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What is the Bradford Cleveland Brooks Leadership Center?
The center is an Adventist Christian learning organization initiated by the North American Division Regional Presidents’ Council in collaboration with the Oakwood College Board of Trustees designed to provide education and excellence in leadership skills at all levels of the Church. The center will provide a cross-cultural learning ministry offering curriculum in biblically-based, God-centered, missionally oriented, applied Christ-like servant leadership and modern management skills and competencies, guided by professionally-driven theological and sociological research, consultation, and generative coaching for men and women at the undergraduate and graduate levels of learning.
The center is a futures-oriented institution originally conceived by and named in honor of three outstanding black leaders in the Seventh-day Adventist church: Dr. Charles E. Bradford, visionary spiritual leader, who served as the first Black president of the North American Division; Dr. Edward Earl Cleveland, renown world evangelist, who has done more to shape the public preaching of the Seventh-day Adventist message than any other preacher during the twentieth century, also founder of the Annual Pastoral Evangelism Council (APAC) and professor of evangelism at Oakwood College, and Dr. Charles D. Brooks, innovative media-evangelist and first speaker-director of Breath of Life Television Ministries, and who has birthed some fourteen churches nationally and internationally. Co-visionaries, their significant contributions gave birth to the BCBLC vision and mission.
Dr. Bradford says, “the idea goes back to the Compleat Administrators Seminars of the 80s ‘which endeavored to provide growth experiences for people in conferences and institutional leadership throughout the {North American} Division.” The center is a shared vision and a new paradigm for cooperative and collaborative Christian service, and a facility for its implementation.
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