Fellowship Chicago 72nd Church Anniversary Reflections

0:05 As I reflect on the history of Fellowship, I'm amazed. I am grateful that God has kept this church strong for 72 years, seven decades plus two. This year particularly, I keep reflecting on the image of the ship, how Reverend Jesse Jackson actually nicknamed Fellowship the ship. And that image of us reclaiming an image that brought so much pain and shame through the transatlantic slave trade. Because normally when we think about ships historically as black people, that's what brought us over here from the motherland. But the ship has reclaimed that image that this is not a painful place. You know, this is not a place that brings us into enslavement, but it's a place that represents literally the opposite. It's a place of liberation, a place of healing, a place of safety.

1:01 People have been able to jump aboard this ship in the middle of the civil rights movement, in the middle of economic down turmoil, in the middle of shifts in culture. but there's been something stable about the ships sailing through dangerous waters, sailing through uncertain decades and seasons, and people have been able to to find what they needed on this ship. And so as I reflect over the 72 year history, my prayer really is that we continue to be the ship that people can find stability and safety and fun and love. So I'm happy to be on the ship myself because I found those things here for me. Do you know how bold you have to be to tell the mayor of a city, for Reverend Evans to tell the mayor of a city in the middle of the civil rights era, I'm going to invite Dr. King, regardless of what you have to say.

2:01 It's this boldness, it's this radical courage to be like, I really don't care what the consequences are going to be. I'm going to stand for what I feel is right. I'm going to stand for righteousness. I'm going to stand for justice. So that moment and watching and as a pastor now, I can't imagine seven years of driving by a place that's been that that represents almost my failure. because we talk about it in hindsight, like, you know, seven years the building stood just the beams. But for Reverend Evans, I cannot imagine how much that pained him and probably even aged him and the internal wandering and the internal wrestling. Like, I thought, God, I thought you told me to do this and I stood for you and now it looks like a failure and I'm amazed at the courage that it took to stand and wait on God. I want you to remember me from here being in your heart that he helped me. He did it through his singing, through his preaching, through his teaching. He helped me. I want to live on.

3:21 That's my proudest woman, that when I'm dead. I will still live in the heart and not the people. I really wish he was still here. I really do. I miss the safety I felt when I knew he was over there sitting in his home in Indiana Avenue. Every time I go to Burr Oaks and I walk and I go by his tombstone, I go over and I say to him, I'm doing my best. That's what I said. And that's what I would tell him. I would say, God, thank you. Because the little time I did have with him, man, it was power packed with insights and love. I felt he loved me and he affirmed me. I preached a sermon called, So What If I Am a Grasshopper? After, you know, they went to go view the land and they came back with the report, but we saw ourselves as grasshoppers.

4:24 I said, so what if you are a grasshopper? If God called you, you can do it even if you are a grasshopper. He called me the next day and said, I'm just so happy to be a grasshopper. Man, you know what that meant to me. So affirming. And the one thing that he says that just rings in my spirit, and I would thank him for it, is the reminder. He said, thank you for not taking the ship under the water, but leaving it on the water. And he also thanked me in that conversation. He thanked me for not trying to compete with Pastor Jenkins while I was his AP. He said, you know, normally you get two great preachers together. It's not enough room for both of them. And he said, I'm so glad to see y'all working together. You know, just I would say thank you, man. Thank you for fellowship. Thank you for trusting God. Thank you for being a man of courage, a man of faith. We really don't understand to be 25 years old and start a church.

5:19 When you put it in context, you'd be like, man, you were on something else. You had a different kind of commitment to God. I'm also amazed at the courage it took to ordain a black woman in the 50s. I mean, Reverend Consuela York. That's major to me. Fellowship and Reverend Evans were the first in this Midwestern region of the United States. was one of the first to ordain a black woman in ministry. Man, that's radical. Let me be very clear. If it were not for women, there would be no fellowship. From the kitchen to the Sunday school to the choir to the pulpit. Miss Jenny, you know, down there cooking every Sunday. And Mama Daniels, who we just laid to rest a few weeks ago. And you think about Miss Ludella Evans Reed.

6:16 And you think about Ma May. Miss Luther May Hollinshed Evans, Reverend Evans' late wife. And you think about Dr. Tara. And you think about Brie, Lady Brie. I mean, there is this legacy of the sisters just holding it down. And all through the Bible, we're reminded from the book of Joel to the book of Acts that the Spirit is going to pour out on all flesh. Your sons and your daughters are going to prophesy. So I think fellowship has just represented the beauty of the fullness of the Holy Spirit and not becoming discriminatory and biased and withholding positions of influence and power just to the men. And so Reverend Evans broke barriers in that area, ordaining the first female. Pastor Jenkins ordained the first female deacons.

