Please join us for a working lunch at The Center with Rev. Dr. George Mason, senior pastor at Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas. Mason will be presenting on lessons learned from a brush with Ebola and serving as the face of faith at the heart of a crisis. He will be followed by a panel discussion with Rev. Dr. Louis Zbinden, Rabbi Dr. Samuel Stahl, Rev. Dr. Don Anderson and Dr. Charles Lerner.
Rev. Dr. Mason made the choice to issue a press release that one of his congregants, Louise Troh, had been placed in quarantine. Troh had been planning her upcoming marriage to Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person in the U.S. to be diagnosed with Ebola and the first to lose his life to the disease. In one article, Mason was quoted as saying, “Anyone would be surprised at how close this has been to home,” Mason said. “But I think our church has prepared as best we can. If it had to happen somewhere, let’s just say that we feel the burden of this privilege, this terrifying privilege. Regardless of the outcome, we’ll walk beside them and be good stewards of this tragedy.”
They were words he and his congregation lived out — literally and figuratively — embracing her in love while many others in the community shunned her in fear.
Meet Rev. Dr. George Mason
The Rev. Dr. George Mason has been the senior pastor of the Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, TX, for 25 years. He is a native New Yorker and holds a business degree from the University of Miami and both master of divinity and doctor of philosophy degrees from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has been active in social justice pursuits in race relations, public education and payday lending. Most recently, he has been given the Dallas County Medical Society Award for Non-Physician of the Year for his work in the Ebola crisis in Dallas.