Howard Thurman |
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| Photo Courtesy of Boston University |
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Another example
of the relevant reverend is Howard Thurman, who left a secure position
as a university professor to pioneer in the founding of the first
effectively integrated church in twentieth-century America. What
his life's work has meant is told in Footprints of Dream: the
Story of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco.
Dr. Thurman there says, in recalling his father:
He was the first person I had ever seen die. I was seven,
and my father was fifty-five. He had been sick only five days.
I stood with my mother beside his bed. His magnificent chest
showed the pressure from his lungs, as he fought for air. Up
from his throat came the guttural noises which in our community
was called the 'death rattle.' At length my mother said, "Saul,
are you ready to die?"
With an effort supreme, he said, "All my life I have been
a man. I am not afraid of death, Alice, I can stand it."
At that moment his body was caught in a great spasm that lifted
his large frame from the bed. We struggled to hold him down.
Suddenly, it was all over. My father was dead.
Because my father had no membership in the local church, he
was not regarded as a Christian, and the minister was unwilling
to bury him from the church. In the rooms of our home there
was not enough space for the funeral service to be held there.
The funeral parlor was available only to white people; even
the bodies of Negroes could not be embalmed on the premises
of the undertaker's establishment. My grandmother insisted that
my father must be buried from the church. She carried her plea
to the board of deacons, and she received from them the permission
to use the sanctuary of the church for the funeral. A traveling
evangelist, a Rev. Sam Cromarte, accepted the invitation to
conduct the service. This was to us a most gracious act.
During the sermon, to our utter amazement, the minister "preached
my father into hell." Here was an object lesson to all
unbelievers, to all sinners. As I sat beside my mother on the
mourner's seat, I kept saying to her, "He didn't know Poppa?
Did he? Did he, Momma?" Tenderly she placed her hands over
my bare knees, gently patting them as she whispered comforting
and reassuring words to me.
During the long drive from the cemetery I was able to question
freely at last. My mother, grandmother, and I talked about what
had happened. They tried to explain it to me. Finally, I said,
"When I grow up to be a man, one thing is sure, I'll never
have anything to do with the church."
When I once served as chair of a conference of clergy gathered at
Philips Exeter Academy, I had the high privilege of inviting Howard
Thurman, a minister I most admired, to speak to us, first about
preaching and then about worship. At the beginning of the first
address, he told us that he had never before been to Exeter. However,
as a boy living in Florida, he saw National Geographic ads for the
academy and yearned to go there to secure an education to fit him
for his future lifework. Being poor, black and fatherless, he sent
for the catalog but never applied for admission. Still, he relished
receiving our invitation and rejoiced to be here at last to behold
his dream. When the Exeter headmaster heard about this dream, he
asked Dr. Thurman to recommend to him any boys he thought would
like to have an academy education.
When our speaker was talking about preaching, he began by making
"a remark that cannot be challenged: the preacher is a man
who puts on his trousers one leg at a time, like any other man."
Today the profession is increasingly blessed by preachers in dresses,
but the principle nonetheless is valid. As he went on in his spontaneous
but structured way, he revealed to us our truest task: "The
preacher is the sermon."
When people ask, "Is the reverend relevant?" I think of
the San Francisco dream of Dr. Thurman. He dared to engage in the
struggle to incarnate religion as person-to-person fellowship. When
humanity was rent with rage during World War II, he committed himself
to work for human fellowship strong enough to break through the
fiercely resistant walls of race and class and nationality. People
outside of America and outside of the Christian family of faith
had long asked him, "Why is the Christian church in the United
States powerless before the color bar?" At that time he could
not point to even one single local Christian church anywhere in
America that had a really effectively integrated membership. How
he accomplished this is the story of the Church for the Fellowship
of All Peoples in San Francisco.
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