A Remarkable Man, a Remarkable Church: Howard Thurman and Fellowship Church

Howard Thurman was a remarkable man and 75 years ago he founded a remarkable church. This article is about him, the church he founded, and a remarkable co-pastor of that church today.  

The Remarkable Howard Thurman

Howard Washington Thurman was born in Florida 120 years ago this month, on November 18, 1899 (although some sources say he was born in 1900) and died in 1981. Ordained as a Baptist minister in 1925, he has been characterized as “a spiritual genius who mentored MLK, Jr., and carried Gandhi’s teaching to America.”

Thurman was a part of a Student Christian Movement-sponsored four-person “Pilgrimage of Friendship” to South Asia in 1935-36. That experience, including personal conversations with Gandhi, influenced Thurman greatly—and later reverberated throughout the civil rights movement in the U.S.

In 1953, Thurman became the Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University (BU), the first African American to hold such a position at a majority-white university. At that time, MLK, Jr., was a graduate student at BU.

According to BU’s alumni magazine (see here), “King not only attended sermons [at Marsh Chapel] but also turned to Thurman as his mentor and spiritual advisor. Among the lessons that inspired him most were Thurman’s accounts of a visit to Mohandas Gandhi in India years earlier.”

So much more needs to be said about Thurman, but for additional information I highly recommend the superlative February 2019 PBS documentary “Backs to the Wall: The Howard Thurman Story.”

So much more needs to be said about Thurman, but for additional information I highly recommend the superlative February 2019 PBS documentary “Backs to the Wall: The Howard Thurman Story.”

The Remarkable “Fellowship Church”

In the fall of 1943, Alfred G. Fisk, a Presbyterian clergyman, had the vision of starting a church that would welcome people of all races and creeds. Thurman, who had served as Dean of the Howard University Chapel since 1932, was asked to recommend a young black minister who might be interested in helping start such a church.

Thurman decided to volunteer himself and requested a year’s leave of absence from Howard beginning July 1, 1944. Thus, Thurman was the main one responsible for starting a new church in San Francisco with a remarkable name: The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. For short, it is often just called Fellowship Church.

On October 8 of that year, Fellowship Church held its first public meeting—and last month it celebrated its 75^th Jubilee Anniversary.

Fellowship Church was unmistakably based on the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. Along with that basic affirmation, though, the second of the three-paragraph “commitment” agreed to by Fellowship Church members says,

I desire to share in the spiritual growth and ethical awareness of men and women of varied national, cultural, racial, and credal heritage united in a religious fellowship.

In 1959, Thurman wrote a book titled Footprints of a Dream: The Story of The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples (reissued 2009). I finished reading it last week, and it was a fascinating read.

The Remarkable Current Co-pastor of Fellowship Church

Since 1994, Dr. Dorsey O. Blake has been co-pastor of Fellowship Church. (Currently, the other co-pastor is a white woman.) This past June, I had the opportunity of hearing/meeting Dr. Blake, for he was the speaker at the local Juneteenth banquet.   

Dr. Blake was born in 1946, and before he was a year old his father became pastor of First Baptist Church here in Liberty, a predominantly African American church from its beginning until the present. His first six years in school were at the segregated Garrison School in Liberty, established for Black students in 1877.

Fellowship Church in San Francisco, literally seeking to be a place of fellowship for all peoples, continues to thrive under the leadership of a remarkable man whose early life was spent as a Baptist PK (preacher’s kid) in the small town of Liberty, Missouri.

Clothes for the New Year

Yesterday I had the privilege of preaching at St. Luke’s United Church of Christ in Independence, Mo., less than a 15-minute walk from the Harry S. Truman Library & Museum.

 St. Luke’s was founded in 1878 as the German Evangelical St. Lucas Church, and services were conducted in German until the First World War. There was a name change in 1934 and then the current name was chosen when the UCC was formed in 1957.

 St. Luke’s moved into their current church building in the early 1960s, and the sanctuary is very attractive. June and I enjoyed worshipping there yesterday, the last Sunday of the year.

Following the lectionary, which I never did during all the years I was a (part-time) pastor, the text for my sermon was Colossians 3:12-17. That passage includes these words (in the NIV):

Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.

The items of clothing mentioned first are rather straightforward and perhaps need little explanation. It doesn’t take much reflection to understand the meaning of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience.

Of course putting all those virtues into practice is a different matter.

 

The most important garment to put on, of course, is love. And in spite of the widespread use of that term, it is the most difficult to understand adequately and to put into practice.

 Jesus reportedly said that the second greatest commandment is “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39, citing Leviticus 19:18). Earlier, Matthew quotes Jesus as saying, “Love your enemies” (5:44).

 But who of us really loves our neighbors as much as we love ourselves, let alone our enemies!

 And, as you have heard emphasized often, as Jesus talked about it love is not primarily a feeling; rather, it is an action. We love others not by what we feel or say but by what we do for them.

 In a very provocative statement, Shane Claiborne is reported to have said, “When we truly discover how to love our neighbor as our self, capitalism will not be possible and Marxism will not be necessary.”

 He may well be right.

 Accordingly, in these days after Christmas, it is fitting to reflect again on the wonderful words of Howard Thurman. (This was the heart of my blog article for Dec. 26, 2011.)

When the song of the angels is stilled,

When the star in the sky is gone,

When the kings and princes are home,

When the shepherds are back with their flock,

The work of Christmas begins:

To find the lost,

To heal the broken,

To feed the hungry,

To release the prisoner,

To rebuild the nations,

To bring peace among people,

To make music in the heart.

(As you may or may not know, Thurman, 1899-1981, was one of the most prominent African-American ministers in the U.S. in the middle half of the 20^th century; he was a classmate of Martin Luther King, Sr., and a mentor of MLK, Jr.)

Why this emphasis on what we should put on and wear in the new year? To answer that question as succinctly as possible: because it is good for you, it is good for others, and it pleases  God.

How can you beat that?

"The Work of Christmas"

Howard Thurman was an outstanding theologian, educator, and civil rights leader. On this day after Christmas, we would do well to read and ponder one of his poems.

Howard Thurman (1899-1981)

Thurman was listed in Ebony Magazine as one of the 50 most important figures in African-American history. Among his twenty books is Jesus and the Disinherited (1949), which greatly influenced Martin Luther King, Jr. (Thurman was the Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University, the first black person to be named tenured Dean of Chapel at a majority-white university, during the time King was a graduate student there). 

Thurman’s poem “The Work of Christmas” was published in his book titled The Mood of Christmas (1985). You may have heard this poem previously, as it is very fitting in the days following the celebration of Christmas. It is a wonderful poem, and I invite you to give attention to it again:

So much of the Christmas season is shaped by commercialism, hedonism, and sentimentalism. But the true significance of Christmas is more than a sweet story of the miraculous birth of a baby who was immediately worshipped by rough shepherds and then by majestic magi.

As Thurman suggests, though, we have not properly celebrated Christmas unless we have committed ourselves afresh to feed the hungry, to do what we can to bring peace among all peoples, and to radiate the light of Christ in all our words and actions.

So now that Advent has been observed and Christmas has been celebrated, in both secular and religious ways for most of us, let’s get on with the work of Christmas. Then we will have truly celebrated the birth of Jesus.