Pastor Scott Wagers is founder and Senior Pastor of CHAM Deliverance Ministry and a licensed minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). He has been a grassroots homeless organizer in San Jose for over fifteen years and a front-line preacher in the inner-city of San Jose for ten years. The work of CHAM Deliverance ministry and its staff has contributed to significant changes in the way the City of San Jose deals with the issues of homelessness and poverty.

Pastor Scott earned his BA and MA in sociology at San Jose State University, writing his Honors thesis and Masters thesis on “The Structural Causes of Homelessness in America.” He won a merit scholarship to Yale Divinity School and studied there for one year, completing his Masters of Divinity at Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Pastor Scott is the recipient of many community and academic achievement awards. He is an Arkansas native, born in Mountain Home and raised in Hot Springs where he graduated from Hot Springs High in 1984.

In 1999, Scott sought to bring the reality of poverty in Silicon Valley to the board rooms of major corporations like Cisco, the wealthiest corporation in the world at the time. These efforts caught the attention of Mayor Ron Gonzales who appointed Scott to head-up a task force to end homelessness in San Jose. This task force began to immediately implement programs and policies to ameliorate homelessness locally. Many of these policy changes protected homeless people from police harassment and unjust incarceration. Also, Scott convinced the San Jose City Council to commit $800,000 in rental subsidies toward the CHAPP pilot program. CHAPP immediately moved dozens of families out of shelter and into permanent housing. The CHAPP program was highly successful and provided a model for future homeless programs seeking to keep the homeless in housing permanently. During this time, Scott was able to help convince dozens of community organizations, unions and churches to join to together and pressure the city council into committing money to build more affordable housing than any other big city in the nation.