Staff and Founders
STAFF
PCU’s Executive Director, Rev. Peter Laarman, is a graduate of Brown University and Yale Divinity School with a background in community organizing and in media work for the U.S. labor movement. Before joining the PCU staff in 2004, Laarman served for ten years as senior minister of New York City’s historic Judson Memorial Church, during which time he focused the church’s public ministry on support for low-wage workers and popular education addressing rising social and economic inequality in New York and the nation. In 2005 Laarman was instrumental in establishing the new resource center for faith and public life that is affiliated with the Center for American Progress. He is viewed as a key leader and strategist within the interfaith worlds of Southern California and the nation. Contact him at
Jennifer Snow, who serves as PCU’s Deputy Director, holds a doctorate in religion from Columbia University, where she researched and published on race and religion in the development of American immigration policy. Her study of Protestant missionary ideology and early anti-Asian immigration laws will be published by Routledge Press in December 2006. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Religion and Civic Culture, University of Southern California, and a year at the Office for Religious and Spiritual Life at Occidental College, she joined PCU in January 2006, looking forward to developing programs that help people of faith from a wide variety of socioeconomic, racial, and theological backgrounds live out a commitment to activism and social justice. Currently she is focused on PCU’s new Eighth Day Project, developing networks and resources around environmental justice for congregations in Los Angeles. You can reach her at .
Lead Campus Organizer Frank Romero, a graduate of Biola University, is a recent addition to Progressive Christians Uniting. He joins us from his work with the Pasadena based non-profit organization, Middle East Fellowship, where he had been the Campus Organizer and Education Programs Coordinator since 2003. Frank is very involved with the Los Angeles activism networks and campus mobilization initiatives around the question of Palestine. He had lived in the Middle East region for two years during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq subsequent to the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. Since then he has helped in recruiting, organizing and facilitating international delegations and comprehensive volunteer programs to Palestine. Also, he’s a die-hard Laker fan. You can reach him at , and sign up for his Campus Campaign email alerts on our website.
Rev. John Forney, who coordinates Common Ground and Special Projects, is a graduate from Cal. State U. Los Angeles and Claremont School of Theology, where he received a Rel. D. degree. He has done additional work at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific and earned teaching credentials at Mills College in the School of Education. He is an Episcopal priest resident in the Diocese of Los Angeles. His ministry has been mostly in local parishes, serving both United Methodist and Episcopal congregations over 20 years. He has taught in settings from preschool through university level, serving as the chair of the Religious Studies Department at Alaska Pacific University. He has also run his family’s real estate business and a waste water treatment plant which enables him to do microdevelopment work in Ghana, Africa. John believes that the development of Common Ground groups will provide the necessary support, spiritual growth and practical action to build a new Christianity that will truly embody the radical teachings of the “Jesus of dangerous memory.” To contact him, email .
PCU’s new Orange County Chapter Coordinator, Erin Weller, recently graduated from Chapman University in Peace Studies and Dance Performance. At Chapman she participated in Disciples on Campus as well as Students for Peaceful Empowerment, Action, and Knowledge (SPEAK), finding community while searching for faith, leadership, and service. Erin has also worked extensively at Pilgrim Pines Camp, a UCC summer camp that reaches out to youth in the church as well as foster children to cultivate respect and love for their faith, their environment, their peers, and themselves. She is very passionate about issues of social justice and hopes her job with PCU will begin a journey working for justice throughout the U.S. and the world. Erin is also a dancer and hopes to dance professionally. She currently works at Saint Joseph Ballet, an organization that reaches out to low income youth in Santa Ana, teaches them dance, tutors them, and helps their parents find work. In the future Erin looks forward to volunteering internationally with refugees and refugee children. She also has interests in the fields of social work, adults with mental disabilities, and teaching. Erin is excited about working with PCU in supporting caring Christians who live out their faith by taking a stand when they see injustice in their community and in their world. You can contact Erin at , and sign up to receive her OC E-Newsletters.
Charles Bayer, Coordinator for the Pomona Valley, has been a life-long activist as a community organizer, pastor, author, elected politician, political newspaper columnist and seminary professor. He has served congregations in Washington D.C. Chicago and St. Joseph, Missouri. His eight published books focus on theology and congregational life from the perspective of both liberation and process thought. He has taught in Chicago and Australia, and currently teaches under the auspices of the Disciples Seminary Foundation in their program for lay-ministers. You can reach him at , or sign up online for the Pomona Valley email alerts.
Virginia Classick, Regional Coordinator for the San Fernando Valley, is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and has worked primarily in the fields of mental health and domestic violence for nearly 40 years. She grew up on the campus of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, where her father was a professor. She received her B.A. in theology from Valparaiso University in Indiana, took courses in the M.A. in Religion program at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, and received her MSW (Masters in Social Work) from Washington University in St. Louis. She serves as Secretary of the Board of Directors of Peace Action West, is a member of the Christian-Muslim Consultative Group of Southern California and the Valley Interfaith Youth Initiative. She lives in Woodland Hills, and is a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and a General Member of All Saints-Pasadena. You can reach her at .
