Harry R. Jackson Jr.

Harry R. Jackson Jr. is an African-American Christian preacher and Pentecostal bishop who serves as the senior pastor at Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, Maryland, and serves as the Presiding bishop of the International Communion of Evangelical Churches. He is also a social conservative activist and commentator.

Jackson is the founder and chairman of the High Impact Leadership Coalition, which is composed of ministers who actively promote socially conservative causes. Bishop Jackson is also a co-founder of The Reconciled Church Initiative which seeks to bring racial healing to the church and America.

Jackson was raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. He became involved in political activism as a child with his mother, Essie. His parents managed to scrape up the $2,500 in tuition required to send him to Cincinnati Country Day School. He attended Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he played football. He got a tryout with the New England Patriots but didn't make the team.

Jackson's family moved to the Washington, D.C. area in 1973, eventually settling in Silver Spring, Maryland. After graduating college, he got a high-level executive job at Republic Steel and was admitted to Harvard Business School. He married his wife, Michele, in 1976.

The death of his father, Harry Jackson Sr., caused Jackson to decide to become a Christian minister. He and his wife moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he preached in the inner city. Soon he took a job at Corning Glass (now Corning Incorporated) in Corning, New York, and preached in his free time. There he founded a church called the Christian Hope Center, and his parishioners were mostly white. "We really broke racial barriers for a black man pastoring white people in 1981," he says.

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