Thomas W. Porter Executive Director JUSTPEACE Center for Mediation and Conflict Transformation BA, Yale University M.Div., Union Theological Seminary JD, Boston University School of Law

Tom Porter is a United Methodist minister, teacher, mediator and trial lawyer. He is the executive director of JUSTPEACE Center for Mediation and Conflict Transformation, The United Methodist Church. The mission of the Center is "to engage conflict constructively in ways that strive for justice, reconciliation, resource preservation and restoration of community in and through The United Methodist Church and with the Church universal to the world in which we live." After graduating from Yale University, he received a M.Div degree from Union Theological Seminary and a J.D. degree from Boston University Law School. He studied mediation at Harvard Law School and Eastern Mennonite University.

Tom is an ordained elder of the New England Conference of The United Methodist Church. For twenty-three years, Tom was the chancellor for this conference. He was a founding partner of the trial firm of Melick & Porter LLP in 1983 and has been a trial lawyer since 1974, representing religious institutions, universities, hospitals, professionals, nonprofit organizations and others. He is a member of the board of the Journal of Law and Religion and was chair of the board from 1989 through 2001. He was a founder and the president of the Council of Religion and Law, a society of law professors and theologians as well as lawyers and ministers, from 1978 to 1985. He was a member of the board of Union Theological Seminary, chairing its educational policy committee, from 1992 to 2001. He was a lecturer and trainer in conflict transformation theory and skills at Union Theological Seminary. He is a member of the Working Group on Restorative Justice of the Boston Theological Institute. He co-taught a course at Claremont School of Theology on vocation and peacebuilding.  He is an Adjunct Lecturer at Boston University School of Theology and will be teaching courses in the fall and spring with Rodney Petersen.

From his experience as a trial lawyer, his work as a mediator and teacher and his experiences studying the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, he came to understand the centrality of our common calling to be ministers of reconciliation, the need to embody this in the way we deal with conflict, and the importance of this ministry to our vocation and spiritual formation and our life together in community. Besides teaching and training, he has facilitated mediations and circles of accountability and healing within the Church. He believes that local churches can be centers of relational healing and peacebuilding for their members as well as the neighborhoods in which they reside.

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