
Bishop Brown has served the church in various pastoral and executive roles. Recruited while in seminary by the Western Pennsylvania Conference, where he directed a ministry in two public housing projects and pastored two congregations in the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from 1973 to 1979.
He was then selected through a national search in 1979 for a position on the program staff of the California-Nevada Annual Conference. One year later, he was promoted to director of the program staff, serving as Conference Council Director from 1980 to 1983. From 1983 to 1987, Brown was appointed the District Superintendent of the Golden Gate District. In this role, he supervised the 55 churches in a richly diverse area including San Francisco and several rural and suburban counties along the Pacific Coast.
In 1987, he was named senior pastor of Taylor Memorial United Methodist Church in Oakland, California.
While serving this congregation, the community was devastated by the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake; and, two years later, the Oakland hills firestorm. Working with other pastors in the community, he organized the Oakland Interreligious Network, a collaboration of faith based organizations, responding to these disasters.
As chairperson of this group, Brown led the community’s ecumenical and interfaith disaster response.
In recognition of this and other relief work, he was named recipient of the 1996 Outstanding Leadership and Service Award for Emergency Response Ministries, given by United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR).
Following 11 years serving in Oakland, Brown was given a new challenge as Senior Pastor of the predominantly white, First United Methodist Church of Bakersfield, California. As he started his third year with this congregation, he was nominated by the California-Nevada Conference as a candidate for Bishop.
He was elected to the episcopacy and assigned to the Denver Area, where he served from 2000-2008. At that time the Denver area included two Annual Conferences with 400 churches spanning the states of Colorado, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming.
In 2008, Bishop Brown returned to the California-Nevada Annual Conference as Resident Bishop.
From September 2008 until August 2016, he led over 360 ethnically and culturally diverse United Methodist congregations and ministries in the northern two-thirds of California and Northern Nevada.
Throughout his ministry, Bishop Brown has been active with the social justice ministries and programs for social change in the communities where he has been appointed. A few of those include: Trustee of the Glide Foundation, vice-chair of the Community Advisory Commission for Alameda County Medical Center, Volunteer Police Chaplain (Oakland, California), member of the Governing Board of United Way for Kern County, and President of the Board of Directors for the Bakersfield Homeless Shelter. In 1998 he was the recipient of Special Congressional Recognition from Congresswoman Barbara Lee.
Within the United Methodist Church, he has served several roles including as a member of the General Commission on Religion and Race (GCRR), and as a member of the board for the General Board of Discipleship (GBOD).
While serving on GBOD, Bishop Brown guided the formation and launch of the Division of Ministry with Young People and the first Global Young People’s Gathering (2007) in Johannesburg, South Africa. Subsequently, he has given leadership for these events held in Berlin, Germany in 2010 and in Manila, Philippines in 2014.
He also served on the board of directors for the General Board of Global Ministries (GBGM), and as President of the United Methodist Development Fund (UMDF).
Beginning in May of 2014, Bishop Brown served for two years as President of the Council of Bishops of the United Methodist Church. The United Methodist Church, with over 13 million members around the world and more than 46,000 congregations throughout the United States, Africa, Europe and the Philippines, is the largest member church of the World Methodist Council. It is, also, the third largest religious denomination in the United States with over 7.3 million members in the United States alone.
In retirement Bishop Brown has continued his ministry through a coaching practice that works with leaders to discover their strengths for influence, innovation and collaboration. He also served as Interim Senior Pastor for Glide Memorial United Methodist Church, San Francisco from 2016-2017.
He is married to Mrs. Minnie Jones Brown. They have three adult children and three grandchildren.