Angela Wright
Angela Hope "Angie" Wright is executive director of the Leading Edge Institute and was the founding pastor of Beloved Community Church. She is an ordained clergywoman of the United Church of Christ (UCC) denomination. She is noted for her long career as a leader of several non-profit community advocacy organizations in the Birmingham area.
In the early 1990s, Wright helped to found the Alabama Arise organization, a lobbying group for liberal/progressive economic public policy before the state legislature. Later in that decade, she organized the Bethel-Ensley Action Task group, an economic development initiative. After Hurricane Katrina caused extensive devastation and displacement in 2005, she directed the United Way of Central Alabama's efforts to provide housing and support for refugees fleeing the New Orleans and Mississippi Gulf Coast areas. In 2007 Wright became director of the Leading Edge Institute, a women's organization that provides leadership training and opportunities to effect social change.
Wright graduated from Davidson College in North Carolina and Duke University Divinity School in Durham. She was ordained into the ministry at Pilgrim Congregational Church in 1997. Her first pastorate was the Congregational Christian Church in Garden City, at the southern edge of Cullman County. In 1999, several people met in her home to organize a congregation that would intentionally seek to appeal to people of all races and socio-economic backgrounds. The result was Beloved Community Church, which joined the UCC in 2000.
Wright has two sons.