Pastor Michael McBride (known as “Pastor Mike”) is a native of San Francisco and has been active in ministry for over 20 years. Pastor McBride’s commitment to holistic ministry can be seen through his leadership roles in both the church and community organizations. A graduate of Duke University’s Divinity School, with a Master of Divinity with an emphasis in Ethics and Public Policy, Pastor McBride founded The Way Christian Center in West Berkeley, where he presently serves as the Lead Pastor.

In March 2012, he became the Director for the LIVE FREE Campaign with Faith in Action, a campaign led by hundreds of faith congregations throughout the United States committed to addressing gun violence and mass incarceration of young people of color. In 2021, he established LIVE FREE USA as a national racial justice network working at the intersection of gun violence prevention, criminal justice reform and civic engagement.

He is one of the national leaders in the movement to implement public health and community centered gun violence prevention programs, which have contributed in 50% reductions of gun related homicides in Oakland and many other cities across the country. He is a co-founder of Black Church PAC and the National Black Brown Gun Violence Prevention Consortium which work to center black and brown gun violence prevention practitioners and scale up life-saving interventions related to urban and communal violence.

Regarded as a national faith leader, active in the Ferguson uprisings and many subsequent uprisings, he helps bridge, train and support millennials and religious institutions working on racial justice and black liberation. Pastor McBride has served on a number of local and national task forces with the White House and Department of Justice regarding gun violence prevention, boys and men of color and police-community relationships. In 2016 he was appointed as an Advisor on President Obama’s Faith Based Advisory Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. He has been a frequent contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, the Huffington Post and many other media outlets providing commentary on issues related to faith and racial justice.

In 2021, Pastor McBride joined colleagues with the Black Brown Peace Consortium to launch Fund Peace, a national campaign of black brown gun violence prevention organizations to secure billions of federal resources to scale up community violence interventions. In 2022, this leadership led to historic gun violence prevention legislation being passed with the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.