Pastor’s eNote: Weekly Update

We celebrated Marin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday yesterday. As I gathered with leaders from around Seattle yesterday morning, I was reminded of the legacy of Dr. King and how so much of his work, along with the broader civil rights movement, is beginning to fade from public consciousness.

Just this morning I read an article about how younger adults and teenagers have little or no knowledge of Dr. King and the movement he helped advance. Many of his contemporaries such as Coretta Scott King, Jim Lawson, and John Lewis, have now died. Likewise, the great influences in MLK’s life of Dr. Howard Thurman and Gandhi died decades ago. (MLK always carried a copy of Thurman’s Jesus and The Disinherited with him, even on the day of his death.) My students at SPU often know little, if much at all, about the civil rights movement.

Our American culture moves like a pendulum where we live in action, reaction, and then re-reaction. Lately, we swing radically from one extreme to another. I grieve that the great legacy of Dr. King and so many others is seemingly dismissed in our current swing of that pendulum.

These prophetic leaders, most of whom were devoutly Christian, made a brave stand for justice and summoned those of us of the faith to point our lives, church, and world toward the justice of God. While only God can bring a truly just age, the work of Christian believers is to faithfully point to that world. In this sense, Dr. King’s legacy is entrusted to us. His life and work, like that of so many others, point to the legacy of Jesus himself. This is kingdom work.

If you visit Westminster Abbey in London today, you will see small niches above the entry doors. There are small statues of Christians over the centuries who have attempted to point to God’s just future in those niches. There are only two people from the 20th century whose sculpture appear above those doors: Rev. Dr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

May their legacy be more than carvings in stone.

Grace to You All,

Pastor Craig Brown

(January 20th, 2026)