Home : The Voice : August 2002 

Fahed Abu-Akel Elected Moderator

Synod executive David Snellgrove, at left, had a pleasant reunion with Columbia Seminary classmate Fahed Abu-Akel, following Fahed’s election as General Assembly Moderator. The new moderator came to the United States in 1966. He was ordained as a PCUSA minister in 1978 and became a US citizen in 1981. He married Mary Zumot in 1980. He is the founder and executive director of the Atlanta Ministry with International Students, and director of the National Christmas International House Program.

by Bill Lancaster

The 214th General Assembly elected the Rev. Fahed Abu-Akel, 58, a Palestinian- American pastor from Atlanta, moderator of the Assembly for the coming year. He was elected on the second ballot, gleaning the votes of 269 of 520 commissioners—or 57 percent. The Rev. Laird Stuart of San Francisco got 153 votes (29 percent) and the Rev. Arthur J. “Jerry” Tankersley of Laguna Beach, CA received 71 votes (14 percent).

Abu-Akel had spoken movingly of his memory of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, when he was a 4-year-old child living in the Galilean village of Kuffer-Yassif, when Israeli troops drove his family from their home. As his father led the eight children away from their village, young Fahed looked back and saw his mother on the roof of their house, waving. She stayed behind while her husband and their children journeyed to a mountain refugee camp.

When they eventually returned, finding her alive, they asked her why she had not come with them, Fahed recalled. She told her husband: “This is our home, our land, and our church. If they want to kill me, they will need to kill me in my own home.” Fahed recalled his parents’ frequent bedtime readings of the Psalms and the Gospels, and said two Scottish ministers who shared their home for a while had a strong influence on him and kindled his desire to enter the ministry.

Abu-Akel listed three priorities for the PCUSA: spiritual renewal; a renewed commitment to mission; and a need for Presbyterians to cultivate “unity in diversity.”

He was nominated by Ann Beran Jones, a commissioner from the Presbytery of
Chicago, who he later named vice-moderator. His candidacy was endorsed by the Presbytery of Greater Atlanta.