When the Activist Becomes the Pastor

That sentence sounds simple. Living it was not.

Part 1 of a Series

“Where is Soaries? Where is First Baptist?”

I heard the question more than once. Sometimes from people I knew. Sometimes from strangers who only knew me by reputation. It was usually asked after some injustice in our area had gone unanswered by the clergy. The folks asking had a right to ask. I had asked the same question of pastors when I was a young man.

I started organizing at sixteen. The first campaign I ever joined was for a woman from our neighborhood who promised to help us get a better park. Our basketball courts were sub-par. Our baseball field was uneven enough to be dangerous. Our tennis courts had to be tended by volunteer men from the community. On the other side of town, the parks looked like country clubs. I didn’t yet have the historical or socio-political analysis to explain the disparity. I just knew our park was bad and theirs was good. We registered voters and got our candidate elected.

From that day forward I cared about public policy. I learned to speak in public by addressing a board of education that had designed two systems of schooling, one for us and one for them. I mobilized neighbors to fill those board meetings. I led a sit-in in a mayor’s office over police brutality. I picketed the federal building when the US Attorney targeted Black radio personalities in a racially biased payola investigation. I organized tenants to withhold rent when their landlord refused to give them heat, and helped them get a judge to use the escrowed payments to buy new furnaces. I was an organizer. I was good at it. I loved it.

Then I became a pastor.

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I had boards to lead. Members who needed counsel. Systems to build so that those member needs actually got met. I had classes to teach and sermons to preach every week. I had eulogies to deliver. I had a budget to manage. I was now employed by an institution and paid by its members. And unlike my early days, when my work was confined to one small town, First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens drew members from ninety-four different municipalities. Each one had its own mayor, school board, and police department.

What does an activist do with that?

The first answer was the obvious one. I did the job I was paid to do. Most people don’t understand what church members actually expect of their pastors. There are a few congregations where preaching on Sunday morning is enough. Most members expect far more. They expect leadership, presence, structure, counsel, and a steady stream of resources well beyond the worship hour. And most pastors carry this load while also working a full time job, because most churches cannot pay a full time salary. They are teachers, managers, nurses, business owners. They preach on Sunday after working all week. I was fortunate. I only needed a part time job to supplement my salary at First Baptist. I could give most of my time and energy to leading the church. But the church was growing fast, and growth required that the operations keep pace.

So where did my activism go?

It showed up in the preaching. It showed up in the organizational infrastructure we built. But compared to who I had been, I was nearly invisible. The people who remembered the old me, or who needed the old me, would ask the question, “Where is Soaries?”

The hardest voice asking that question was my own. I had been the young activist asking the same thing of the clergy in my community. Now I was the clergy. There were moments when I did respond to a public injustice. But I responded as a leader, not as an activist. There is a difference between those two postures, and that difference is much of what this series is about. The activist agitates from outside the room. The leader is responsible for the people inside the room. The activist can leave when the meeting is over. The pastor is still the pastor on Monday morning, at the hospital on Tuesday, and at the funeral on Wednesday.

I had a family, too. Being faithful to my immediate family and my church family was all I had the bandwidth to do. That sentence sounds simple. Living it was not.

This is the first installment in a four or five part series on the inner life of a pastor who came up as an activist. Part Two is about the two tools that became my replacement for the picket line. Prophetic preaching and motivational leadership. They were not a retreat from the work. They were a different way of doing it.