Keynote Speaker

Rev. Dr. Natalya Cherry

We are excited to announce our 2023 Mid Winter Institute Keynote Speaker, Rev. Dr. Natalya Cherry. Natalya is a ordained Elder in our very own Susquehanna Conference where she pastored local churches from 2001-2013 and previously served on the ministry staffs of Bethesda UMC in Bethesda, MD and Metropolitan Memorial UMC in Washington, DC. In 2018 she joined Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth Texas as Assistant Professor in Methodist Studies and Theology.

Dr. Cherry received her BA from Georgetown University, an MDiv from Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC and a PhD from Southern Methodist University.

After serving in these ministry capacities for over 14 years, Dr. Cherry returned to the academy in order to encourage and equip theology students with an awareness of God’s grace, so that they may hear and respond boldly to God’s call to make a difference in this world with that same grace. She has courses in United Methodist History and Doctrine, United Methodist Polity, Introduction to Christian Theology, Evangelism, and Epistemology of Religious Experience.

Dr. Cherry’s first book, Believing INTO Christ: Relational Faith and Human Flourishing, was released in Fall 2021. She contributed an invited chapter to The Wesleyan Mind, Joe Cunningham and Clive Murray Norris, editors (Oxford: Routledge, 2023) and also is in the early stages of co-authoring a new kind of biography of John Wesley with a senior scholar of United Methodist History.