“Building Beloved Community, Part 1” – January 14th, 2024

Rev. Sophia Lyons preaching, with Jean Gauthier, Charlyn Bethell, Guy Urban and a beautiful song by the FPW Choir!

Let’s stretch ourselves beyond one Sunday to honor and learn from the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr., whose understanding of Beloved Community is Liberating Love’s expression (our month’s theme.) We will explore the particularities of this throughout the month, and I am looking forward to reflecting on how I live this well and how I fall short. Nourish your body, mind and soul and come worship with us!

The reading this morning is an excerpt from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’ Jr.’s sermon entitled “Transformed Nonconformist.” Rev. King preached this sermon at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He served as the pastor at Dexter from 1954 until 1960. He offered this sermon in his first year of ministry with them and frequently preached this message later in his ministry, challenging listeners to be a transforming presence in the world: 

…The saving of the world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority…We must make a choice.   

Will we continue to march to the drumbeat of conformity and respectability, or will we, listening to the beat of a more distant drum, move to its echoing sounds?   

Will we march only to the music of time, or will we, risking criticism and abuse, march to the soul saving music of eternity?  

More than ever before, we are today challenged by the words of [Romans, chapter 12, verse 2]: “Be not conformed to this world: but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.