Martin Luther King Jr.: A Great Pastor

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Becoming a Pastor
Gospel of Non-Violent Resistance
Important Moments in King’s Life
A Great Pastor
Conclusion
Bibliography

Introduction

Martin Luther King Jr. is one of the iconic people who shaped the civil rights movement in the United States during the 1960s. King was a pastor, and he used Martin Luther King Jr. is one of the iconic people who shaped the civil rights movement in the United States during the 1960s. King was a pastor, and he used this platform to draw people to God and, at the same time, agitate for racial equality. The pulpit for him was a place to spread the gospel of salvation and that of equality based on the premise that all people are created equal, and thus, they should be treated as such without exceptions. King stands out because he was a peace ambassador, and he encouraged even those being segregated and treated as lesser human beings to fight for their civil liberties and rights through nonviolence using various strategies, such as civil disobedience. As such, he won the most coveted Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 for fighting for racial equality using non-violent means. His oratory skills convinced many followers about the need for maintaining peace and nonviolence even while suffering, and through landmark speeches, such as “I Have a Dream” and “I Have Been to the Mountaintop,” he articulated his vision for America and the church.

This paper discusses how King became a great pastor and helped people get closer to God. It focuses on his spirituality and identifies relevant cultural and historical influences that shaped his journey of faith. It also highlights important moments in King’s life and key experiences. Martin Luther King Jr. became a great pastor by using his faith in God, theological basis, and oratory skills to articulate Christian principles and fight for civil liberties through non-violent resistance. He grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, where racial segregation was rife with black communities being subjected to oppression and barbarism, including the savage lynching of blacks, police brutality, court injustices, and Ku Klux Klan’s (KKK) hatred vitriol, and these historical aspects shaped his life and resolve to become a pastor and a champion of civil liberties.

Becoming a Pastor

Historical and Cultural Influences

King’s life was a continuation of the commitment his family had made to advance the ministry and mission of the Christian church. He came from a lineage of Baptist preachers including his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and uncle among other members of his extended family. According to Baldwin, “King was born in the church, and it shaped his identity, rooted him in strong moral and spiritual values, and instilled in him a sense of direction and purpose.” He was brought up in the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, GA, and later became a youth minister at Calvary Baptist Church in Chester, PA, and at Twelfth Baptist Church in Boston, MA. The congregations in these churches were mainly made up of blacks, and this aspect shaped King’s earliest sense of the function and identity of the church. Later on, he joined the Morehouse College, Crozer Theological Seminary, and Boston University, which gave him the necessary training to ask critical questions about life at the time from the liberal-modernistic point of view. This section highlights some of the historical and cultural influences that ultimately contributed to him becoming a great pastor.

At the Ebenezer Baptist Church, King, as a child, was exposed to what Baldwin calls the “Ebenezer tradition” formed in the 1880s by blacks coming from slavery with a firm belief that ecclesiastical or autonomous religious institutions had to be formed to address the many needs of African Americans at the time. The role of the church had evolved to cover other areas apart from spreading the gospel of salvation, such as responding to social, political, and economic problems affecting its congregants and society at large. Therefore, King grew up in this environment, and this exposure allowed him, as a boy, to start questioning the narrow and self-centered definitions of conventional churches. The historical understanding of the origins of church and slavery would later contribute significantly to his approach to Christian ministry and gospel.

Beyond the Ebenezer Baptist Church, King mingled with different cultural and religious ideologies in Atlanta, especially meeting with black elites from different professions, and this exposure stirred him to become ambitious and driven to succeed in life. Additionally, this interaction informed his “personhood, humanity, and early thirst for community, and that helped him to make sense of the paradox of a society supposedly rooted in Judeo-Christian values while sanctioning structures of white supremacy and black subordination”. Consequently, on his journey to becoming a great pastor, he started a lifelong refusal to be caught up in church labels and his denominational identity, which set him apart from his peers. King’s religious eclecticism was compounded when he joined Morehouse College, where he was introduced to philosophical and theological liberalism to further promote his intellectual energy and independence.

He continued questioning church doctrines with Henry David Thoreau’s ideas on civil disobedience and Jesus’ teachings making the basis of his arguments. During his final semester at Morehouse College, he refused to acknowledge the virgin birth of Jesus Christ before an ordination committee, but he was nevertheless ordained as a minister. He then pursued higher learning at Crozer Theological Seminary and at Boston University, whereby he honed his skills and understanding to continue rejecting scriptural inerrancy and libertinism. At Boston University, he studied personal idealism, which stresses the personal God of reason and love and that all human beings are sacred. As such, personalism became his basic philosophical position to refine the ideas that he would ultimately advance in the black church and his preaching as a pastor. Therefore, the way King studied shaped his ministry, image, and style as a preacher, and he was convinced that preaching could be “philosophically sound and intellectually respectable, as well as dynamic and entertaining”. With this knowledge, he started his ministry as a preacher, and his ideologies set him up for success as a great pastor.