Inland Empire Chapter Coordinator Coy J. Remer grew up in the Oklahoma City area where he lived until he started seminary at The Claremont School of Theology in 2004. Coy has a BA in Religion from Oklahoma City University, and has just completed his Masters of Divinity. Coy now manages the Cokesbury on the campus of the School of Theology and works for the Inland Empire chapter of PCU. Before working for PCU, Coy worked for CLUE in the Inland Empire with the people of Redlands and Highland to stop the proposed Super Wal-Mart’s in both communities. For Coy, working with PCU is a dream come true. He greatly looks forward to spreading the love and grace of God by partaking in the work of Christ in the here and now.
Casey Crosbie-Nell, Administrator and Event Organizer, is a recent graduate from Claremont School of Theology, where he earned a M.A. in Organizing and Soci
al Ethics. Casey comes out of the Lutheran tradition and is currently affiliated with Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. From that tradition he has earned a deep respect for the concept of Grace, and an inclination to fight for the forgotten, neglected, and rejected in our own society and in others. Within the organizing world he has worked on a number of local projects including unionizing security and healthcare workers in Los Angeles and promoting public education on the business models of companies such as Wal-Mart in the inland empire. He has also worked in Washington D.C. with Sojourners/Call to Renewal as an events organizer for their Pentecost Conference. Before coming to the big city, Casey was raised in a self-described “village” in rural South Dakota and attended Concordia College in Moorhead MN. He also worked in the social service sector in Minnesota before attending seminary. You can contact Casey at .
FOUNDERS
Rev. Dr. George F. Regas retired as Rector of All Saints Church, Pasadena, in May 1995 after serving 28 years in that position. The primary focus of his ministry at All Saints was peace and justice. He led his congregation to oppose the Vietnam War, the escalating nuclear arms race, and the first Gulf War. He also established many programs to respond to human needs in the Los Angeles area: the AIDS Service Center, a medical program for uninsured children, a shelter for the homeless, and others. Always deeply committed to interfaith work, Dr. Regas founded Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace in the immediate wake of the 9-11 attacks. ICUJP has since become the primary meeting ground and generator of creative ideas for committed interfaith activists in Los Angeles. Dr. Regas continues to write, preach, and lecture widely. He is without question one of the most prominent figures in the national constellation of progressive faith leaders and is well known internationally as well through his work in behalf of the Desmond Tutu Foundation and in combating nuclear escalation and military adventurism on the part of the United States. This year George Frank Regas is celebrating the 50th anniversary of his graduation from the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, MA. He later studied with John A.T. Robinson in Cambridge, England, and he received his doctorate from the Claremont School of Theology here in California.
Dr. John B. Cobb, Jr. was born of Southern Methodist missionary parents in Japan in 1925. Most of his childhood was lived in Hiroshima and the Kobe area, where he attended Canadian Academy. Furloughs were spent in his mother’s parents’ home in Newnan, Georgia. Because of the approach of war, he returned to Newnan around Christmas 1940, finished high school there, and then went to a junior college of Emory University, located in Oxford, Georgia. Before completing junior college he joined the army to attend the Japanese language school at the University of Michigan, completing that program at Camp Savage, Minnesota. His subsequent military service was mainly translating captured military documents at Camp Ritchie, Marlyand. Soon after Japanese surrender he became part of the army of occupation.
After discharge from the army he went to the University of Chicago where he entered the Humanities Division. After a year there he transferred to the Divinity School, where he received the MA and PhD degrees. He joined the North Georgia Conference of the United Methodist Church. His appointment for the first year was part-time teaching at Young Harris College and part-time pastoral responsibility for six churches. He founded a seventh. The next two years he was full time at the college from where he went to Emory University for five years (1953-58). The rest of his teaching career, until his retirement in 1990, was at the Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University. He has been guest professor at the University of Mainz, Rikkyo University, Iliff School of Theology, Vanderbilt Divinity School, the University of Chicago, and Harvard Divinity School. He also served as a fellow at the Woodrow Willson Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
In 1947 he married Jean Loftin and they had four sons. They now have five grandchildren. Jean served as office manager at the Claremont United Methodist Church and as a librarian at the Claremont School of Theology. On retirement they moved to Pilgrim Place.
He has been committed to the process thought of Alfred North Whitehead. Together with Lewis Ford he founded the journal Process Studies in 1970, and with David Griffin he founded the Center for Process Studies at the School of Theology at Claremont. He has written a number of theological books, including A Christian Natural Theology, The Structure of Christian Existence, Christ in a Pluralistic Age, Beyond Dialogue, Reclaiming the Church, and Grace and Responsibility. He has co-authored books in other fields with process thinkers: The Liberation of Life (with Charles Birch, biologist), For the Common Good (with Herman Daly, economist), and Romans (with David Lull, New Testament scholar).