CST Announces the 2024 Distinguished Alum Award Recipients
Rev. Brenda Bos, Rev. John Griffin-Atil, and Rev. Dr. Shin Wook Kang were awarded the 2024 Distinguished Alum Award during this year’s Commencement ceremony held at CST’s new Los Angeles campus.
Each recipient of the award was nominated by their peers for being agents of transformation and healing in the world, and for living out CST’s core values of compassion, justice, and belonging.
“We are tremendously grateful to have such inspiring alums who represent CST so well,” said President Grant J. Hagiya. “CST strives to send students into the world who will make a real difference and change people’s lives for the better. This group of Distinguished Alums is a perfect example of the changemakers we are so proud to have in the CST community,” said Hagiya.
Reverend Brenda Bos (MDiv 2011) is the bishop of the Southwest California Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, overseeing 106 congregations with over 11,000 members. She has served Lutheran congregations in Danville, Canoga Park, Santa Monica and San Clemente, California. Before ordination, Brenda worked in network television production for eighteen years, most notably at Warner Bros. Television. She and her wife Janis are fierce advocates for mental health services for families and youth.
Born in Kansas, Reverend John Griffin-Atil is an ordained United Methodist pastor, lay Zen Buddhist, and a long-term AIDS survivor serving in Southern California. John’s “Broadway Sing-along Sundays” revived a West Hollywood congregation, and he currently serves as the Executive Director of the nonprofit Imperial Beach Neighborhood Center, which serves ‘the least of these.’ John was recently nominated as the first openly LGBTQ member of The United Methodist Cal-Pac Conference Board of Ordained Ministry. He lives in Imperial Beach, California, with his husband and teenage son.
Born in 1949, Reverend Dr. Shin Wook Kang graduated from Seoul Methodist Theological College in 1973 and received a Master of Divinity from CST in 1985. He then went on to complete pre-med at UCLA in 1989 and receive his M.D. degree from Loma Linda University School of Medicine in 1994. After many years of service, he retired from Korean Methodist Church in Los Angeles in 2019 and now continues to practice medicine in Koreatown, Los Angeles.
CST is grateful for its many alums serving all over the world and pursuing lives of transformation and healing.