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Shaun King's Days As A Pastor Mirrored His Later Successes — And Failures — As An Activist
Before he was a prominent voice in the Black Lives Matter movement, Shaun King pastored Courageous Church in Atlanta. Two years after he founded the church, King stepped down amid financial stress and some of the same questions that would dog his later career, something he addressed in an interview with BuzzFeed News.
ATLANTA —Inside the shell of a vacant building, in the fall of 2008, the activist Shaun King, then 29, filmed a video telling his supporters about one of his life’s many dreams: to plant a church in the “The Bluff,” a neighborhood in the English Avenue section of Northwest Atlanta. Known as Atlanta’s forgotten community, nearly half of the homes there are vacant. But it’s where King said his vision to be a church planter began.
“This neighborhood is spiritually empty, not just physically empty,” King says in the
grainy video. “Our heart and our passion and our love is for the people that are here.”
“Maybe,” he says, “just maybe one day years from now we’ll be able to buy this corner, and this corner can be a beacon of hope and beacon of light for this area called ‘The Bluff.’ Will you believe God with me for that?”
Although his vision for a church was still forming in 2008, the video was classic King: He often filmed himself making appeals to his vast network of monetary support for various projects. By late 2008 — still weeks away from Courageous Church’s first service — King had helped corral thousands of dollars for a Christmastime toy drive and donated uniforms to a local school.
By 2009, the Association of Related Churches, an organization that works with pastors and their wives to plant churches, assessed and approved King. To ARC, which was averaging close to 50 new churches a year, King had unlimited potential. He was celebrated for his ability to rally people around causes using technology, and he used that leverage to tell the ARC’s leadership it was too white. King was something of a golden boy, so they listened — and King delivered with something no church planter can deny: numbers.
With King, the organization had its largest church grand opening ever. On average, ARC’s churches host about 250 people. More than 600 people showed up to hear King speak at Courageous Church’s first service on Jan. 11, 2009 at Center Stage in Downtown Atlanta. The church took up an offering.
King never planted a church in The Bluff, but he led Courageous Church for nearly two years. It’s not clear how many members the church had at its peak, but in 2011, after a shift to make the church less focused on traditional Sunday services and more mission-oriented proved unpopular, King stepped down. An assistant, Broderick Santiago, assumed pastoring duties, but the church closed its doors within a few weeks’ time.
Interviews with King, as well as dozens of his friends and former members of his church — as well as King’s numerous blog posts and video pleas for donations to the church — reveal many of the typical struggles of a young pastor and a new church: problems finding meeting places and inconsistent tithes. (Many members were under-employed or not working at all. The breakfast drew dozens of homeless people every Sunday.)
Shaun King's Days As A Pastor Mirrored His Later Successes — And Failures — As An Activist
