As we mark the national holiday celebrating the life and vision of Martin Luther King, Jr., let me tell you about a friend of mine. His name is Michael Haynes. He is nearly 80 years-old, and is a retired pastor. For over fifty years, he pastored the historic Twelfth Street Baptist Church in the Roxbury district of downtown Boston.
Twelfth Baptist Church is a direct descendant of the First African Baptist Meeting House on Beacon Hill, founded in 1805. In 1840, a band of dissenters from the church felt led of the Holy Spirit to become involved in the Underground Railroad, an organized means of smuggling slaves from bondage in the South to freedom in the North. They became known as the Twelfth Baptist Church of Boston.
When I first met Michael, I asked him what he did. He said he was a pastor of a church. "Just a little church, in Roxbury. Its ministry is pretty much serving the neighborhood around it." Then, with the kind of thoughtful pause and careful wording that reveals something of great significance, he added, "Those three or four city blocks are what I've given my whole life to. It's been my world."
One of the first persons on those blocks that he had a chance to serve was a young man named Martin. Yes, that Martin. Michael mentored Martin Luther King, Jr., gave him his first ministry opportunity in a local church, and even introduced him to a young woman named Coretta who would one day be his wife.
Michael kept serving those few city blocks, always with a vision for changing them. And they needed change: Michael's world has been a world of drug dealers, pimps, and gangs; poverty, homelessness and racism. He knew from the beginning that any real change would rest on leadership. Not just his leadership, but a generation of leaders. Leaders like Martin. But even more to the point, though he would never make such a claim, leaders like himself who would take up residence on their own few blocks in areas around the country and around the world where nobody would naturally want to reside.
So he began talking about training leaders, praying about training leaders, vision-casting about training leaders, until finally he witnessed the reality of training leaders. First with a few classes at Twelfth Baptist, then as an extension center of a seminary, finally as a full-fledged campus.
