As the kids lined up at the Communion table, I introduced our Children's Ministry Moment to the congregation:
"I believe how we tell history, especially to children, is important. This weekend, as we celebrate our nation's hero, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., it may be tempting to condense the breadth of his life and work to the famous words, "I have a dream." But when we reduce this great man to a dreamer, we neglect to remember all he did and said for the here and now. We forget what he challenged not just the nation but the Church to be and do. Today we'll share part of his Letter from Birmingham Jail -- words that are difficult to hear, but that I hope we will hear with an open mind and a ready spirit."
Then the children presented this speech I adapted
from The Year They Walked by Beatrice Siegel and Letter
from Birmingham Jail by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I've shortened just a few sentences from MLK's excerpts; mainly the punctuation has been simplified for the children's ease of reading (fewer quotation marks and no ellipses). In our preparations the previous week, we talked about any vocabulary that was unfamiliar to them and they tackled it all with grace and persistence.
R: As a young minister, Reverend King
was patient and cared for the needs of his church. His deep passion for social
issues had not yet been tapped, but he knew some things for certain.
A:
He wanted freedom
and justice for all African-Americans.
M: He also knew that violence was not
an answer to their problems.
Violence was not the way of God.
L:
But Reverend King’s
nonviolence was not passive. He
was patient, but also persistent.
He did not believe in waiting for justice and equality to come in their
own time.
I: Some ministers and rabbis said they
believed in justice and equality, too, but that Reverend King was going about
it the wrong way. They wanted to
wait until a more “convenient” time.
Reverend King wrote a letter to them from jail.
M: You spoke of our activity in
Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergy
would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. But as I continued to think about the
matter, I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist.
L: Was not Jesus an extremist in love?
“Love your enemies. Bless them
that curse you. Pray for them that
despitefully use you.”
A: Was not Amos an extremist for
justice? “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty
stream.”
I: So the question is not whether we
will be extremist, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate, or will
we be extremists for love? Will we
be extremists for the preservation of injustice, or will we be extremists for
the cause of justice?
R: There was a time when the church
was very powerful. Early
Christians suffered and sacrificed for what they believed. The power structure convicted them for
being “disturbers of the peace.”
But they went on with the conviction that they had to obey God. They were small in number but big in
commitment.
L: Things are different now. The contemporary church is so often a
weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch supporter of the status quo.
M: Far from being disturbed by the
presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is
consoled by the church’s often vocal sanction of things as they are.
I: If the church of today does not
recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its
authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an
irrelevant social club with no meaning for [this] century. I meet young people every day whose
disappointment with the church has risen to outright disgust.
A: I hope the church as a whole will
meet the challenge of this decisive hour.
Listen. What do you hear? 