Gospel of Non-Violent Resistance

As mentioned earlier, one of the reasons that gave King prominence as a pastor was the non-violent resistance approach that he adopted to fight for civil liberties. Therefore, it is important to understand how he decided to follow this path when the better option was to inflame people with his oratory skills to take up arms and fight for their rights. The institutionalized violence and injustices directed towards blacks in the US at the time were enormous. The problem was compounded by the emergence of hate groupings, such as the KKK. Some of the King’s peers, like Malcolm X, supported violent resistance. On April 3, 1964, at Cory Methodist Church in Cleland, Ohio, Malcolm X stated, “No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism…I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare”. However, King chose to see an American dream where others saw nightmares and call for peace instead of violence, and thus it is important to understand how he arrived at such a decision.

King’s intellectual “pilgrimage to nonviolence” started when he was a young boy growing up in Atlanta, where blacks were seen and treated as lesser human beings. He admits that seeing the brutality directed towards blacks in Atlanta made him come perilously close to resenting all white people. However, his turning point came when he worked two summers, against the advice of his father, in a plant together with both white and black laborers. King argues that at this point, he realized that poor whites were exploited the same way as blacks. Therefore, he realized that oppression was a product of societal injustices as opposed to being a racial problem. As such, when he joined Morehouse College and read about the ideology of civil disobedience by Thoreau, specifically the concept of refusing to cooperate with an evil system. At Crozer Theological Seminary, he interacted with works of other scholars on the subject to shape his theory of nonviolence resistance.

King was convinced that true gospel should deal with not only the soul and spiritual wellbeing, but also the body and material wellbeing. He argued that any “religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the social and economic conditions that scar the soul is spiritually moribund religion only waiting for the day to be buried”. Consequently, he justified the need to incorporate socio-economic matters that were affecting people at the time into his preaching. In his arguments, King held that people should not be deprived of their freedoms, because by doing so, they are relegated to the status of a thing, instead of being elevated into personhood.

Despite King’s conviction about the gospel of love, he almost gave up, especially after reading about Nietzsche’s philosophy that all life expressed the will to power together with the blanket attack of the Hebraic-Christian morality. However, his resolve to continue with the gospel of peace was rejuvenated once he heard and read about Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy. He realized that Jesus’ teachings about love and turning the other cheek could be employed as a social force to agitate for change in society. King understood that Bentham and Mill’s utilitarianism, Marx and Lenin’s revolutionary methods, Hobbes’ social contract theory, and Nietzsche’s superhuman philosophy could not offer a solution to the millions of oppressed individuals across America. In Gandhi’s non-violent philosophy, King says that he “found intellectual and moral satisfaction…I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.” Therefore, based on Gandhi’s philosophy and Jesus’ teachings about love, King finally settled on nonviolence as a formidable tool to fight against oppression, racial inequality, and injustice and this approach made him a prominent pastor of his time.

Important Moments in King’s Life

King was an instrumental figure in the fight for civil liberties, and some moments thrust him into the limelight as a fearless individual led by deep convictions about the cause he was agitating to ensure racial equality. One such moment was the Montgomery bus boycott, which protested against institutional racial segregation on public transport as espoused in Jim Crow laws. On December 5, 1955, a black woman, Rosa Parks, refused to vacate her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, for a white man as required by the law. She was arrested, found guilty of violating transport rules, and fined $10. This incident triggered a series of events, which culminated in the famous Montgomery bus boycott, which lasted for 385 days with King leading the protests. He was arrested during this campaign, but in the end, a United States District Court ruled against segregation on buses plying in Montgomery. King’s instrumental role in this boycott made him a national figure and the de facto spokesperson of the civil liberties movement.

After the Montgomery bus boycott, King was involved in a series of non-violent campaigns agitating for racial equality, but the Birmingham campaign of 1963 stands out from the rest. According to Garrow, King wanted to “create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.” However, King was arrested and sent to jail even before the protest could gain momentum. This arrest was a blessing to King because from his cell he wrote the famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail”. In this letter, he articulated the need for the civil rights movement to pursue non-violent means to achieve social change. The letter was in response to criticisms made by clergymen, who argued that the fight against racism was supposed to take place in courts, but not in the streets. However, reiterating the need for people to fight for their freedoms, King used religious grounds and leveraged his oratory skills to emphasize the need for peaceful protests. This letter once again placed King on the national platform as a reliable leader and pastor despite the difficult times he was going through.

