Revolutionary Bible Study

The Freedom Church of New York City and West Park Presbyterian Church present: 

Revolutionary Bible Study

Monday, April 23rd, 2012, 7pm

West Park Presbyterian Church

165 West 86th Street at Amsterdam

New York, New York 10024

Mondays, 7pm

RSVP

The Occupy Movement has placed the issue of economic justice at the center of American political discourse. This Bible study focusing on historical Jesus in the occupied Palestine will offer a critical assessment of the role of revolutionary Christianity in our contemporary world.

co-taught by Rev. Dr. Robert Brashear and Rev. Osagyefo Sekou

Texts: The Gospel of Mark, Binding the Strong Man by Ched Meyers, and Gods, Gays, and Guns by Rev. Sekou

Additional Readings:
Call and Consequences: A Womanist Reading of Mark by Rachel St. Clair
The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James Cone
The Historical Jesus by John Dominic Crossan
A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutierrez
Saving Paradise by Rita Nagashima Brock and Rebecca Parker
Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman


Rev. Dr. Robert Brashear is the Senior Pastor of West Park Presbyterian Church and teaches Theologies of Liberation at Newark Theological Seminary.

Rev. Osagyefo Sekou is the founding Senior Minister of The Freedom Church of New York City and teaches Homiletics at the Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education.

From Civil Rights Movement to Occupy Wall Street: A conversation on Nonviolence in the 21st Century with Rev. Dr. James Lawson, Wednesday, October 26, 2011, 7:15pm, The Cathedral of Saint Paul, 138 Tremont Street, Boston, MA 02111

Noted civil rights veteran, James Lawson, will participate in an ecumenical communion at Occupy Boston (Dewey Square) on Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 5:30pm.   Following the communion service, Dr. Lawson will be in conversation with Rev. Dr. Harvey Cox, Hollis Research Professor of Divinity, Harvard Divinity School.  The dialogue will take place 7:15pm at The Cathedral of Saint Paul located 138 Tremont Street , Boston, MA 02111.

Rev.  Dr.  James Lawson is considered the architect of nonviolent civil disobedience during the Civil Rights movement.  On the eve of his assassination, Martin Luther King called Lawson "the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world." 

Dr. Lawson’s visit to Occupy Boston is sponsored by the Episcopal Diocese of Boston and the Cathedral of Saint Paul in partnership The Protest Chaplains, Theology Salon, and The Freedom Church in Cambridge, MA.  

Prior to meeting Dr. King, Lawson was a seasoned practitioner of nonviolence.  While a student at  Baldwin Wallace College,  he joined the Fellowship of Conciliation and its affiliate the Congress for Racial Equality. In 1951 refused the draft, declaring conscientious objector  status, Lawson served fourteen months in prison.  Upon his release from prison, Lawson went as a Methodist missionary to India. He studied Gandhian nonviolence and began to combine this thought with African American social protest and religious thought.  Upon returning from India, Lawson enrolled in seminary.  As a student at Oberlin School of Theology, Lawson was introduced to Dr. King by Rev. Dr. Harvey Cox.  In their first meeting, Dr. King requested that Lawson come to the South because in King’s word: “there is no one like you” to train members of the emerging civil rights movement in nonviolence civil disobedience and philosophy.  

Lawson obliged and moved to Nashville, TN.  And enrolled in Vanderbilt Divinity School where he was eventually expelled for his activism.  Rev. Dr. James Lawson mentored and trained many of the students of the civil rights movement that ended a century of Jim Crow laws in the American south.  Lawson served the Director of Nonviolent Education for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  Lawson mentored John Lewis, Bernard Layfette, Diane Nash and other students that created the Nashville sit-in movement.  These students would go on to found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. 

James Lawson helped coordinate the Freedom Rides in 1961 and the Meredith March in 1966, and while working as a pastor at the Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis, played a major role in the sanitation workers strike of 1968. It was a Dr. Lawson request that Dr. King supported the Memphis Sanitation Workers.  In 1974, Lawson moved to Los Angles to be the pastor of Holman Methodist Church until his retirement in 1999. Even after his retirement, Lawson was arrested protesting with the Janitors for Justice in Los Angeles, and with gay and lesbian Methodists in Cleveland.  In 2006, Vanderbilt University, publicly, apologized for its treatment of Dr. Lawson, invited him back as a Visiting Professor and currently has an endowed chair named in his honor.   He continues to teach the philosophy of nonviolence to social movements through the world. 

The Resurrection of the Prophetic Tradition

The Freedom Church seeks the resurrection of the prophetic tradition of Christianity in the U.S. and aboard.

The First Service of The Freedom Church

The Freedom Church

Sunday, October 2nd, 2011,  11am

@Democracy Center
45 Mount Auburn St.
Cambridge, MA 02138
freedomchurchboston@gmail.com

When they were filled, he said unto
his disciples, Gather up the fragments that remain,
that nothing be lost
-John 6:12

Vision and Mission

The Freedom Church is an ecumenical Christian community committed to living out the revolutionary teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.   We claim ecumenical as way to glean inspiration for the prophetic edges of existing denominations and traditions.

We claim Christian as an authentic identity for we believe that the life and legacy of Jesus is our central touchstone of our faith but do so without exclusion of other traditions.  We deploy liberation theology's notion that God gives a perferential option to the poor. 

Hence, our faith community is an open and affirming body that honors the queer community and all historically othered folks.   We will strive to be a multi-cultural and multi-contextual congregation of activists and the historically othered seeking a deeper way of being our soul, skin, and society-a space of discernment and support for those who are answering their call.

The name, “The Freedom Church”, comes from a speech given by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the last days of his ministry. 

In preparing for the seminal event for the Poor Peoples Campaign, Resurrection City, which planned to bring thousands of poor people to the nation’s capital to live in tents until the passage of anti-poverty legislation, King prophesies, “Resurrection City will be the Freedom Church of the poor.”  We dare to be that prophetic in-gathering.

Ella Baker and Septima Clark, in creating and sustaining the Freedom Schools in the heat of the Jim Crow South during the Civil Rights movement, is key.   The Freedom Schools trained folks from the Deep South.  From the schools emerged community based leaders who spoke their special truth to power in their own interest.  Fannie Lou Hamer, a former sharecropper and great spokeswoman for the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party was given space “to be” in the Freedom School.  Above all we take serious, Matthew 25:35 (the least of these) and a prophetic reading of the Bible as a mode of being in the world.

It is the gathering of the prophetic fragments from the aforementioned places and space that The Freedom Church is born.