I once preached an entire sermon against a medical procedure I knew nothing about.

A surgeon had placed a baboon’s heart into the body of a child. I told my congregation the doctors were arrogant. That they were trying to play God. I was certain I was right. I was outraged, and I made sure everyone in that sanctuary knew it.

After the service ended, a woman who had known me all my life approached me. She was my senior. She had something to say.

“Pastor, did God give Adam and therefore humans dominion over everything?”

Yes.

“Did that include baboons?”

Yes.

“Well, if God gave humans dominion over everything God made, and a doctor used his dominion to take a baboon’s heart to save a human life — what’s wrong with that?”

A long pause followed.

I had preached a whole sermon on a subject I had never read about. No articles. No books. No coursework. I had preached from my own sensibilities. From instinct. And one person — quietly, respectfully — dismantled everything I had said with three questions.

My answer was “I don’t know.”

That was the moment I enrolled in formal religious education.

As an activist, I never needed it. My activism had its own moral grounding. People deserve dignity. Institutions that suppress human rights need to be challenged and corrected. Someone has to organize the response. That framework was enough. It required no theology, no philosophy, no ethics examination. It required strategy. I learned strategy from the activists who came before me, from the campaigns of the 1960s, from working alongside Rev. Jesse Jackson and studying the organizing principles of Saul Alinsky. Once I was known as effective, the work found me. My job was to identify the injustice, build the response, and execute.

But pastoral leadership asked me questions that strategy cannot answer.

Why do innocent children die while cruel people live into old age? How can someone claim to love Jesus and hate their neighbor? What moral weight should a doctor assign to a baboon’s life when a child’s life is in the balance? These are not organizing questions. They are theological ones. And my congregation had a right to expect that their pastor had at least thought about them before Sunday morning.

So I did something that cost me time and money I did not have. I stepped away from the church I had been leading. I went back to school. I earned three degrees in religion, theology, and preaching — the kind of preparation that required examination, analysis, and structured thought that my activism had never demanded of me.

Some people are gifted enough to lead without that kind of preparation. I have seen it. I have respect for it. I was not one of those people. I needed the discipline that formal education forces. I needed someone to require me to think before I spoke.

There are still times when my answer is “I don’t know.” But at least I have thought about it in advance.

My grandmother had very little formal education. She was a seamstress by trade. She died a millionaire. Every dollar she had was in real estate. I learned to invest from watching her. And when she passed, I inherited my first house along with a perspective I had not yet earned.

But long before any of that, I was organizing tenants against slumlords. A slumlord is a specific thing. It is not simply a landlord who owns property in a struggling neighborhood. It is a property owner who lets a building deteriorate deliberately— no working elevators, no heat in November, no extermination services, no maintenance of common areas, no functional garbage disposal. The city was supposed to monitor and enforce those basic conditions. But corruption, ineptitude, and municipal budget priorities allowed these conditions to persist year after year. Tenants suffer. Nobody responds to their plight.

I knew how to fight back. The tool was the tenants association. I would organize the residents, have them document every violation in writing, and then direct them to pay their rent into an escrow account controlled by the association rather than to the landlord. When the landlord took them to court for non-payment, we would show up with bank statements and inspection reports. We were not withholding the rent. We were holding it. The judge could see that. In almost every case, we won. The escrowed funds went to fix what the landlord refused to fix— new furnaces, functioning heat, basic repairs. One case involved a six-family building in a suburban town, an otherwise decent neighborhood, where the landlord had removed every furnace from every apartment in November. We fixed it ourselves using the tenants’ own rent money.

It required total participation. The rent payments had to be current and held in a legitimate bank account. But when it worked, it worked completely. We took the power away from the landlord and handed it to the people being exploited.

I did these enough times that I became convinced rent control was the answer. These landlords had demonstrated they could not be trusted. Government had to set the limits to protect tenants and entire neighborhoods from abandonment.

Then I became a landlord myself.

A bank-owned multifamily came available— new construction, priced below market because the bank needed to move it. By that point my church had developed nearly 200 units of affordable housing, so I understood the financing mechanics. But every unit we had built used subsidies, and this property did not qualify for any of them. So I decided to run an experiment in unsubsidized affordable housing.

The idea was straightforward: purchase the building at a below-market price, finance it at a below-market interest rate, and secure an agreement with the city to freeze property taxes so that municipal increases would not get passed through to the tenants. I rented the units at 60 percent of market value. The experiment worked in every area my partners and I could control.