Another important moment in King’s life as a pastor was during the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered the famous 17-minute speech, “I Have a Dream.” On August 28, 1963, King joined other leaders from different parts of the US to march in Washington to agitate for jobs and freedom. The objective of this protest was to create awareness about the suffering of blacks in the south and present their grievances to the nation’s capital. Specifically, King and his fellow protestors and leaders wanted the government to address racial inequality in public schools, stop racial discrimination in workplaces, protect protestors from police brutality, and establish a minimum wage of $2 for all workers. When King was allowed to address the protestors, he abandoned his prepared speech when Mahalia Jackson shouted, “Tell them about the dream”. This unplanned speech went on to become one of the best-known texts in American oratory history, and reformers around the country acted on King’s message to oversee the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Ultimately, based on the three incidents highlighted under this section, King became a prominent pastor and civil rights activist until he was assassinated on March 29, 1968, in Memphis, where he had gone to support black public work employees during a strike for better pay. He paid the ultimate price of agitating for civil liberties with his life because racism had been institutionalized and normalized to the extent that some individuals, such as his killer, thought it was unacceptable for black people to be equal with their white counterparts. However, King stood for what he believed to be right, and even in his death, he was honored for causing a civil rights revolution leading to important constitutional changes geared towards ending racism in the US, while at the same time preaching the gospel of salvation.

A Great Pastor

The historical and cultural factors and experiences that King went through from his childhood until he became a pastor prepared him for his ministry. However, his greatness as a pastor hinged on the message of hope and love that defined his message and preaching. According to Dawson Jr., “It takes hope to, to argue as King did if love is used to be used as a tool for social transformation.” The understanding that love, based on Jesus’ teaching and Gandhi’s philosophy, could inspire people to come closer to God and fight for their rights peacefully was one of the distinguishing characteristics of King as a pastor. His spirituality centered on the belief that a person could be use prayer for religious inspiration, personal growth, and to establish an intimate relationship with God. His entire spiritual life was a journey towards the discovery of self and its relationship with the living God.

King’s greatness also depended largely on his oratory skills. He knew how to use words to inspire people into action, convince them about his ideas, and instill hope in their hearts. His landmark speech – “I Have a Dream” proves this argument, and according to Baldwin and Anderson, the speech closes with glorious praise, “Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we are free at last.” This ability to use words artistically was unparalleled, and it drew large crowds of people to his rallies where he took the opportunity to preach the gospel of salvation and reiterate the call for social justice and racial equality. In other words, on top of focusing on people’s spiritual needs, King addressed socio-economic problems affecting all the oppressed people in the country, and this aspect, among others, as discussed in this paper, made him a great pastor leading humanity to God.

Conclusion

Martin Luther King Jr. is remembered for his leadership during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. However, apart from being an activist, he was a great pastor passionately preaching the gospel of salvation wherever he went. As a boy, he was exposed to Christian values as he was brought up in a family of Baptist preachers. Additionally, growing up in Atlanta, GA, he witnessed the oppression that blacks faced due to the color of their skin. These childhood experiences shaped King’s life purpose and compounded with the knowledge he gained from Morehouse College, Crozer Theological Seminary, and Boston University, and he determined his path in life by choosing to become a pastor and a civil rights activist. Instead of adopting violence as a way of responding to social injustices and racism, he followed Jesus’ teachings and Gandhi’s philosophy and opted for non-violent resistance. The Montgomery bus boycott, the Birmingham campaign, and the Washington march are some of the important moments in King’s life. Ultimately, King was a great pastor based on his faith in God, theological knowledge, oratory skills.

Bibliography

Baldwin, Lewis, and Victor Anderson, eds. Revives My Soul Again: The Spirituality of Martin Luther King Jr. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018.

Baldwin, Lewis. There is a Balm in Gilead: The Cultural Roots of Martin Luther King, Jr. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991.

—. Never to Leave Us Alone: The Prayer Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010a.

—. The Voice of Conscience: The Church in the Mind of Martin Luther King, Jr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010b.

Bennett, Scott. Radical Pacifism: The War Resisters League and Gandhian Nonviolence in America, 1915–1963. New York: Syracuse University Press, 2003.

Cone, James. Martin & Malcolm & America: A dream or a Nightmare. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1991.

Dawson Jr., Clanton. “The Concept of Hope in the Thinking of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” In The Liberatory Thought of Martin Luther King Jr.: Critical Essays on the Philosopher King, edited by Robert Birt, 431-355. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012.

Garrow, David. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr., and the Southern Crisis. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1986.

Hansen, Drew. The Dream: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Speech that Inspired a Nation. Broadway: HarperCollins, 2005.

King, Martin Luther. Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1958.

—. Thou, Dear God: Prayers that Open Hearts and Spirits. Boston: Beacon Press, 2012.

Selma. Directed by Ava DuVernay. Chicago: Harpo Films, 2014. DVD.

Walsh, Frank. The Montgomery Bus Boycott. New York: Gareth Stevens, 2003.

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