The Reverend Cassandra G. Perry is the Executive Director of the 163 rd Street Improvement Council. She also serves as Associate Pastor of the Williams Institutional CME Church, and is an Adjunct Professor at New York Theological Seminary. After studying in Spain and at the University of Oxford in England, she graduated from Duke University as an Angier B. Duke Scholar. She earned an MBA in International Marketing from the Garvin School of International Management in Glendale, AZ; then worked in the private sector for companies such as Honeywell, Pfizer, and Goldman-Sachs.

Rev. Perry left the corporate world to work with nonprofit AIDS service organizations in Harlem, and after a decade in AIDS service accepted her call to ministry. Rev. Perry was licensed as an Exhorter in November, 1998; Licensed to Preach in July 1999; ordained Deacon in August 2001; ordained Itinerant Elder in August 2006; and was admitted into Full Connection in the CME Church in August 2010. She earned her M.Div. degree from New York Theological Seminary in 2003. In addition to missions trips to Africa and the Caribbean, during her seminary experience Rev. Perry participated in a number of History of the World Christian Movement Consultations. The HWCM Consultation was a multinational, diverse group of scholars who came together to render a non-Eurocentric, gender-inclusive telling of the Christian story. This group, formed in 2001, was a precursor to a style of historical inquiry that has subsequently become the scholarly standard.

As a result of her studies and her ministry, Rev. Perry has traveled to Africa, Asia, South America, Central America, the Caribbean, and the Holy Lands of Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, all in the exploration of a more accurate, more diverse telling of the story of the Christian movement.

Since March 2010, Rev. Perry has served as Executive Director of the 163rd Street Improvement Council, an organization providing housing and supportive services to a variety of individuals in need. She serves on the Board of Directors of the New York State Neighborhood Preservation Corporation, a statewide organization committed to revitalizing housing in urban and suburban areas, and has recently begun service on the Board of helpNYC, a peer-driven initiative designed to offer assistance by meeting people at their points of need. A Lifetime Mensan, Rev. Perry’s academic affiliations are with the American Academy of Religion, the Society of Biblical Literature, the American Society of Church History, and the North American Patristics Society.

In July 2013, she was appointed a Research Fellow in World Christianity at New York Theological Seminary’s Center for World Christianity. In September 2016, Rev. Perry matriculated as a Ph.D. student at Regent University. She passed comprehensive exams in 2019 and is now researching and writing her dissertation, intending to explore the impact of identity on Tertullian’s pneumatology. Since 2019, Rev. Perry has served as Adjunct Professor at New York Theological Seminary. In addition to teaching, her ultimate goal is to use this information as an evangelistic tool for those who would (erroneously) declare Christianity to be “a white person’s religion.”