John Thomas III
John Thomas III
Dr. John Thomas III is the Editor of The Christian Recorder—the official organ of the 2.5 million-member AME Church. He is the first layperson to serve in this role and the youngest elected General Officer in the history of the AME Church. The Christian Recorder is published by the AME Church Sunday School Union in Nashville, TN and is the oldest continuously published periodical by persons of African descent in the world. In continuous production since 1852, its readership encompasses 40 countries on five different continents.
He received the Bachelor of Arts degree (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) in 2004 from Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia with double majors in International Studies and Spanish. Upon completing his degree, he was awarded a 2004-2005 U.S. Student Fulbright Fellowship to Peru. John enrolled in the Princeton University School of Public and International Affairs Master of Public Affairs program in Fall 2005 in the Development Studies Field. While at Princeton, he interned at the World Bank country office in the Dominican Republic in 2006. In 2007, he helped organize a student-led consulting workshop for Afro-Honduran and Indigenous Congressional legislators in Honduras. After obtaining the MPA degree, John obtained the Doctor of Philosophy in the Political Science Department of the University of Chicago. His dissertation focused on the evolution of Black Politics in Peru and Ecuador from 1980-2016. John has authored several papers and presentations in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Through his research, John has served as a consultant to the Inter-American Development Bank, the Ministry of Culture of Peru and the Center for Ethnic Development in Lima, Peru. His academic appoints include work at Chicago State University and Payne Theological Seminary. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina.
In 2011 at the 20th World Methodist Conference in Durban, South Africa, he was elected to a five-year term as the Youth and Young Adult Coordinator of the World Methodist Council.
In this role, he was responsible for facilitating youth and young adult initiatives for its 80 member denominations in the Methodist, Wesleyan, Holiness, and Uniting/United Church traditions.
John Thomas III is a lifelong member of St. John African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, Nashville TN. He represented the Tennessee Annual Conference at the 2004, 2008 and 2016 General Conferences as well as at the 2001, 2007, 2009 and 2015 sessions of the Lay Biennial. He also represented the 13th Episcopal District (Tennessee and Kentucky) on the General Board of the African Methodist Episcopal Church from 2004-2012. John served as the Young Adult Representative of the Connectional Lay Organization from 2009-2013 and as a Women’s Missionary Society Sojourner to the Dominican Republic in 2002 and 2009. He was a Connectional Lay delegate to the General Conference in 2012 and served as an at-large member of the General Board from 2012-2016.
Dr. Thomas serves on the boards of the Associated Church Press, the World Association of Christian Communicators, and is a member of the World Methodist Council. He also participates in this National Conference of Black Political Scientists, the American Political Science Association and the Latin American Studies Association.