7:13 And then in my era already, we have the first woman chairperson over the deacons. And so the legacy really does continue. And I thank God for the sisters. You know, even right now, I mean, I can go down a list of women who I'm grateful for all that they do to keep this church selling strong from our staff to leaders, they know who they are. And I thank God for them. Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Ah, my, my, my, my, my, my! Yeah! What God can you do? Fellowship set the model not just for our church or for Chicago but for the country people were watching Mama Lou in that choir and they were stealing and borrowing and imitating and emulating everything fellowship was doing and so what a fellowship and Lord have mercy tis so sweet to trust in Jesus and what's my song yield not to temptation and on my way to heaven, so am I.

8:40 It's a highway to heaven. Oh, my goodness. He's my everything. And of course, Reverend Evans' famous song, It Is No Secret, you know, that what God can do, what he's done for others, he'll do for you. And then here comes Pastor Jenkins. I mean, stellar award-winning songs from this church that people still again sing at their church. This means war. My God is awesome. grace. I mean, come on, man. So when I think of the Music Ministry of Fellowship, I think of soulful. I think of encouraging. I think it just hits you right in your heart. Old lady in my former church used to say, sometimes you need the music that gets you where you need to get God. And all of the music that has come from this church down through the decades is the type of music that gets you where you need to get God. And I'm proud in a way that we already are kind of continuing that legacy. There's so much more that I think will come from our music ministry, but even the affirmation. You can make it through this. Your story's not over.

9:48 That was done with Fellowship. Bree's song, Free. And then Pastor Jenkins allowed Bree and I to be on his latest album singing a remix of the Potter, the Potter's House. So the legacy continues even in the music industry as well. I want to say thank you to Pastor Jenkins. I want to say thank you to him too. And I want to thank him because he did not have to give me a chance. And I'm just amazed. It's like the longer I stay here, the more amazed I get. You'd think the amazement will wear off, but man, what a mystery. How God meshed he and our lives together. I owe him everything. But Pastor Jenkins, without him, I'm not sure fellowship would have had the vibrancy that we see now. I didn't make fellowship vibrant. Fellowship was vibrant when I got here.

10:45 You know, I've added some things, but Pastor Jenkins to me, he kept fellowship from becoming a museum. I think if he would not have come, it would have just been a relic. It would have been a place that we drive by and say, I remember when. and because of his leadership, because of his courage to do things differently, because of his spiritual insight and foresight to say, hey, we have to attract these young folks or else this church is going to fold. I think his spiritual insight and foresight allowed me to come and have a strong foundation to say, hey, let's take it even higher. But Reverend Evans served so well for 50 years and certain songs were sung for 50 years. And a certain style of worship happened for 50 years. So here he comes saying, hey, y'all, let's try to do something different.

11:41 And it's biblical. Isaiah 43 says, behold, I do a new thing. Psalm 92 says, sing a new song unto the Lord. The Bible is always this new. And he was the Joshua after Moses. And Joshua did not lead just like Moses. And I think some people had an issue with Joshua's style. But we ought to all thank God for Joshua's favor. and his strength because now we're standing on a legacy that Pastor Jenkins instilled into this church, which is now a legacy of creativity, a legacy of innovation, a legacy of a relevant ministry. And Reverend Evans did that in his time. It was innovative. He brought drums in and had a guitar player and a bass guitar. That was not happening in most churches. 200-piece choir, innovative, creative for that time. Pastor Jenkins came in his time, innovative, relevant for that time. So the real prayer is, will I and will we continue to hold that legacy of being innovative, relevant, creative for this time? And there's an old song all of us know, to serve this present age my calling to fulfill. Oh may it all my powers engaged to do my master's will.

13:01 And I feel like Evans, Jenkins, and I'm trying to just be faithful to the time that we're serving. Man, that global pandemic that we're still in, we're not all the way out.

13:24 Man, I know we're still here by God's grace. So many churches closed, so many pastors died, so many ministries just collapsed in the pandemic. and for us to still be strong. And we grew in the middle of grief. We flourished in a famine. We became stronger in the middle of a struggle. That's God's grace, man. You don't flourish in famine, grow in grief, you know, succeed in struggles without the grace of God being on us. And so we just made decisions to try to lead with some common sense. I will never forget the day I learned that the NBA was shutting down March of 2020, that the largest churches in the nation were shutting down. Lakewood in Houston and New Psalmist in Baltimore, Maryland.

14:21 And I'm sitting there saying, now, wait a minute, if the NBA is shutting down, the MLB is shutting down, Major League Baseball, golf tournaments were shutting down. I said, I think we need to we need to follow suit and be wise and put the people first. And so I had to keep saying over and over again, the job of the shepherd is not just to feed the sheep, but it's to protect them from the wolves. I kept saying over and again, we may close the building, but the church is still open. And so I think God just favored us in a special, unique way, trying to use common sense and turning this ship into the virtual ship was one of the best things that could have happened. and one of our members actually gave me that idea. Michael Edwards. One day we were talking, he was checking on me and he was like, well, I guess we're the virtual ship now and that's going to be all right.

