John R. Wimmer is a United Methodist minister who served as a local church pastor for 18 years and founded the Center for Congregations, now a network with 5 regional offices in Indiana and whose model of working with churches has been adopted by many organizations nationwide. Since 2002 he has been program director at Lilly Endowment, where he has sought to enhance pastoral leadership and congregational vitality through more than $700 million in grants to denominations, seminaries, and a wide variety of other church agencies. Under Wimmer’s leadership, the Endowment’s Sustaining Pastoral Excellence Initiative touched more than 20,000 pastors through peer learning groups, and two initiatives he now directs on economic challenges facing pastoral leaders involve thousands of seminarians, pastoral leaders, and churches in more than 100 denominations.
