Pastor Martin Luther King, Jr.

I had just completed another lecture in the course, Religion in America. That day we viewed the film, “We Shall Not Be Moved.” The film chronicled the non-violent civil rights struggle of the fifties and sixties. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was portrayed as a pastor and civil rights leader.

At the end of the class I was approached by an African American student. He was stunned to learn that Dr. King was a real pastor. Although he had done a course in African American history in high school, Dr. King was always presented as a civil rights advocate.

Today’s skewed commentaries on the life of Dr. King also make very little reference to his pastoral passion. “According to Dr. Lewis Baldwin, Professor of Religious Studies and Director of African American Studies at Vanderbilt University, “Many labels were attached to him during his lifetime - Dr. King was called a civil rights activist, a social activist, a social change agent, and a world figure. But I think he thought of himself first and foremost as a preacher, as a Christian pastor.”

“The pastoral role,” says Baldwin, “was central to everything, virtually everything Dr. King achieved or sought to achieve in the church and in the society as a whole.”

Dr. King was twenty-five years of age and finishing his doctoral dissertation at Boston University when he was appointed to his first job as a local pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. In a sense he was carrying on a family tradition. His father was a pastor. His grandfather had been a pastor. His great-grandfather had been a pastor.

The church hired Dr. King in 1954. After a time of internal tensions, church leaders said they were looking for a noncontroversial pastor who could help restore morale. Rather than accept an invitation to be with his Dad at a larger congregation in Georgia, Dr. King accepted the smaller and quieter church in Alabama. Such a setting afforded him the opportunity to complete his doctoral dissertation.

As King was establishing his pastorate, racial tensions were rising in Montgomery. About a year after his arrival, Montgomery seamstress Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to yield her seat on a bus to a white passenger. King began speaking out and leading peaceful protests. From the church, he helped ignite the Montgomery bus boycott. 

King saw this as a natural extension of pastoring his people. Being a pastor for him included being a civil rights leader. It would therefore be correct to say that it was the African-American church that nurtured him and gave him the sense that God was a God of justice and mercy.

As Dr. King was pulled more and more into the national limelight, he became concerned that he was neglecting his responsibilities at the church. Often he did not have sufficient time to engage in counseling, to do funerals and weddings, to do the kind of administrative work that comes naturally with the pastoral role.

King resigned from the Dexter Avenue church in 1960 to devote more time to the civil rights cause. Even though he was now a leader at the national level, he wanted to maintain a pastoral role, so he became an associate pastor at his father’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

As we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of his “I Have a Dream” speech, we need to be reminded that the heart of Dr. King was not seen so much in that speech as much as in his writings – and more specifically his volume, Strength to Love. According to his late wife, Coretta Scott King, "If there is one book Martin has written that people consistently tell me has changed their lives, it is Strength to Love." This book best explains the central element of Dr. King’s philosophy of nonviolence. 

The book is a compilation of his sermons reflecting a biblical and passionate denunciation of racial prejudice and of the tangible injustice that springs from that phenomenon. 

He was also critical of those sectors of the Christian world that have historically used the Bible and Christian theology as tools for promoting slavery and racial segregation. His criticism extended to Black churches that have “reduced Christianity to either a frenzied form of entertainment or a snobbish social club.”

Why aren’t we told about the heart of this pastor during this season of remembrance? Interestingly, it was during the extemporaneous moments of his “I Have a Dream” speech, his pastoral passion became most visible as he cited references from the Minor Prophets to justify his theses of justice and mercy.