15:17 I said, I like that. And so we just started running with the virtual ship, hashtag virtual ship. And I think that that's what helped us sell. But let me add a piece, talk about legacy. If we were not a church that had already embraced media, If we were not a church that had already embraced social media and updated our cameras and had an LED wall and understood what it means to do ministry through the media and using technology.

15:47 We would have been like a lot of churches were in the middle of a struggle trying to purchase stuff that was not available because everything was on back order. But Reverend Evans had a relevant ministry in media and technology. Pastor Jenkins continued the legacy of technology and media. And so we just, again, rolled that wave. So I didn't really create it. I stood on what was already built and just tried to add to it. You have to know your history because the old adage says, if you don't know where you've been, you won't know where you're going. And then there's a symbol, an Indinkra symbol from Ghana called Sankofa. Sankofa. and it simply means go back and get it. There's a bird walking forward, looking backwards with an egg in its mouth. So the bird is holding the future, looking backwards, walking forward. Church anniversary gives us a time to walk forward into the unknown beauty of our destiny while looking backwards at the known proof and visible proof of how God has already moved in our lives and we're holding the future in our mouths. Man, that's something to just sit down and take in. You've got to know where you've come from. You need to know the struggle. You need to know because when the next test comes and somebody says you can't do it, you look at them and say, I can't. But my history says I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. God kept Pastor Jenkins. God kept Reverend Evans.

17:22 God kept Dr. Tara. God kept my mate. And God kept Deacon Johnny. God kept Deacon Joe Dixon and Deacon Ephraim Pugh. God kept Mama Dangles. God kept Linda Shaw-Poyle. So don't tell me what God can't do for me. Same God knew you. same God, new battle, same God, new opportunity. So for me, it grounds me. It grounds my faith. But leave me alone now because I'm getting happy because the more I think about it, the happier I get because, yeah, man, you got to know where you come from. It's important, especially black church history. Black church history is black history. So what we're talking about is not just a local experience. We're talking about a local experience in a global context of suffering, pain, discrimination, struggle, resistance, resilience. And so all of that on a micro level and a macro level, that ought to fill your soul with possibility and hope of what can be because of what you've already seen has been. So I feel like God has promised some things to fellowship. And just because the person in leadership has changed does not mean the promise has changed.

18:45 When Pastor Evans retired, he handed Pastor Jenkins a blueprint of a vision to expand this church. Pastor Jenkins in his time worked so diligently with all his soul on the Legacy Project and trying to expand it so we have more space to do more meaningful, relevant, innovative ministry and I feel like just because a promise was paused does not mean that a promise was canceled and I really believe that in my tenure God is going to allow us to build a new edifice that will represent a vibrant, historic ministry that is relevant and necessary for all generations. A space for the youth that is adequate.

19:42 A space for our seniors that's adequate. A space for summer camp, a space for businesses to partner with us. A space for worship. You know, we love our sanctuary, but it's very intimate. There's a reason why we had to have three services pre-pandemic, and we pack up in here. I mean, if we all had to come and show up at one time, you ain't seen a mess. It's already a mess, and we have multiple services. You know, parking and da-da-da. Where we gonna sit and overflow and... Lord, it's not enough room. You know, the building was built in 1973 and I think that God is going to allow us to build a new edifice that's going to allow families to find home and children to find spaces for their maturation and their spiritual growth, like all of us have. But I think new times require new techniques, new methods.

20:46 Same message, new methods. So I really sense that. And my prayer is before our 80th church anniversary, that that will come into fruition. That's my prayer. Before this church turns 80. We'll see what the Lord said. That's Sharpe's prayer. And I know God is able. I want to thank fellowship because the greatest gift this church has given me is space to be myself people have asked me over and over again what has been the most difficult thing coming here like what's been the most difficult thing and I said my struggle was internal it wasn't the people it was wondering if I am enough and over time different whispers different conversations, different reminders. This church has reminded me I am a love.

21:44 I'm not what I shall be. I'll grow as your pastor and we'll grow together as pastor and people. But what a gift to be free, to just be myself. I'm country. I'm funny sometimes. I'm you know I love the Bible I love preaching I'm passionate about it and my enthusiasm and my energy and all that comes with it sometimes I'm sporadic and spontaneous some will pop up out of nowhere now where did that come from I don't know the Lord said do it let's go I just thank you all for trusting me as your pastor because this is the highest honor that I've received in my lifetime to serve as a third pastor fellowship missionary baptist church aka fellowship chicago so I love y'all and God really can do more than you ever expected and we haven't seen anything yet