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Pastor Warner A. Richards

A native of Costa Rica, Warner Richards has served as an ordained minister and community leader for over 19 years. In this capacity he has conducted seminars on leadership, family-life enrichment, conflict resolution, and men’s issues, throughout Latin America and North American both in English and Spanish. In addition, has served as chair for many different boards, as chaplain, empowerment speaker and focus group facilitator.

After graduating from High School he followed his calling and went on to study theology. After only four years of ministry, he was ordained to the gospel ministry. This was an unprecedented achievement, as he was the youngest minister with the shortest service record to be ordained in the Central American Union.

After serving ten years in Costa Rica, Pastor Richards was invited to minister in the Northeastern Conference. He accepted the invitation and lead the Corona Seventh-day Adventist Church, a largely Black English-speaking congregation to an integrated and culturally relevant fellowship within its largely Hispanic community. As part of this bi-cultural approach services are now simultaneously interpreted from English to Spanish every Sabbath.

Pastor Richards holds a Bachelor of Arts in Theology, a Masters Degree in Christian Counseling, and a Masters of Arts in Pastoral ministry. Having completed four units of Clinical Pastoral Care as a Clinical Chaplain, in accordance with the standards of the College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy Richards is now a certified Chaplain. He is also an active member of the American Association of Christian Counselors (AACC) and received a certificate in "Caring for God’s People God’s Way" and a certificate, in “Critical Incident Stress Management” from the AACC study program.

In the year 2003 he was one of the founders members of the board of directors, of the Queens Congregations United for Action (QCUA), a faith-based organization, created to address the immediate needs of the ever-increasing and largely immigrant population of the Corona-Flushing-East Elmhurst areas. He is also founder of a weekly radio broadcast on WMCA 970 AM “Voice of Hope” and served as speaker/director for several years.

Pastor Richards is married to Panamanian-born Norka Blackman-Richards. Hailing from a long tradition of Adventist ministers and missionaries, Norka is a lecturer in English Composition and Literature at Queens College of the City University of New York. She is also a writer, a women’s empowerment speaker, and the president and founder of a non-profit organization, 4Real Women International, which carries emotional healing and empowerment to women and their families. Pastor Richards and his wife Norka have been married for the past 18 years, and they are known to work as a team, as they both preach the gospel and minister to the needs of their congregants and the communities where they have served.

On August 11, 2007 Pastor Richards was installed as Pastor of the Shiloh Church of Seventh-day Adventists in Brooklyn New York where he enthusiastically serves as leader of this congregation.

The passage of scripture that serves as the motto of Pastor Richards' ministry is:

"The Spirit of the Lord [is] upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord."
~ Luke 4:18, 19 (KJV) ~