Reverend Cecil “Chip” Murray

Rev. Murray holds the John R. Tansey Chair in Christian Ethics at USC and is a senior fellow at the Center for Religion and Civic Culture. He also directs Passing the Mantle, a program that trains up-and-coming black ministers in community development. For 27 years, he headed one of Los Angeles’ most visible churches, the First African Methodist Episcopal Church, which under his leadership grew from a small congregation of 250 into an 18,000-person church with multimillion-dollar community and economic development programs that brought jobs, housing and corporate investment into many South Los Angeles neighborhoods.