The city refused to grant the tax abatement. They extend that kind of agreement to major commercial developments routinely. Not to me. Every tax increase hit my operating costs directly. Insurance moved the same direction. An increase in taxes required an increase in rent to keep the apartments viable. The math was not ideological. It was arithmetic.

When I was organizing tenants, I never thought about any of that. My entire exposure was to greedy landlords who needed as much government oversight as possible. I had no framework for a landlord absorbing legitimate costs that were rising faster than the rents could reasonably follow. I had never had to run the numbers myself.

The pastoral life required me to hold both truths at once. The tenant whose furnaces were pulled out in November is not acceptable. And the landlord being squeezed by tax increases the city refuses to share is also not acceptable. These are not competing moral claims. They are two people caught inside a policy environment that is not working for either of them.

That is the thing about my activist solutions. They were usually right about who is being harmed. They were not always right about what is causing the harm, or what actually stops it. A slogan that feels righteous on the street can produce unintended consequences once it becomes law— consequences that hurt the very people it was designed to protect.

I learned that as a landlord. I carried it as a pastor.

I believe God called me to be a minister. But I never thought I was called to be a pastor.

I was at a meeting planning a protest in my hometown. All of a sudden, I got a strange feeling and went outside to get some fresh air. A friend came out to check on me, and I told him I felt like God was telling me to become a minister. He found that hard to believe because I didn’t even attend church.

But that was not quite right. I was always going to church. I just wasn’t going to worship. As an activist and community organizer, I went to churches to spread the word about some issue or call to action. That is where I went because that is where the people were.

I had been raised in a Christian home. My father was a part-time pastor and a full-time English teacher. I had never abandoned my beliefs. But I had stopped attending worship because the church of my youth did not seem to care enough about social justice and public policy. The Jesus I read about in the Bible was concerned about physical well-being as much as personal salvation. I never chose sides between the social and the spiritual gospel. I still have not.

What I was gravitating toward was what we call prophetic ministry rather than the priestly functions of the clergy. My father affirmed that call. He assured me there was room for the kind of ministry I felt led to pursue. So my activism expanded into Christian ministry, and I was working for a man who had never been a pastor himself. Rev. Jesse Jackson was an activist minister whose strategies were rooted in the church and the Bible. But he did not serve a congregation. Neither did I ever plan to.

Then my father died. He was 47 years old. I had only been a licensed minister — a minister in training — for two months. The church turned to me and asked me to fill in while they searched for a successor.

Filling in meant administering the ordinances of the church. That started with Communion two days after his funeral. I had no formal training, but I had watched my father perform these functions all of my life, so I knew how to do them. I just felt like a fish out of water. This was exactly what I had not wanted. But these people needed me, and I could not say no.

At the same time, Rev. Jackson told me I was being promoted to National Coordinator of Operation PUSH, working directly with him every day out of the national headquarters in Chicago. What he did not tell me was that I would need to move. My previous job had involved constant travel, so it had not mattered where I lived. This one required being in Chicago whenever I was not on the road.

For 16 months I delayed. Finally, I had to tell Rev. Jackson that I could not go. My mother needed my help raising my 9-year-old sister in New Jersey. I resigned.

I now had no job, no savings, no investments. My credit was so bad that I was using my deceased father’s American Express card. We had the same name, and as long as I paid the bills on time, no one seemed to mind.

This was the most confused period of my life. But it did not feel confused, because I felt good about my work. Advocating for affordable housing. Fighting against racist policies in law enforcement. Protesting apartheid in South Africa. My activism functioned as a kind of drug that allowed me to live in a fantasy world of nobility while my actual life was dysfunctional.

Preaching a different sermon every week changed that. Being there for families in their hardest moments changed that. It forced me to decide who and what I was going to be.

I finally accepted that both God and the church were calling me to a responsibility I had never wanted and for which I was alarmingly underprepared. But that unwanted role became the thing that made me grow up.

I spent three days last week in the place where I got my professional start on a national level. I attended the Rainbow PUSH annual conference in Chicago. It was the first time I had been inside that headquarters building in 50 years.

My youngest son, Martin, was with me. I took him on a tour of the building where I sat in staff meetings every Monday morning with the most prominent Black leader in America— the Rev. Jesse Louis Jackson. I showed him my old office. I introduced him to the two people still there from the old days, Rev. Janette Wilson and Betty Magness. He met Mrs. Jackie Jackson, the heroic widow of Rev. Jackson.

