Rev. Odette Lockwood-Stewart

We are pleased to announce that the Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart has been selected as the new Interim Senior Pastor for the American Church in Paris. Her interim term begins this summer after Pastor Scott’s departure. Her bio follows. She has previously served as a guest pastor at ACP so she is well known by the ACP congregation. Her selection is announced to the congregation this morning. She will be joined by her husband, the Rev. Jim Lockwood-Stewart.

Thanks to Don Eppert for his leadership and the full AFCU call committee for doing a subpurb job in selecting the top candidates to be submitted to the ACP for final selection.

We wish Pastor Lockwood-Stewart God’s blessings in her new assignment. Please welcome her and pray for her success.

Peace and blessings!

Odette Lockwood-Stewart

The Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart was born in Stamford, Connecticut and raised in southern California. An ordained United Methodist Elder, she has over forty years of experience leading congregations and campus ministries.
She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies in the first California State University degree program in the field. She graduated summa cum laude from Boston University School of Theology with a Master of Divinity degree. While still a student she co-founded the Anna Howard Shaw Center at Boston University, and was a delegate to the World Council of Churches Consultation on Women in Theology in Cartigny, Switzerland.
Pastor Odette has served local churches in Los Angeles, Berkeley, and San Leandro, California. She has been Executive Director of campus ministries at the University of California, Los Angeles, University of California, Berkeley, and San Diego State University. She founded a campus ministry with medical students and faculty at the University of California, San Francisco. Most recently she taught seminarians the practice of ministry as Faculty Director of Community Engaged Learning at the Pacific School of Religion.
In each ministry Pastor Odette has demonstrated passion for worship and preaching, local and international partnerships for mission and ministry, and mentoring gift-driven discipleship. She has taught immersion courses in Colombia, Washington D.C., and at the U.S. Mexico border engaging theology and the public square.
Giving leadership at international, national, regional and local levels of the Protestant Church, she served as: President of the National Campus Ministry Association; a Director of the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry of the UMC, and first elected clergy delegate of the California-Nevada Annual Conference to the United Methodist General Conferences of 2008 and 2012.
Her writing includes devotionals, curricula, sermons and poetry, as well as articles on social religious history, women in ministry, prayer, and Christian spiritual formation.
Pastor Odette has served on the Advisory Boards of the Student Christian Movement, USA, the Glide Foundation, the Berkeley Food and Housing Project, Berkeley Organizing Congregations for Action, Ecumenical Black Campus Ministry, and currently, Boston University School of Theology, which honored her as Distinguished Alumna in 2018.
Grateful to serve with the ACP community and AFCU in this transitional season, “May we follow the way of Jesus and offer the welcome of Jesus out of gratitude for the love and grace we know in the Living Christ.”
Pastor Odette and her husband of thirty-five years, the Rev. Jim Lockwood-Stewart, take delight and loving pride in their four grown children, and eight grandchildren, who live in California, Oklahoma, and Maryland. Rev. Jim is a retired United Methodist pastor and a bassoonist. Introduced to ACP as Visiting Pastors, they are blessed to return to the American Church in Paris.
For re-creation, Pastor Odette enjoys reading, writing, cinema, theater, studying French and Spanish, and she revels in being a flaneuse.