Linda Bryant Valentine, a businesswoman and Presbyterian elder from Illinois, is being nominated to replace John Detterick as executive director of the General Assembly Council of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
Valentine (link to bio), a lawyer and corporate executive, is an elder at Fourth Presbyterian church in Chicago.
She has been general counsel and managing director of an investment fund with Opportunity International https://www.opportunity.org/ , a Christian nonprofit group in Oak Brook, Ill. which operates micro-enterprise development programs in 28 countries to assist people living in poverty around the world. The investment fund she directs provides collateral that allows small development programs to borrow wholesale funds in their local currencies, allowing them to avoid the foreign exchange markets.
Karen Dimon, a council member from DeWitt, N.Y. who leads the executive director search committee, announced the committee’s recommendation of Valentine during a news conference May 10. The council will meet May 23 in Chicago to vote on whether to formally nominate Valentine, and the General Assembly will be asked to confirm that nomination in June.
Detterick, who’s served as executive director for eight years, is retiring.
If the assembly confirms Valentine, she will begin work July 1 and be paid $160,000 a year. Dimon, connected to the news conference in Louisville via a conference call, described Valentine as “a wonderful blend of church background and business” and “a management-oriented visionary.”
She also said Valentine has experience managing complex projects and with downsizing — a reference to the council’s decision earlier in May to cut $9.1 million and eliminate 75 jobs from the PC(USA)’s national staff and the positions of 55 overseas missionaries.
Dimon said the search committee worked for 14 months and considered more than 40 candidates. Valentine, 56, said during the news conference that a consulting firm the search committee had hired asked her to apply for the position — and her first reaction was to laugh, a nervous laugh of disbelief about the idea. She described her awareness of the difficulties the PC(USA) faces as “a hard dose of reality.”
But people she spoke with about the opportunity urged her to think hard about taking the job, and in time she began to sense God calling her to accept. “I wrestled and I resisted,” Valentine said, and in time the voice speaking to her heart “spoke strong and clear and said, `Of course.’ “
Before joining Opportunity International in 2005, Valentine worked as senior vice-president and chief legal officer of the software firm TenFold Corp., based in Salt Lake City. For about six months in 2002, she served part-time as interim executive director of Fourth church.
And from 1984 to 2002 she worked for Motorola Inc., serving in a number of positions, including as general counsel for its communications businesses and a senior vice-president.
Previously, Valentine worked for Atlantic Richfield Co., for a law firm in Philadelphia and for United Airlines.
She graduated from Georgetown University Law Center and also earned a bachelor’s of arts degree in economics and political science from the University of Michigan.
“I do love the Presbyterian church; I was born and raised Presbyterian,” Valentine said during the news conference. Her ties to the denomination go back four generations — her great-great grandfather, Benjamin Smith Everitt, graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary, as did three of his sons, and he was a Presbyterian pastor in New Jersey in the 1800s.
More than 20 years ago, she and her husband Chris moved to Chicago and joined Fourth church, where both were elected elders and where their three children all served as elders or deacons while in high school. Valentine has a son and two daughters: Ben, 21; Jackie, 19; and Christie, 17.
Valentine’s mother, Barbara Everitt Bryant, is a member of the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity and Purity of the PC(USA).
Having worked for the past several years for a nonprofit group concerned about world poverty, Valentine said she’s aware that three billion people subsist on less than $2 a day. Many people are poor and hungry — spiritually and physically, she said — and she sees the church’s role as setting aside differences among Presbyterians to bring life and hope to a hurting world.
“The Presbyterian church is a model for the world,” Valentine said — open, democratic, willing to debate hard issues.
“I’m aware of the challenges of the Presbyterian church,” she said — listing among them dropping membership and influence, and the recognition that more resources are being kept by Presbyterians to use at the grassroots and less being sent to support the national church.
Valentine said one of her first tasks, if confirmed, would be to fill in the broad outlines of the reorganized national PC(USA) structure with a detailed plan for implementing it. “I think it’s bold,” she said of the reorganization plan. “I think it’s responsive to the realities.”
Motorola is one of the firms in which the PC(USA) is considering divesting because of its involvement in Israel. Asked about that issue, Valentine said it’s hard to say how it might play out.
“I think it’s vitally important that the church be a prophetic voice in the world on issues of justice,” she said. “We have a process . . . I trust in that process.”