I was not there as a speaker. I paid to register us for the conference, walked in through the front door as a participant, had my badge scanned, and sat in the audience. I was not there to be seen or heard. I wanted to hear the new, young voices advocating for a truly free society. I wanted to reflect on the days I attended those weekly staff meetings and reminisce about the stories Rev. Jackson would tell us about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

But mostly I was there to support the new leadership of an organization I had once planned to work for forever. And I wanted to consider what a former activist and retired pastor should be contributing to the issues my younger self had dedicated his life to.

The speakers were passionate. Elected officials, organization leaders and pastors gave insightful analyses and moving speeches. Several acknowledged what rarely gets spoken out loud— that cultural distractions and widespread apathy may be greater enemies to social progress than callous conservatism. The struggles of the future are clearly more complicated than the struggles of the past.

I left satisfied that a new generation of movement leaders was present and had reported for duty. Now their primary challenge is to build the movement. And that challenge is not new.

We generally describe the 1960s as the era of a civil rights movement. The inconvenient truth is that most people were not in the movement at all. Most Black churches were not active in the struggle for civil rights. Most Black people never marched in protest of anything. That is why leading a movement is a heartbreaking business. Most activists live very lonely lives.

Few people today understand the stature that Rev. Jesse Jackson had in the early 1970s. One day in 1975, while we were in Philadelphia helping textile factory workers fight for fair wages and better conditions, he told us he wanted to hold a rally in downtown Philadelphia on Wednesday at noon. It was Monday. Two days’ notice.

The staff looked at each other and wondered how on earth we were supposed to pull this off. But there was no voting in PUSH, and we got to work. Frank Watkins started calling the media. I started calling key clergy. Other staff fanned out across the city. Two days later, 10,000 people showed up at a midday rally in downtown Philadelphia to hear what the “Country Preacher” had to say.

At 24 years old, there was nothing else I could have imagined doing with my life. My job at PUSH was my life.

That is the distinction I kept turning over as I left the conference this week. How many of these new leaders have a life that includes their work? And how many have their work as their life? It is not a small difference. And I know which one causes more damage over time.

There have been a lot of spiritual, social and emotional casualties among people who gave everything to causes, organizations and leaders. I did not do a great job protecting myself when I was an activist. By the time I became a pastor, I had developed a strategy for my community, my family and my own well-being. I wanted these young leaders to benefit from what I had learned - from my successes and my failures, just as I once benefited from Rev. Jackson’s.

The only real activity I participated in at the conference was brief one-on-one conversations with many of the young leaders present. My offer to them was simple: I will be available. I want to help them protect themselves spiritually and financially while they do this work— to appreciate the value of strong families, healthy relationships, and things like good credit, life insurance, annual checkups and regular vacations.

I predict that these leaders are going to register millions of voters. They are going to change things. I believe that. But they need support from those of us who lived long enough to know that they too will one day be replaced. When that day comes, they will need more than news clippings and awards to feel like their lives were fulfilled and well lived.

Nothing in my personal experience or my academic training prepared me for what happened the night a 17-year-old boy was killed by mistaken identity and his mother, a member of my congregation, needed her pastor.

She was a single mother. He was her only son. And I met her in the emergency room.

I had been in difficult rooms before. I had ridden in the command car with police on one of the most tense nights of my ministry. But nothing compared to what I walked into that night. The emergency room was packed with friends, family, and grieving young people. Carloads of gang members were circling the hospital outside, threatening the youth inside. The hospital closed the emergency room to the public. The medical professionals stepped back. The medical examiner refused to come to certify the young man’s death. And somehow, the night became mine.

I stood in that room and ushered young people in, two and three at a time, to see their dead friend. I did that for hours. All night long.

I have held a core belief through all 31 years of my ministry at FBCLG: all ministry flows from pastoral care. There is only one institution in the community whose reason to exist is to help people manage every transition of life. From birth through death, and everything in between. The church does not show up for the spectacular moments only. It shows up in emergency rooms at two in the morning when everyone else has left.

As an activist, I had one primary obligation: protest injustice. When agents of the government took innocent lives, I had no choice but to be in the streets. That is what activism requires. But as a pastor, I was called upon far more often to do something different. I was called to sit with mothers who had lost children not to police but to other young people. To stand in hospital rooms. To preach funerals. To help families bury sons.

Part 3 of “Activist to Pastor” series

The criticism that black leaders speak more loudly about police misconduct than about black people killing each other misses this entirely. As an activist, I protested police misconduct because that is what activists do in response to state violence. But as a pastor, I was doing pastoral care for victims of black-on-black violence constantly, and with a frequency that would have surprised the critics. The news media did not always cover what was said or what was done. But the work was being done.

