Oakwood alum "ambassador" featured as Adventist Review cover story

BY LAEL CAESAR

Wintley Phipps is one of those gifted individuals who may well have succeeded at anything. The testimonies of his friends and the range of his friendships speak with an eloquence all their own. Garth Gabriel, his six-foor-five-inch academy roommate, now a pastor in Michigan, remembers his athleticism. He was the fastest on the track, and a great ice skater. Distinguished Harvard epidemiologist David Williams, a graduate school companion, remembers him as a master chef as well as a smart learner because of his ingenuity with mnemonic devices. He also admires his multitasking ability, something also on the lips of another companion from college days, Delbert Baker, former president of Oakwood University and now a vice president of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. Baker knows him as an organizer, an administrator, a networker, and one who follows through.
 
Retired navy admiral Barry Black, chaplain of the U.S. Senate, comments on the respect Phipps commands among America’s statesmen, and Linda, his beloved wife, concurs. She knows that his business calls, on behalf of the U.S. Dream Academy, Inc., he founded to improve the lot of the children of the incarcerated, easily turn into seasons of ministry to the very celebrities whose support he is seeking. C. Diane Wallace Booker, the Dream Academy’s executive director, is still amazed at his recruiting skills, for it was those abilities that drew her from her comfortable law office to join him in something that was only a dream. Les Pollard, Oakwood University president, testifies to yet another of his gifts of God, the humility that accompanies the voice God has lent him. In Pollard’s opinion, “Wintley is a guy who walks in humility with the kind of gift that would probably strangle most of us.”

Phipps’ story opens with no world conquering scenes...

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