There is also a distinction that matters. An agent of the government taking an innocent life is a state crime. Misguided, misdirected young people killing each other is a community tragedy. Both produce grief. Both require a response. But they are not the same kind of thing, and the responses they demand are not identical.

After that young man’s funeral, we expanded our work with young men in the community. We went on to serve dozens of families whose children became victims of violence. The pastoral care did not end that night. It extended.

The boy’s mother lost her only son. I cannot tell you that anything we did made that loss smaller. But she did not face it alone. That is what I was there to do.

A word before this one. In Part 1 I told you the next installment would be about prophetic preaching and motivational leadership. It is still coming. But I felt led to tell you this story first. By the end you will understand why.

“They shot another unarmed Black man.” That was the message I received at my hotel while taking a few days off in Niagara Falls during the first year of my pastorate at First Baptist. The shooting happened in a city whose mayor was also new to his job. As the pastor of the largest Black church in the area, there was no doubt in my mind that I had to act.

But what would my role be? I left my brief getaway, and on the drive back to New Jersey I reflected on how I had previously responded to police violence as an activist.

In one case I had led a protest at city hall demanding that the officer who killed an unarmed teen be suspended without pay. He had been suspended, but he was still collecting a check every two weeks. My position was simple. If he was exonerated, he could always be paid retroactively after his trial. But if he was convicted, which he ultimately was, he could never be expected to reimburse the taxpayers for having paid a murderer. We won that case and the cop went to jail. We followed up with public hearings that we organized to document other incidents of police misconduct, which produced a report to the mayor and police commission with recommendations for training reform and increased accountability.

In another case I led a protest in front of a city hall that turned into a takeover of the mayor’s office. We promised to stay until the officer in the shooting was suspended without pay. After the second day of our sit-in, the police threatened the mayor that they would go on strike if he did not allow them to arrest me and the other protesters. When the mayor informed me, I called the major activists in the region and asked them to contact the mayor and promise to bring thousands of their followers to join us if anything happened to us. The mayor did not allow our arrest. We won that case too. And that cop was also convicted and sentenced to jail time.

That was Rev. Buster Soaries, the activist. Now I was Rev. Dr. DeForest B. Soaries, Jr., pastor of the largest church in the region, married with two children, twelve years older and still committed to justice. But now I would respond differently than I had in the past.

First, I met with the family and friends of the victim to offer my condolences and the sanctuary of our church for the funeral if they needed it. Then I met with the youth of the neighborhood who had begun gathering to plan a response to the shooting. These young people were not products of the southern, church based, nonviolent civil rights movement. They believed they would not be taken seriously unless they retaliated by shooting up a police car that night to kill a police officer. They showed me their guns. I believed them.

They were respectful toward me, and they thanked me for meeting with them. I left with a sense of frustration and fear. I tried to reach the mayor to work out a strategy to keep the city from going up in flames. He was nowhere to be found. The city was on the edge of an explosion, and the one man elected to lead it offered no leadership at all. Whatever was going to hold that night together, it was not going to come from city hall.

So I did the only thing I could think of that might get us through the night without violence. I rode in the command car of the police department, and I had word spread through the neighborhood that I was in a police car, so no one would shoot at a car and risk killing me while trying to kill a cop. In Part 1 I wrote that the activist agitates from outside the room and the pastor is responsible for the people inside the room. That night I went all the way inside. I had spent my activist years on one side of the police line. I had never seen policing from the inside.

From the command car I could monitor the night in real time over the police radio. I could also hear the fear among the officers as they talked with their leaders, uncertain about what was coming. I had spent years naming what the police did to us. I had never once considered that they were afraid too. On a night like that one, the fear in that car was as real as the fear in the neighborhood. Seeing it did not excuse anything, but it changed me. And there was no violence that night at all.

We held the funeral for the victim at First Baptist. In my eulogy I tried to convince the hundreds of young people in the room to honor him by letting us help them build successful lives. A couple of dozen kids accepted our invitation to leave their guns at the church before they left. We collected two dozen guns.

A few days later I took a group of neighborhood youth to the state capital to visit that city’s Black mayor and hear him describe what it is like to be Black and hold political power. They had never seen or met a Black mayor. Their eyes and their minds opened to a way to shape public policy, and even police behavior, other than violence.

We then started a program for neighborhood youth that helped almost all of them grow into successful, responsible men. College graduates, entrepreneurs, fathers, husbands, and church leaders. One of those young men opened his own barbershop across the street from our church. He became my barber.

Stay tuned for “Activist to Pastor,” Part 3.

“Where is Soaries? Where is First Baptist?”

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